ABC fails to send news crew to cover Auschwitz memorial
Neither of Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, will be on the ground in Poland for the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Neither of Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, will be on the ground in Poland for the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday. It’s likely to be the last such service attended by survivors of the unspeakable events that occurred at the concentration camp.
TV crews from Nine and Seven will be there to cover the event, as will print and digital journalists from News Corp and Nine Entertainment mastheads.
A spokesman for SBS said it was not sending a TV news crew to Poland, “however we are covering it extensively through a number of features”.
The ABC’s spokesman didn’t respond to repeated questions from Diary on Sunday about the astounding editorial decision. News director Justin Stevens also failed to reply to our inquiry.
To put the Auschwitz decision in context, in 2023 the ABC sent 37 staff – at a cost to the taxpayer of $150,000 – to the four-day Indigenous Garma Festival in Arnhem Land.
Fifteen months later, it seems they can’t see the news value in sending a single journalist to mark a significant anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in modern history.
FitzSimons’ erotic adventure
Sydney Morning Herald columnist and prolific author Peter FitzSimons left readers hanging at the weekend with some unresolved plot threads in a florid tale of his hair-raising 10-week trip through Africa as a 24-year-old in 1985.
In a contribution to the SMH’s January series, “The summer that changed everything”, FitzSimons recounted how he travelled from Egypt, through Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda, on his way to Johannesburg to meet up with the object of his affections, 19-year-old Debbie.
Fitz had met Debbie while playing rugby in Italy. She was the sister-in-law of a South African teammate, and when the footy season ended, the former Wallaby sought to be reunited with the teenager.
“Things were so great between us that instead of returning to Australia I decided to travel across the African continent to meet up with her and hopefully have a few more precious weeks in her fragrant company,” Fitz gushed.
It turns out that it was quite a trip. At one point, the strapping Aussie rugby player was forced to pay “a couple of Somali truck drivers to get me through Uganda”. We’ll let FitzSimons take it from here. After all, it’s not our story to tell.
“I have to further pay my way with the drivers each night by sleeping beside the fuel tanks as a guard, while they go into Ugandan villages looking for women,” he wrote. “On our last night before getting into Kenya I awake to find that the erotic dream I am having has as its foundation an African woman they had brought back for me, now beaming at me in the moonlight.
“I am aghast! But that’s another story.”
Hmm. Now, far be it for us to pry, but Diary speaks on behalf of all readers in querying why such an anecdote was left so open-ended? What are we to make of that surprise encounter? What happened at that truck stop, Peter? Why won’t you tell us?
Fitz’s tale rambles on, interspersed with (barely relevant) Bob Dylan lyrics.
Fitz gets robbed in Tanzania.
Fitz accidentally scares some kids in Zambia with his whiteness (not his fault).
Fitz has a run-in with the cops in Zimbabwe.
Fitz endures a curious hitchhiking encounter with a “white bloke” who has a chained-up black man in the back of his ute – again, another strange plot twist, left unresolved.
Finally, Fitz arrives in Johannesburg to be reunited with Debbie, but apparently her parents aren’t that impressed with the big lug, and things don’t work out. But we knew that already because of course Fitz’s happily-ever-after is Lisa Wilkinson.
Anyway, Fitz, back to that night at the truck stop …
Sayers cheese!
The media race to secure an interview with Luke Sayers has been on in earnest since the businessman’s social media account was, ahem, hacked, and the citizens of the online world copped an eyeful of something they most certainly did not ask for.
Sayers has been mostly quiet throughout the three-week duration of the lewd pic scandal, other than to say he would “leave no stone unturned” in his bid to find the person responsible for hacking his X account.
At this stage, Sayers remains in Italy on holiday with his family, and is presumably spending his days turning over stones in the picturesque European countryside. Hopefully he’ll find the culprit soon.
Meanwhile, Operation Save Our Sayers is being managed back in Melbourne by expensive media spinners, who are in full damage control mode.
When will the crisis management team advise Sayers to roll out the inevitable tell-all interview? And who will be the lucky journo to jag the one-on-one?
On Saturday, The Age got something the other media outlets didn’t have – a picture of Sayers and his wife Cate chewing the fat in a cafe in Lucca, Tuscany.
But was the photo, which appears to have been taken from a distance of about one metre, carefully stage-managed by Team Sayers?
The pic – which carried a mysterious tag explaining it was “exclusively obtained by The Age” – certainly looks like a set-up. Sayers appears to be casually making a conversational point, while his wife is giving the impression of hanging off her husband’s every word. What a deadset giveaway!
But what makes the whole thing even more suspicious is that the feature-length story that accompanied the photo was particularly sympathetic to Sayers. Here’s a few choice quotes from the piece by The Age’s chief AFL writer Jake Niall and senior reporter Sarah Danckert.
“Sayers has a boundless, almost Pollyanna-level positivity, irrespective of the financial or footy score.”
“His supporters reckon him a social media dunce, incapable of posting anything.”
“Hardly flattering, the pic did not appear to be one that anyone would willingly send a paramour.
“His charismatic, emotive style of leadership is against the grain of buttoned-up accountancy firms.”
The article only made a passing reference to the attached photo of Sayers and his wife, noting that they “were photographed together at a cafe in Lucca, Tuscany on Friday (AEDT)”.
The sunny tenor of the piece didn’t go unnoticed by readers, with one posting on X: “ ‘Were photographed together’ is such a funny way to say ‘he got someone to take this pic of him and his wife in Italy and he emailed it to The Age for this damage control puff piece’.”
That post caught the attention of The Australian Financial Review’s columnist Mark Di Stefano, who added: “This is disgraceful. If he wants the puff piece he can sit for the interview.”
The Age and the AFR are both owned by Nine Entertainment. It’s no small thing for a journalist to publicly deride a colleague’s work as “disgraceful”, but Di Stefano’s criticism arguably has merit.
Diary asked the editor of The Age, Patrick Elligett, about the friendly fire from Di Stefano, and whether Sayers and his wife posed up for the seemingly contrived photo and co-operated with the journalists for the story.
“The source of the photo is anonymous and will remain so,” Elligett said.
The lewd pic scandal has cost Sayers big-time – he’s stepping down as executive chair of his successful consulting firm Sayers Group, and he’s chucked in the presidency of his beloved Carlton Football Club.
Cullen speaks
Dumped Today presenter Alex Cullen – who fell foul of his bosses at Nine after he trousered a $50,000 gift from a lottery tycoon without first disclosing it to his superiors – made his first public comments about the scandal on Sunday.
Cullen, who was sacked on Thursday following a five-day review into his conduct, posted a pic of himself on Instagram alongside his toddler son, under a statement that read: “This has been a very difficult time and I just want to say thank you to all the wonderful people who reached out. It means the world to me and my young family. I will miss my colleagues at Today and wish them the best. Thank you again and I look forward to whatever comes next.”
Cullen, 44, is no doubt ruing his decision to give a shout-out this month to Melbourne-based billionaire Adrian Portelli, who offered $50k to the first journalist to refer to him on-air by his preferred nickname “McLaren Man”, rather than his widely used moniker “Lambo Guy”, which he had apparently tired of.
Portelli subsequently posted a screenshot on social media of a $50,000 deposit into Cullen’s bank account – a transaction which Nine executives were not made aware of until alerted by a News Corp journalist.
There are some things in life worth taking a risk for, and then there’s Lambo Guy.
Unfortunately for Cullen, his breach of the company’s code of conduct as it relates to third-party commercial agreements came just three months after the devastating investigation into the company’s rotten workplace culture.
Interim CEO Matt Stanton, who has pledged to clean up the place, could hardly stand by and approve one of his high-profile presenters taking cash for comment, even if it was just a stupid mistake that pales in significance when compared with some historical workplace offences at Nine. Some of the perpetrators of said offences remain at the network – a fact that continues to traumatise quite a few staff.
No more Laura
Laura Tingle has been pushed out the door at the AFR, having filed her final column for the masthead at the weekend.
“I started my journalistic career at The Australian Financial Review in 1981 and, in more recent times, have contributed to its pages for the past 23 years. Now it is time to say goodbye,” she told readers in a postscript to her farewell piece in Saturday’s paper.
Diary contacted Tingle, who is the chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30 program, to politely ask if it was her decision to leave the Fin, or if she’d been given the old heave-ho.
It seems it was the latter.
“Six years ago, when I left the AFR for the ABC, they agreed between themselves that they would both carry my weekly column,” Tingle said. “That’s allowed me to continue to occupy absolutely prime space on the AFR’s opinion page every Saturday morning. Six years on, the demands for that space are rather intense, now that the paper has to accommodate its former editor-in-chief, Michael Stutchbury, and also Jennifer Hewett, who is moving from daily to weekly writing. My column continues to appear on the ABC website, and I part with the AFR on good terms – six years later than I ever expected.”
Tingle’s extraordinary deal to share the same column on the same day with two rival media organisations always struck Diary as too good to be true. It was the ultimate double-dip, getting paid twice for the one column. How that ever made it past the bean counters at the AFR is amazing. Why would a subscription business allow content that it subsidises be made available, for free, somewhere else?
We asked AFR editor-in-chief James Chessell about Tingle’s departure from the masthead.
“It was a business decision and nothing else,” Chessell told us.
In a note to staff on Friday, Chessell praised Tingle’s contribution to the masthead.
“The consistency and quality of Laura’s writing has been a big part of our political coverage,” he said.
Also on the columnist scrap heap at the AFR is former Labor minister Craig Emerson.
“Just letting you know, my fortnightly column with the Financial Review has come to an abrupt end under new AFR management,” he wrote in a post on social media.
Chessell confirmed that Emerson was another casualty of the masthead’s “refresh”.
“Once again, nothing political,” Chessell told us.
For his part, Emerson pledged to bat on. “I’m not going away though. I’ll be doing even more on social media.”
Phew!
Nick Tabakoff is on leave.
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