Buried away in the safe waters of afternoon radio with Deb Knight on 2GB and 4BC on Wednesday, Ita Buttrose conducted her first interview since the ABC cuts.
It was meant to be all about mental health but things became a little less sedate when Knight dared to ask Ita about whether the ABC was too left-leaning.
“No one in the media is perfect,” she pointedly told Knight. “Not any of us. And no organisation! So I think that less than perfect organisations should stop chucking stones at us.”
Buttrose admitted that the suggestion the ABC leaned left was “a very common complaint, and it’s been around for many years”.
But asked if she thought the complaint was warranted, Ita replied: “No I don’t. There’s some unconscious bias within the ABC, and I’ve spoken about that before. But if you look at all the inquiries, we seem to have come through them very well. And nobody’s been able to identify areas that are so left-leaning that there’s no other view presented.”
Ita also claimed to have hosted more right-of-centre voices on the ABC recently, creating its own problems: “We’ve had quite a few conservative people on our programs and that’s caused us some flak as well. It’s very difficult to please everybody.”
Labor joins GetUp over ABC
GetUp used a campaign blitz in Saturday’s Eden Monaro by-election to road-test a 2022 federal election issue it reckons will take skin, and seats, off the Coalition.
The pitch? “Protecting the ABC.”
Diary hears GetUp made its presence felt in Eden Monaro during voting, ahead of Labor’s apparent narrow victory, with a vocal campaign against government funding levels.
But what was more interesting was that GetUp’s ABC pitch seemed closely synchronised with Labor’s.
GetUp’s Paul Oosting was first out of the blocks with a press release blitz last Tuesday. The ABC, he declared, was a “vote-deciding” issue. “It’s time to end the political interference (at the ABC),” Oosting said.
Like clockwork, hours later, Labor joined in, issuing a 30-second “vote Labor to save the ABC” ad, featuring ABC on-air talent, including Q&A host Hamish McDonald and several other personalities to back its case.
But should that ad have been allowed to remain up?
As of Sunday, the ad was still on Labor’s Twitter feed despite questions about whether ABC talent should be used for political purposes. And after the polls closed, Labor leader Anthony Albanese pointedly tweeted: “I want to thank everyone who voted for a strong ABC.”
The ABC is something to be cherished – but to this Government, the ABC is something to be cut.
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 1, 2020
Their priorities are all wrong.
Our national broadcaster is there when Australians need it most. That’s why Labor will reverse Scott Morrison’s cuts to the ABC.
In the lead-up, Albo pledged to reverse the ABC funding freeze. Meanwhile, GetUp forked out for ABC polling, releasing an “electorate snapshot” that claimed 70 per cent of Eden Monaro residents wanted more funding for Aunty.
For friends of the ABC, the by-election was indeed a gift: a very marginal seat up for grabs 10 days after big ABC cuts.
Only @KristyMcBain and Labor will defend the ABC – and only Kristy McBain and Labor will reverse Scott Morrison's cuts to the ABC. pic.twitter.com/U8AjwbgnGA
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 1, 2020
With uncanny foresight, GetUp had also strategically released a 60-page report just two months ago (days after the by-election was announced) to detail “the damage this government’s aggressive agenda of cuts has inflicted on the ABC”.
That GetUp report was authored by Emma Dawson, long-time policy adviser to ex-Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy. Dawson is close to the ABC’s head of strategy Mark Tapley, after the pair worked hand-in-glove for Labor’s Conroy when Tapley was the ex-communications minister’s chief of staff.
In the 2019 federal election, GetUp started small, trialling an ABC cinema ad pitch in three marginals: Boothby and Mayo in South Australia, and Wentworth in Sydney.
But with Dawson’s ABC report in tow this time, GetUp is likely to go bigger with a national campaign in 2022. Will Albo follow?
7.45 news rethink?
The outcry over the proposed axing of the 7.45 news seems to have given Ita Buttrose pause.
Lost in all the hand-wringing about ABC cuts was a quiet revelation by Ita last week: that the ABC would continue to look at the feedback about the 7.45 bulletin.
“We will review it,” she told Deb Knight on Wednesday. “We will look to see what people say, and consider it once we can fully judge the public’s reaction to this particular decision.”
Sounds like this one isn’t over.
Nine’s 50 years is up
Last Friday marked the end of a 50-year era at Nine, with the company’s CEO Hugh Marks and much of the company cleaning out their offices at the company’s historic Willoughby headquarters for the last time.
Marks and co will today head for the company’s new home at the 1 Denison @ North Sydney tower.
An advance party led by Nine’s corporate affairs boss Victoria Buchan already moved in last week to iron out any kinks in the new building for her big boss and about 100 other Nine staff.
The real fun starts on Monday. Those joining Marks this week will include Nine’s head of TV Michael Healy and his entire programming team, plus all of marketing and commercial, Nine general counsel Rachel Launders and her legal team, production boss Adrian Swift and his team, and Nine program director Hamish Turner.
Notable omissions will be Nine’s TV news and current affairs team, including 60 Minutes, ACA and Sydney news operations (who will move in October), as well as local staff on the Sydney Morning Herald and the Financial Review (relocating in August).
The latest word out of Sydney’s top rating radio station 2GB is that its band of shock jocks may not be moving at all and could even stay in their current inner-city Pyrmont home for good.
Seven takes on 60 Minutes
60 Minutes, watch out! Diary can exclusively reveal that Seven is restoring long-form current affairs to its schedule six months after the disappearance of Sunday Night and Today Tonight.
We’re reliably informed that a new show, to be called Seven News Spotlight Investigates, will start later this month.
It is understood that the show will start airing in late July with the much-anticipated interview of Danny and Leila Abdallah, who tragically lost three children when they were hit by a car in Oatlands in Sydney’s northwest.
The Abdallah interview with Michael Usher won’t be going head-to-head with 60 Minutes, with that first instalment to screen on a weeknight.
And indeed, Seven News Spotlight Investigates won’t have a regular schedule at all, running on any night between Sunday and Wednesday on any given week. It is understood the new show will be funded out of Seven’s programming budget, and will screen in an 8.30 timeslot whenever it airs.
The new show won’t have a regular host, instead having individual reporters introducing the stories, following the template established by Basil Zempilas’s Ben Cousins interview a couple of months back.
Uniquely, its potential talent pool will also extend beyond Seven, opened up to any journalists — even those out of work — with an important story to tell.
Boy George blow-up
Spare a thought for Neil Breen, Brisbane radio 4BC’s new-ish breakfast replacement for Alan Jones, after he was abruptly hung up on by no less than Boy George on Friday.
Breen went all fanboy interviewing the pop star and The Voice judge, gushing about how much he had loved Do You Really Want to Hurt Me when growing up in the 1980s.
But a furious Boy George replied: “Please don’t talk about me in past context. It’s really insulting …. Everybody knows who I am.” The star was so “insulted” he hung up on his Nine stablemate.
But when Diary reached Breen over the weekend, he was basking in his new-found notoriety — even cracking Boy George one-liners. “All I was trying to do was tell Boy George how much I loved him. And he thought I really wanted to hurt him!”
Seven’s $300k splurge
Seven may be struggling with tough budget cuts at present, but one outlay that has survived its razor gang is a new “brand refresh”, Diary can reveal.
It was a bit of a “blink and you miss it” moment, but Seven launched the refreshed look — expanding on the diagonal segment of the traditional red ‘‘7’’ — at the start of the current Big Brother season.
It’s now planning a full rollout across the network in coming months.
Diary has learnt the new look cost Seven a cool $300,000 with rebranding experts Hulsbosch. Nice work if you can get it!
A Seven spokeswoman told us that the new look was “a reflection of our content-led growth strategy that was announced by CEO James Warburton late last year” that would help to draw in “new, younger audiences”.
‘Moonman’ lashes Aunty
Friends of the ABC have been lashing out at so-called “conservative” commentators in the wake of the ABC cuts.
But it was in the heart of the Australian mainstream on FM radio where the biggest anti-ABC diatribe was aired last week.
It came from a well-known ex-ABC talent: comedian Lawrence Mooney, who of course once hosted the ABC’s biggest live TV event, its flagship annual New Year’s Eve telecast.
But Mooney, now the host of Triple M’s Sydney breakfast show, Moonman in the Morning, embarked on an epic three-minute on-air rant against “the ones least affected by this global crisis: the ABC”.
He started by revealing he and all Triple M staff had recently taken a pay cut, at a time ABC staff are still trying to hang on to a 2 per cent pay rise.
“Thousands of businesses are struggling to survive, and government debt is spiralling out of control,” he began.
“(We’ve) had to take drastic measures to survive. Here at Triple M, we’ve all taken a pay cut … Yes it sucks, but it is what it is … BUT there’s a group of people doing plenty of bellyaching, and it’s the ones who have been least affected by this global crisis, the ABC. Oh, dear old Aunty! ABC you can’t pretend to be the victims here. ABC, you caaan’t! Boy, am I enjoying this!”
But Mooney was only just warming up. “While everybody else struggles through COVID-19, the tone-deaf elitists at the ABC have made it clear that they think they’re different and special,” he said. “So now that we know that, ABC, do us a favour. Get rid of all your stupid ‘we’re all in this together’ promos, because you clearly believe you’re on your own. Now take your $3.2bn of our money and shove it.” (The ABC promos actually say “we’re with you”).
And Mooney couldn’t resist one more brutal put-down before signing off. “On radio and TV news bulletins, there’s ads for ABC news telling us Australia only depends on you for news. It’s bordering on self-pleasuring!”
Andrews’ media woes
The media halo around Victorian Premier Daniel “Chairman Dan” Andrews continued to slip last week amid quarantine bungles that have seen the state’s coronavirus cases spike dramatically.
This time, it’s not just about his legendary three-year feud with 3AW’s morning king Neil Mitchell.
Last week, a series of national broadcasters — from Leigh Sales to David Koch — called out Chairman Dan for his reticence to come on their respective shows.
Sales began last week by noting that she had regularly asked Andrews on 7.30 for an interview since the start of the lockdown in Australia, but that he had “declined each time”.
“We’ll keep trying,” she said. It seems that persistence finally paid off on Wednesday, when Andrews finally appeared on 7.30. But there was no such luck last week for a cranky Kochie, who lamented that “each day, we keep getting refused” by Andrews.
“We want to get the message out, and we really want to understand what’s going on,” he said.
As Diary noted last month, there seems to be problems between Andrews’s media team and journalists, with reports of sarcastic responses to even innocent media requests, with pointed questions to one journalist about having “another thought bubble”.
Another senior media source told us last week that dealing with the Andrews camp behind the scenes had been a “nightmare”.
Even ex-ABC Melbourne morning radio host Jon Faine, said to get on well with Chairman Dan, got in on the act on Sunday, writing in Nine’s The Age that “we can expect heads to roll” in Andrews’s back office if problems keep “happening”.
BBC apologises to staff over Russell Brand sex complaints
Some employees had stayed silent about the behaviour of the comedian and actor because they believed he ‘would always get his way’, a BBC director said.
Questions about ABC platforming ‘radical fringe Jewish voice’
Jewish groups have questioned why the national broadcaster has chosen to platform and ‘mainstream’ a Jewish ‘radical fringe voice’, in its coverage of anti-Semitic events in Sydney.