ABC’s ‘Labor Thugs’ host Fauziah Ibrahim off the air

ABC News Breakfast TV host Fauziah Ibrahim.

She’s the ABC host who caused a media storm when she formulated two lists on Twitter: one featuring a list of “Labor Trolls/Thugs” and the other labelled, even more provocatively, “Lobotomised Shitheads”.

But on Saturday and Sunday, ABC News Breakfast weekend host Fauziah Ibrahim mysteriously disappeared from the show she co-hosts, almost as quickly as her now-deleted Twitter lists, after she caused a storm inside and outside the ABC in recent days.

This came after one prominent Labor figure, former Senator Doug Cameron, even took to Twitter to out himself as one of Ibrahim’s alleged “lobotomised shitheads”.

But the big question is: will Ibrahim return? Diary has now learnt that Ibrahim’s disappearance from the weekend edition of ABC News Breakfast coincided with fury among many internal ABC types that such a list had been published by one of the public broadcaster’s presenters in the midst of an election campaign – or for that matter, any time.

The general feeling Diary detected in the corridors of the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters late last week was that it may be hard for someone who had just nailed their colours to the mast with a “Labor Trolls/Thugs” list to be perceived as conducting an impartial political interview.

In her place, the ABC’s Planet America host John Barron joined the show with a passing mention of Ibrahim. “It’s great to be here,” he told co-host Johanna Nicholson. “Usually I would be watching you and Fauziah.”

Nicholson responded by thanking him for getting up “so early”.

As this column noted last week, Ibrahim’s intention with the lists on her private Twitter accounts seems to have been to expose the intellectual failings of Labor’s leaders and supporters. But such lists aren’t exactly a winning formula for a presenter meant to be reporting impartially on both sides.

Faced with a growing number of journalists who made themselves the story on Twitter, ABC managing director David Anderson was last year forced to send out several missives to staff to warn them against excessive social media activity that brought the ABC into disrepute.

In responding to the revelation of Ibrahim’s lists last week, an ABC spokesman had noted they were made on a “private Twitter account”, while also noting that Aunty was “looking into what has occurred”.

But in February 2021, Anderson personally sent an email to ABC staff where he made it clear that there would be consequences for errant social media activity, even on personal Twitter ­accounts.

He cautioned staff at the time that they had a “responsibility to protect the ABC’s … integrity where your personal use of social media intersects with your professional life”. He then warned them that errant social media behaviour would “be dealt with in accordance with the relevant ABC employment agreement and may lead to disciplinary action, including possible termination of ­employment”.

As of last week, Ibrahim’s tweets were labelled as ‘‘protected’’. But with her provocative lists having already gone viral on Twitter, they will serve as one of the first key tests of Anderson’s beefed-up social media policies.

Following the publication of Diary on Monday, an ABC spokesman confirmed: “The ABC is reviewing recent social media activity by presenter Fauziah Ibrahim, who has taken a break from on-camera duties but remains part of the Weekend Breakfast team’’.

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Palmer and Murray smoke the peace pipe

Sky News host Paul Murray and Clive Palmer have had a quiet feud that stretches back nearly a decade to when Palmer became a federal parliamentarian in 2013.

At the time, Murray embarked on a series of searing personal appraisals of the mining billionaire, questioning the strength of his commitment to being a federal MP while juggling the business responsibilities of being a mega-mining magnate. So Diary hears it was no small feat for Sky’s Queensland editor Peter Gleeson to ultimately convince Palmer that Tuesday night’s high-rating Mavericks debate against Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter and Campbell Newman was worth doing.

Sky News host Paul Murray.

Palmer had apparently resisted appearing for some weeks, before finally being convinced that it was perfect for him to appeal to his core base. Still, Sky bosses were relieved when he showed up around an hour early for the debate, after some well chronicled ‘‘no shows’’ over the years.

While the crowd had to be contained to 150, Sky sources say they could have filled the audience at the Gold Coast’s Benowa Tavern many times over with Palmer and Hanson as the star attractions.

But it was just before the debate started that the night’s most intriguing sight was witnessed: Murray and Palmer huddled together in close and amicable conversation, as Murray smoked a cigar and Palmer had a diet Coke in a private outdoor corner at the back of the tavern.

Diary is informed that Palmer was overheard telling Murray: “I love your show – never miss it.” We also understand that in Palmer’s giant $60m-plus Sovereign Islands compound on the Gold Coast, all eight television screens are permanently trained on Sky News. It’s apparently a similar tale on his 60m superyacht. The scene is apparently reminiscent of when visitors used to go to visit Donald Trump while he was in the White House, with every TV screen was trained on Fox News.

Clive Palmer. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Palmer was on his best behaviour during the debate, resisting his more extreme instincts to even praise his arch rival, Pauline Hanson, during the debate.

The Mavericks debate turned out to be Murray’s highest-rating show of the year, pipping even the Scott Morrison/Anthony Albanese post-debate show that he hosted the very next night. The irony of it all was that despite their chequered past, Palmer opted to spend serious coin on blanket advertising during the Mavericks debate, with wall-to-wall United Australia Party ads screened throughout the telecast.

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Wilkinson’s very own national campaign

If you thought you had heard enough about her headline-making autobiography, Lisa Wilkinson has other ideas.

For six months, The Project host has been nursing some major gripes with sections of the media after they extensively fact-checked her book, It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This, late last year. And it seems she is using a delayed national book tour for some payback.

In the next fortnight, Wilkinson will address a series of high-profile breakfasts across the country for the female networking group Business Chicks to drum up some more royalties. She has revealed a key theme on her tour will be to set the record straight on “some of the stories behind some of the headlines you might have read about in recent months”.

 

Diary is told that what continues to sting Wilkinson is the scepticism over claims such as a huge “gender pay gap” between herself and Karl Stefanovic while they were on the Today show. We’re told she is still smarting from what she sees as a media “pile-on” aimed at tearing down the book.

Wilkinson wrote that the gap in pay was “so off the charts that no-one would have believed it”.

In a separate interview about the book with her co-host Hamish Macdonald, she claimed she had been trying to “close the gender pay gap” with Stefanovic before realising too late that she was “very expendable” at Nine.

But before the autobiography even came out, a number of media stories questioned some of these claims. Perhaps the most publicised story came from news.com.au, which received a leak suggesting that at the time Wilkinson was poached from Seven by Nine in 2007 on $700,000 a year, Stefanovic was only earning about half of that figure.

The news.com.au story also claimed Wilkinson continued to earn more than Stefanovic for “half a decade”, before Stefanovic finally caught up and passed Wilkinson as his star at Nine rose.

At the time she left Nine, Wilkinson was in a salary dispute with then Nine CEO Hugh Marks, who later claimed she had been asking for around $2.3m a year.

But in early November, Wilkinson took to an interview with Radio National’s Fran Kelly to lash out at “cheap tabloid headlines”.

She told Kelly: “That whole narrative was put out there to make me look greedy and like I’d risen above my station, but it was a narrative that I decided at the time not to get involved in.

“Discussions like that are pretty unseemly, they’re pretty awful, and I’m the very first person to admit that when you do breakfast TV, you are paid a ridiculous salary. But what was even more ridiculous was the size of the gender pay gap I had been experiencing for many, many years.”

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Lea latest casualty in Albo’s bus ‘nightmare’

In the end, no amount of BYO RAT tests and other strict Covid-19 rules for the media pack travelling on Anthony Albanese’s bus were enough to shield the Labor leader or, for that matter, several members of the media contingent from catching the dreaded virus. Sky News’s Jonathan Lea, who of course made a big name for himself leading up to the 2019 election for his campaign-altering grilling of Bill Shorten on his climate change costings, was the latest media member of the Albo bus contingent to come down with the virus on the weekend.

After a series of similarly tough interrogations of Albo and his deputy Richard Marles this campaign, the Labor leader’s team may be relieved just to get a week’s respite from the tenacious Sky scrapper. At one point, Lea even brought a pensioner into one of Albanese’s press conferences to ask a tough question on his behalf.

Nine political reporter Fiona Willan.

Meanwhile, Nine TV political reporter Fiona Willan and The Age/Sydney Morning Herald’s senior economics correspondent Shane Wright are among six or seven other journalists who also came down with Covid-19 in the Albo contingent – although Diary is told Wright is soldiering on and working through the dreaded bug.

In the weeks before Albo’s positive test had been revealed, Diary published a sternly worded email issued to all media types travelling on the bus. The aim, as we noted at the time, was to avoid the “nightmare scenario” of the previously Covid-free Labor leader “losing a week of campaigning to be stuck in isolation”.

The strict measures weren’t so popular with some of the media troops, with the note even triggering a fight between a TV political journalist and Albo’s media team.

As we noted at the time, there were three non-negotiable rules contained in the document for those on the bus: RAT testing “every three days” (at the media’s expense), “proof of triple vaccination status”, and wearing of “N95 masks” on and off the bus. The recalcitrant journalist gave in to the rule she didn’t like by rushing out to receive a third Covid shot in the week the campaign started.

It isn’t known if Albanese contracted the virus from the travelling media pack, pressing the flesh with the broader voting public – or even if he gave it to some members of the media. But however he got it, Albo’s “nightmare” scenario came true – despite the bus rules.

In politics, luck’s a fortune. With PM Scott Morrison having only just had Covid-19 during March, the ScoMo bus is free to roll on with few rules, with the PM still carrying antibodies from his bout with the virus.

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Waleed Aly gets an audience again

It’s been two long years since the likes of Waleed Aly and Lisa Wilkinson at Ten’s The Project had an audience.

And no, we’re not talking about the Ten panel show’s sometimes troubled ratings.

The Project is about to fully return to its roots as the only commercial free-to-air TV news and current affairs show to have a studio audience.

The show stopped being able to make that claim in March 2020, when it had no choice but to dump its live audiences in Sydney and Melbourne because of strict government isolation rules in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Until then, Ten insiders had seen the clapping and other engagement from live studio audiences as one of its key differentiation points from most other news shows.

But Diary has learnt that after successful trial in the last few weeks with a masked live audience of about 30 people in Sydney for The Sunday Project (which resulted in no explosion of Covid-19 cases), the show is now ready to recommit to nightly audiences across its entire schedule.

In the next few weeks, Ten will offer about 100 tickets to the public for each Sunday Project edition in its Sydney studios, and 30 tickets a night to its South Yarra studios in Melbourne for the Monday to Friday editions.

Diary is told that the talent on The Project that are happiest with the return of audiences are its resident comedians Peter Helliar and Tommy Little, who since 2020 have had to land their zingers with no audience interaction.

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Triple M’s post-Hadley regional carnage continues

A cross-country ratings disaster is rapidly unfolding for Southern Cross Austereo’s Triple M regional stations in NSW, in the first surveys since morning radio king Ray Hadley was summarily taken off their morning timeslot last June.

Hot on the heels of Triple M Coffs Harbour registering a one-third drop in ratings in the former Hadley shift, things got even worse last week for Triple M Riverina in southwestern NSW.

The station, which has Griffith at its epicentre, lost half of its audience in the morning shift in its first survey since Hadley left.

In Hadley’s final survey with Triple M Riverina, the station recorded a 31.9 per cent share in mornings. But in last week’s survey, that share collapsed to just 16.7 per cent.

Austereo bosses will now be waiting anxiously for the upcoming first survey in the former Hadley stronghold of Port Macquarie since they removed Hadley from the shift at the end of June last year as a cost-saving measure. Hadley regularly recorded huge audiences of up to 40 per cent in the NSW Mid-North Coast town, and many listeners in the town loudly complained when Triple M ceased to broadcast his show.

Earlier this month, Hadley unloaded on Austereo through this column, claiming that its executives had presided over “disaster after disaster”.