Media Diary: Teal MP Zoe Daniel’s high praise of Donald Trump; Mike Sneesby’s new role at MBC
The former Nine boss’s ascension to the head of Saudi Arabian-based Middle East and North Africa broadcaster MBC will link him to the Foxtel Group.
Teal MP and former ABC foreign correspondent Zoe Daniel clearly isn’t politically aligned with Donald Trump. But as one of the few Australian MPs to have met the US President (during his first term, when she was Washington correspondent for the ABC), Daniel is better qualified than most to offer a personal assessment of the man.
Appearing on the Neil Mitchell Asks Why podcast last week, Daniel said she met Trump a “couple of times”.
“My (two) kids have met him as well,” she said.
“Whatever judgment you might make about Mr Trump, one thing I will say about him is that he was incredibly kind and generous to the kids the couple of times that he met them and he was up for taking the time to have a chat and sort of showing some care with them.
“And I think, well, that’s an interesting reflection on him as a person and maybe different to what people might expect.”
Hmmm, that positive reflection of Trump will surely confuse the true believers on Planet Teal.
That’s not in the script!
Daniel is facing a fierce battle to retain her marginal Victorian electorate of Goldstein, amid a strong challenge from former Liberal MP Tim Wilson. She holds the seat with a margin of 3.9 per cent.
But should the result not go Daniel’s way on May 3, one thing is for sure: she won’t be returning to journalism.
“Hopefully I’ll get re-elected. But I don’t have intentions to re-enter the media,” Daniel told the podcast.
Daniel rejected Mitchell’s suggestion that the ABC has “lost the plot”, but conceded that the public broadcaster hasn’t got the “balance right”.
“I agree with (ABC chair) Kim Williams to the extent that he says, you know, the ABC shouldn’t be doing lifestyle content that you could find in all sorts of other places,” she said.
“Because I agree with the fundamentals of the ABC charter, which is that the ABC is supposed to provide something that you can’t get elsewhere.”
Daniel also told Mitchell that she “probably” suffers PTSD as a result of some of her experiences as a foreign correspondent. “One of the things from the US experience … was covering mass shootings. And also I’ve covered lots of big protests and things in various contexts,” she said. “I don’t love big crowds. I don’t love big crowds in contained spaces … I tend to go into that automatic mode of ‘where’s the exit’.
“If I need to get out and, like, how am I gonna get my kids out if I need to get them out, that kind of mentality.”
During a 27-year career with the ABC, Daniel had postings to Africa and southeast Asia, as well as the US.
Crickets at the SMH
The revelation last week that The Sydney Morning Herald’s holidaying editor Bevan Shields is living his best life in Manhattan during the middle of an election campaign left some of his staff underwhelmed. But it was the subsequent kicker – that Shields was bedding down at former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s luxurious Upper West side condo during his stay – that left many seasoned media observers shaking their heads.
Perhaps if Turnbull wasn’t such an ardent critic of one of the two men currently running for the office of prime minister, then it wouldn’t be quite such a big deal.
But he is, and it is.
Despite senior figures at Nine (owner of the SMH) doing their best shoulder-shrugging nothing-to-see-here routine over the weekend, the fact is Shields’ acceptance of a generous offer of hospitality from the Turnbull family has diminished the reputation of the once-proud masthead.
Remember, the newspaper’s oft-quoted motto is “Independent. Always.”
But in Diary’s view, if a newspaper editor is staying rent-free at a super-fancy Manhattan apartment owned by the chief critic of a political party that is about to face an election, then the reasonable perception is that your masthead is about as independent as a one-eyed hometown umpire at a game of bush footy.
Over the weekend, none of Nine’s top dogs was willing to publicly defend Shields’ decision to accept the hospitality of a vocal and polarising political figure in the middle of an election campaign.
Nine chief executive Matt Stanton, the company’s managing director of publishing Tory Maguire, and the executive editor of Nine’s metro mastheads Luke McIlveen all declined to comment, as did Shields himself.
Various senior figures within Nine tried to push the idea – on background – that Shields was entitled to his holiday and wasn’t responsible for the masthead’s political coverage over the course of the campaign.
That argument completely misses the point.
Moreover, if senior SMH figures can’t see that Shields has put himself – and the reputation of the masthead – in a compromising position, then you can guarantee that similar lapses of judgment lurk just around the corner in the tabloid’s newsroom.
Sam slips
It has been a long time since Australian audiences had a late night chat show to watch. And as Network 10 is finding out, it could take some time for viewers to get back into the habit.
Sam Pang Tonight launched with a blaze of publicity, and with a very respectable opening night total TV audience of just over one million viewers.
That first episode on March 17 featured Jack Thompson as the special guest and Dave Thornton as the guest announcer.
But the numbers for the subsequent two episodes dropped to 700,000 and then 600,000, although that was still strong enough for Network 10 to see a future for the series as it commissioned a second season of another eight episodes for later in 2025.
The following week the number slipped again, this time just making it to 500,000.
Half a million is by no means a terrible number – it’s just a lot less than the series launched with.
Network 10 parent Paramount deserves some credit for standing behind Pang and the format to give it time to find an audience. However, they may have overreached slightly when announcing the second season in a press release under the headline: Back by popular demand.
The last time Australians warmed to a long-running tonight show was when Network 10 let loose Rove McManus on our screens or a decade from 2000.
The triple Gold Logie winner and his executive producer Craig Campbell oversaw 354 episodes across the decade before making 23 episodes of Rove LA on Foxtel in 2011 and 2012.
Industry talking points around the future of Sam Pang Tonight include questions about the quality of guests, the look of the set and the buzz created by the guest announcers.
It seems often there is more chatter about the guest announcer, especially the week Kitty Flanagan wason, than the guests themselves.
Sneesby spreads wings
Mike Sneesby’s ascension to the head of Saudi Arabian-based Middle East and North Africa broadcaster MBC will link the former Nine boss to the Foxtel Group.
The majority shareholder in MBC recently acquired a stake in Foxtel’s new owner DAZN.
MBC broadcasts across North Africa from Morocco to Egypt and across the Middle East. Its streaming platform, Shahid, has a bigger audience than Netflix in the region, and MBC also runs TV and radio stations.
MBC is 54 per cent owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. As well as investing in MBC last year, PIF more recently took a minority shareholding in DAZN.
The investment in DAZN came via PIF subsidiary Surj Sports Investment.
PIF has been loading up with Australian executives – in addition to appointing Sneesby to MBC, Surj Sports investment is run by Danny Townsend, a former soccer player from Sydney’s northern beaches.
After his playing days, Townsend went on to run Sydney FC and later the A-League competition. He left Australia to take on the CEO role at Surj in 2023.
There are not a lot of Australians in Sneesby’s orbit at MBC, although three he will surely come across are in the radio division.
Alex Agishev is head of radio content for the group. The former SCA, Nova Entertainment and ARN executive has worked in the region for some time, first for Virgin Radio in the UAE and more recently for MBC in Riyadh. Agishev also co-hosts a drive show at MBC.
Australian colleagues of Agishev at MBC are breakfast co-host Byron Cooke and presenter Andrew Harrison.
Sneesby starts his new job on May 1 after outgoing MBC chief executive Sam Barnett departs.
Anthem for the ages
Derby County plays West Bromwich Albion on Tuesday. Before the match and more than 30,000 fans, both teams’ anthems will play. For West Brom, it’s a poppy 1979 reggae calypso oddity; for Derby it will be the longstanding song Steve Bloomer’s Watchin’.
A local hero, Bloomer played 474 games for Derby between 1892 and 1914. Few Australians have ever heard of him. But the few tourists who do turn up from time to time can easily sing along – because it is Up There Cazaly with reworked lyrics.
Diary’s colleague Alan Howe observes that we should hardly be surprised at the song’s international appeal. A special poll last week by Roy Morgan showed that Mike Brady’s Up There Cazaly is Australia’s most iconic sporting anthem.
Indeed, unprompted, almost 30 per cent of Australians nominated Up There Cazaly as their favourite sports song.
To put that in perspective, the runner-up, Men at Work’s Down Under, which was used for the John Bertrand’s 1983 Australia II campaign that won the America’s Cup to end the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year winning streak, polled just 11 per cent.
Like Cazaly, the Mojo Singer’s C’mon Aussie C’mon World Series cricket anthem topped the charts in 1979, but it was named by just 8 per cent of Australians.
Tina Turner’s early 1990s rugby league anthem Simply The Best, which has been claimed to have repositioned the game in Australia, was nominated by just 5 per cent of respondents.
Brady, who sings what has become the AFL national anthem at each grand final, was surprised and delighted that the country has so embraced his song, a shortened version of which was composed for the Seven Network’s football coverage.
“I wrote it after being asked by Seven to match the C’mon Aussie hit. I’d seen Ray Lawler’s play Kid Stakes, and a character in it repeats the phrase, Up There, Cazaly,” Brady recalls.
Cazaly had been a spectacularly high-marking South Melbourne (now Sydney Swans) superstar.
“Few Australians remember who Cazaly was,” Brady says.
Bumper to bumper
They say news never sleeps. But that maxim is not quite true at The Australian Financial Review.
The AFR – which likes to call itself the nation’s “most trusted news brand” – has never met a public holiday it doesn’t love.
And even more so when there’s a bunch of public holidays back-to-back.
For years, the AFR has euphemistically referred to its single-issue long-weekend editions as “bumpers”. For example, last Thursday’s edition – with its date stamp of April 17-21 – was one such “bumper” that was intended to sustain the AFR’s readership for five long days over the Easter break.
That’s almost twice the length of time that Jesus spent in the tomb on the corresponding weekend about 2000 years ago.
You’d think that the nation’s “most trusted news brand” might go to the effort of printing more than one edition over a five-day period in the middle of an election campaign, and at a time of significant instability across global markets. Surely the AFR’s readership might be interested to read some current news over the course of the Easter break? Apparently not.
Tucked away in small print on page 2 of last Thursday’s paper was an alert about the AFR’s “holiday publishing” schedule, stating that “daily news publishing” would resume on Tuesday, April 22.
But, hang on, what’s this? Directly below was a promotion for the “Thursday Anzac Day bumper”. Given that Anzac Day is on Friday, it seems that the AFR, under editor-in-chief James Chessell, is going to publish single-issue long weekend editions in consecutive weeks.
Election? What election?
Tabakoff’s fight
Diary regrets to report that Nick Tabakoff has stepped back from his 35-year journalism career due to ill health.
Tabakoff returned to The Australian in 2017 as associate editor in what was his third stint with the masthead. A former editor of the Media section, Tabakoff took on the additional role of writing Media Diary in 2018.
The popular newsroom figure took the column in a bold new direction, regularly breaking media stories across politics, business, sport and social media.
Under Tabakoff’s stewardship, the column achieved record online readership and engagement, and became a must-read for media identities, bosses and pundits alike.
All Nick’s friends at The Australian wish him the very best for the battle ahead.
We’re with you mate!
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