Media Diary: Why the soft run for Palaszczuk on Today, Sunrise?
Palaszczuk granted rare TV interviews last week; so why wasn’t she asked about Jackie Trad?
It’s the biggest crisis that has faced Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s government in her five years in power: the integrity issues currently embroiling the state’s Treasurer, Jackie Trad, and her chief of staff over questionable investments made outside of politics.
But you wouldn’t know there was any government crisis if you were watching appearances by Palaszczuk on Today and Sunrise on Wednesday.
Both breakfast shows were granted rare interviews with the Queensland Premier. But neither show touched the issue that has shaken Palaszczuk’s government to its foundations and threatens to see her thrown out of office at next year’s state election.
Instead, all we got were a series of soft questions from both shows that gave the Premier a gilt-edged opportunity to look tough, and also gifted her a plum national platform to trumpet her supposed new crackdown on Extinction Rebellion protesters gluing themselves to the road.
It all smacked of a classic diversion tactic by Palaszczuk and her government, seemingly devised to take attention away from the return to sitting of the Queensland parliament.
Last week’s parliamentary sessions certainly did not go well for Deputy Premier Trad, who copped a parliamentary pasting and calls by the Queensland LNP to resign over her integrity issues.
It begs the obvious question: did Palaszczuk do a deal with Today and Sunrise to only ask her about the protests and avoid talking about integrity at all?
Insiders at Today and Sunrise have been adamant in telling Diary they would not compromise their own integrity to make any such deal. But they have acknowledged that avoiding Palaszczuk’s elephant in the room wasn’t a good look.
Drums beating on missing show
The taping of last Wednesday night’s The Drum, on one of the biggest news days of 2019, was a wild ride. After all, it’s a rare day indeed that the ABC takes one of its marquee panel shows off the air, with no notice, and replaces it with a repeat of Grand Designs.
Now Diary can reveal why. Wednesday’s show was pulled after incendiary comments made by individual panellists about not one but two divisive topics: last week’s failed court appeal by George Pell, and US President Donald Trump.
One source involved in the epic prerecording of that night’s The Drum tells us its Pell discussion was lit up by one particularly fiery comment from a panellist. As the insider notes: “That discussion went overboard!”
The problematic comment prompted an initial double-take from host Ellen Fanning, who to her credit handled the situation decisively. We’re told she quizzed the panellist on whether that person meant to make the offending comment, and then made it very clear, for the record, the comment was “not the ABC’s position”.
But that was not the end of The Drum’s problems that night. Later, another discussion about Australia’s decision that day to join a US mission to the Middle East’s Strait of Hormuz was hijacked by — you guessed it — an anti-Trump diatribe. One guest launched what Diary has been told was a “massive personal attack on Trump”.
Finally, more than an hour after The Drum was pulled from the ABC’s main channel, a heavily edited version of the show, with eight minutes of panel discussion missing, finally appeared on the ABC News Channel, where it is normally repeated nightly at 7pm. This version of the show did not start at its regular time, but at 7.08pm.
The offending comments about both the Pell case and Trump were missing from the final ABC News and ABC iview versions.
An ABC spokeswoman told Diary that “edited some comments made during the program … there wasn’t time to do that before broadcast so we took the decision to cancel the ABC TV broadcast. The edited version aired on the News Channel”.
Errors of a certain Age
The ABC wasn’t the only media outlet last week having problems relating to the hotly anticipated Pell verdict.
At exactly 9.28am, two minutes before the actual verdict was due to be delivered, Melbourne’s Age online site flashed up the headline, “George Pell appeal LIVE: Cardinal is acquitted” on its rolling coverage.
That attention-grabbing headline sent those watching the site into a tizz. The Age’s online “scoop” was proven wrong a few minutes later.
It’s common for news sites to have two alternative versions ready to go for a big set-piece news event, so someone at The Age clearly pressed the wrong button a little early.
This left some on social media confused, even after the real majority verdict that ultimately turned down Pell’s appeal was handed down at 9.30am. A spokesperson for The Age said: “An error was made and rectified within a small number of seconds.”
Q&A: new night, time?
The ABC’s Q&A in 2020, it seems, will be a radically different beast to the current version.
Let’s tally up what we already know: it will have a new host (or most likely two), a new EP, a new focus and possibly a new city.
But now Diary can reveal another big possible change: a move to a new night and an earlier 8.30pm start. It’s all part of a clean slate for Q&A in 2020 after the imminent departures of host Tony “ToJo” Jones and founding EP Peter McEvoy.
McEvoy on Friday announced the end of his Q&A reign will come at year’s end, with the parting words: “I look forward to watching Q&A as it continues to evolve in the future.”
It already seems Q&A will “evolve” pretty quickly. Two live options would allow Q&A to finally take a prime 8.30pm slot instead of its current 9.35pm start time: Tuesday or Thursday.
Of the two timeslots, Thursday at 8.30pm would be most logical. On Tuesday nights, Q&A would have to go up against the commercial networks’ high-rating reality franchises like MAFS, MKR and The Block.
Thursday night would be a much friendlier slot, with less competitive shows on the commercial networks and a track record for Q&A of having run Thursday night special editions with decent ratings in the past.
But what about the ABC’s four-hour Monday night news and current affairs “fortress” — which currently starts with ABC News at 7pm, then features 7.30, A ustralian Story, Four Corners, Media Watch and finally concludes around 10.45pm at the end of Q&A?
Word is that there is a belief at the ABC that even if Q&A is moved, Aunty would still have two-and-a-half hours of such programming — still more than enough to satisfy Monday night news junkies.
Shorten foe jobless
He’s the man who some believe turned the entire federal election on its head, through an extraordinary campaign grilling of Bill Shorten.
Jonathan Lea, the Ten Network’s feisty Canberra reporter, became an instant household name in a viral campaign clip by repeatedly insisting Shorten “answer the question” about how much his climate change policy would cost the economy. The refusal to answer Lea’s questions by Shorten, Labor’s answer to John Hewson, exposed critical chinks in the party’s policy armour early in the campaign.
But a few months on, Lea is jobless and on the hunt for another Canberra gig. That’s because Ten is restructuring its Canberra bureau around its star in the area, newish political editor Peter van Onselen. As a result, Diary hears, Lea was asked by Ten to move to its Brisbane bureau. But Shorten’s nemesis has family ties in Canberra, so he has now taken a payout and parted ways with Ten.
Ross Dagan, Ten’s news boss, told staff that following Lea’s departure, “the next appointment we make in Canberra will be for a producer/reporter”.
The parting of ways appears amicable enough: Lea has told others he would be more than happy to return to Ten down the track. But Diary thinks it’s odd Ten couldn’t continue to find room in Canberra for someone of Lea’s tenacity.
He’s interested in another political reporting gig in Canberra, or even a three-hour commute away in Sydney.
The offers, we hear, are already coming in.
What backlash?
Following an advertiser backlash last week against 2GB’s Alan Jones over his comments about New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, there’ll be unprecedented interest in tomorrow’s release of the latest Sydney radio audience survey.
How will Jones rate? His Ardern comments will sneak into the survey, as they were made in the last days of the survey period on August 15.
Interestingly, the ratings of his television show, Jones & Credlin, actually appear to have benefited from the kerfuffle over his comments. Last Tuesday, the Sky program saw a 14 per cent rise, week-on-week, in its average audience to 69,215 viewers; it seems that viewers were tuning in to see Jones have his say.
Poor old Singo
The major players at this point don’t appear to be showing any signs of backing out of Nine’s takeover bid for 2GB’s owner Macquarie Media, despite recent events. But Diary hears the radio network’s second-largest shareholder, John Singleton, isn’t exactly thrilled about the deal.
Reliable sources have told us Singo has been grumbling about the “missing $20 million” he’s not getting from the sale. That’s a reference to the fact that Nine is paying him only $1.46 a share for his Macquarie stake, or $80m — compared with the $100m he always wanted.
Poor bloke. That’s what you call a First-World problem.
Pauline rocks Uluru
Cynical publicity stunt, or a genuine attempt to start a national conversation?
By tomorrow morning we’ll at least know if viewers tuned into tonight’s heavily-promoted A Current Affair “special” on Pauline Hanson’s Uluru summit bid.
The story is allegedly an in-depth examination of Hanson’s claim on the Today show last month that shutting off the climb from October was like “closing Bondi Beach”. Was the One Nation leader even able to reach the top of Uluru?
Seemingly not.
At one point in the footage, a flustered Hanson says she can’t do it because “my boots are that bloody old”.
She also debates Aboriginal elders on climbing Uluru. Word is that while Hanson remains opposed to a climbing ban, her stance softens during the visit.
Diary hears Hanson was not paid by ACA, nor was a donation made to her chosen charity, the Men’s Shed in Innisfail. But Nine did fork out for flights and accommodation on her seemingly unsuccessful summit bid.
FitzSimons goes quiet
You may have missed the memo last week that Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons will deliver the ABC’s annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture, one of the local media’s big nights.
FitzSimons will be the first person to deliver the prestigious lecture in a red bandana, and join a long list of the Austra–lian media’s big hitters like Kerry Stokes, Jana Wendt, David Williamson, Lachlan Murdoch and John Alexander as Olle alumni.
But what will be FitzSimons’s special subject for one of the year’s media highlights? Alan Jones, perhaps? After all, it has been hard to miss the 2GB broadcaster in the news in the past fortnight.
What more of an excuse would FitzSimons need to return to his favourite subject of Jones, who this column established a few weeks back had been panned by the media’s bandana man in his columns nearly 50 times in the past year.
For a bit of sport, we phoned FitzSimons and asked him direct: would he mention Jones?
Sadly, for fans of Australian media stoushes, his answer is “probably not”.
Indeed, FitzSimons has been going through a rare period of Jones shyness. Since the latest kerfuffle over Jones’s on-air comments 11 days ago, surely a trigger for an anti-Jones tirade, FitzSimons has barely said a word about him.
Why, we asked? “I’m not comfortable in the middle of the baying media pack,” he said.
Instead, FitzSimons said he would use the lecture to tell “war stories from a few of my journalistic mates”, including his former on-air partners, Mike Carlton and Doug Mulray.
FitzSimons said he would have a few themes from his 30-year media career, including “the virtues of freedom of the press”, the “privilege of working in journalism” and, oddly, “the virtues of being savaged on Media Watch”.
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