Over the silly season, there’s been a fascinating off-air stoush building between The Project’s host, budding epidemiologist Lisa Wilkinson, and the country’s ex-deputy chief medical officer and regular Project guest Nick Coatsworth.
The situation culminated last week with Coatsworth suddenly posting a series of comments highly critical of Wilkinson’s support of fresh lockdowns imposed by NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
One of several retweets about Wilkinson read: “Lisa Wilkinson praising NZ for putting close contacts in 24 days of isolation just shows her inner city, multi-millionaire, guaranteed wage privilege.”
When Diary reached Coatsworth, he confessed to some regret about his social media storm on Wilkinson. “It’s not ideal – I’ve got a pretty good relationship with The Project. I’m sort of trying to hose it down. It was a moment of weakness when I sent out the tweets. I’ve got nothing against her personally. I just fell into the trap of saying it on Twitter.”
It all appears to have started when Wilkinson took to Twitter last month to troll Coatsworth for what she saw as “defending” NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s decision to temporarily drop Covid-19 mask mandates when he appeared on her own show in December.
“You’ve seen those numbers in NSW, they’re going through the roof,” Wilkinson had told Coatsworth on air. “People’s Christmases are being destroyed – because that’s the state where there’s no mask mandate.”
Coatsworth doesn’t appear to have been amused. So when Wilkinson went on The Project a week ago to lavish praise on renewed lockdowns imposed by Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand to deal with Omicron, contrasting it with what she saw as Australia’s Covid-19 “bin fire”, Coatsworth was ready with a social media baseball bat of his own.
Coatsworth tells Diary that when he went on The Project with Wilkinson, he wasn’t defending Perrottet, but simply making a case to Wilkinson about what may have been behind the NSW Premier’s action to temporarily ditch mask mandates.
“I was just doing an explainer about why his action might have been reasonable,” she said.
He has explained why he respectfully thinks Wilkinson and others are wrong on Ardern’s tough position on lockdowns.
He tells Diary: “I can understand why Lisa said it. But the measures she was calling for would not have saved Christmas. New Zealand is a tiny island nation and WA is isolated from the rest of the nation. But the eastern seaboard is concentrated in highly populated cities which were eventually going to get hit. The best thing is that before they did, we got vaccinated.”
Meanwhile, he has held out an olive branch to Wilkinson. “She’s a good presenter, a good host – and she’s passionate about her views.”
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PM agrees to ABC blitz except with one star journo
There was no love lost last year between PM Scott Morrison and the ABC, with well-chronicled complaints at the government’s highest levels about its treatment by Aunty on a number of fronts, particularly by the Four Corners program.
And election year 2022 has appeared to start in similarly adversarial fashion between the ABC and the government. Earlier this month, stand-in 7.30 host Laura Tingle called out Morrison on air, about his alleged refusal to front up on the program to face an interview.
Tingle repeatedly put ScoMo at the top of a list she revealed on 7.30 of “our leaders from both federal and state governments” who had been “unavailable” to talk about how they were dealing with the Omicron “crisis”.
She also announced to 7.30 viewers that in light of Morrison’s rejection of her interview requests, it “therefore seems only appropriate to ask the alternative Prime Minister, Labor’s Anthony Albanese, for his views on what is happening and what a Labor government would be doing differently”.
But it now seems that Morrison’s absence from the ABC appears to have been specific to Tingle.
Diary has learnt that in the next two weeks, Morrison has decided to subject himself to interrogations from multiple flagship ABC shows. With a federal election looming, we hear the PM will be embarking on an ABC blitz that will see him conduct at least four Aunty interviews: with 7.30’s regular host Leigh Sales, David Speers of Insiders, new Radio National Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas, and Sabra Lane of ABC Radio’s AM Program.
Word out of the government is that in coming months, Morrison will front up to numerous ABC forums at some point. “He’ll front up to nearly everything,” one insider tells us. “He won’t be shying away from tough interviews. The list of people he won’t do interviews with is extremely small.”
But Diary is reliably informed that one person on that “extremely small” list is Tingle.
Whether it was the 7.30 chief political correspondent’s on-air call out earlier this month about his refusal to do the interview, or her now-famous deleted October 2020 tweet in which she personally trolled Morrison for “government ideological bastardry”, it seems there is no love lost at all between Tingle and the PM.
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Sales tests positive to Covid
Leigh Sales, incidentally, has clearly had an eventful Christmas holidays. The regular 7.30 host has posted to her Instagram account the full magnitude of her summer travails, including a run-in with Covid-19.
“I’ve had a gorgeous summer break and I’ve been looking very forward to getting back on the 7.30 desk on Monday night,” she started with her social media followers. “Two unusual things have happened to me in the last few days. One is that I was bitten on the nose by a mouse that was in my bed, out in the country. So that was really quite unexpected and a little disturbing.
“And the other exciting thing that’s happened is I’ve got a little sniffle. And so I did a RAT and it turns out I have Covid.”
The triple-vaccinated Sales said that would keep her at home “for a little bit longer” and that she wouldn’t be back at work until next Monday. Sales said she was “relaxed” about the diagnosis because of her triple-vaxxed status.
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PVO’s Tame clash boosts The Project
Nobody could argue that Peter van Onselen didn’t end his summer stint as Waleed Aly’s stand-in on The Project with a bang.
PVO triggered a social media storm when his criticism of Grace Tame’s unsmiling presence at an Australian of the Year function was posted on this newspaper’s website on Tuesday. And The Project was quick to recognise its potential news value, given that van Onselen was on the show that night.
PVO assumed the role of pantomime villain on The Project’s Tuesday night instalment, with co-host Carrie Bickmore and guest Amy Remeikis of The Guardian taking turns to attack him over his criticism of Tame’s steely demeanour when she was greeted by Scott Morrison at the function.
Van Onselen’s column had described Tame as “ungracious, rude and childish, refusing to smile for the cameras, barely acknowledging his (Morrison’s) existence when standing next to him”.
Bickmore responded: “First of all, why do you feel the need to tell Grace how she should have behaved? But second of all, why should she stand there and smile and pretend that it’s all okay?”
Remeikis argued that his comments were “devastating to so many people”.
But van Onselen wasn’t backing down: “I just think if you can’t be polite to the Prime Minister of the country – I said in the article, I get it if she can’t be polite to him – but then just don’t go because otherwise I think it’s immature.”
After the show, Lisa Wilkinson – who for two years co-hosted The Sunday Project with van Onselen – wasted little time in taking to social media to support Tame and Remeikis while omitting any mention of her former co-host.
Despite all the controversy, Diary hears that Ten bosses have told PVO he is still wanted for future fill-in hosting spots for Aly and Hamish Macdonald.
It seems that may be all about ratings. The on- and off-air biffo on The Project involving PVO didn’t do the show’s previously struggling ratings any harm.
The night after PVO became the top trending topic on Twitter in Australia, The Project’s ratings jumped by 50,000 viewers.
With that sort of ratings boost, don’t bet against PVO making more regular appearances as The Project searches for more dissent among the hosts.
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Palaszczuk on the run over integrity
There was a media feeding frenzy in Brisbane last week, with the Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk under intense media pressure, not over Covid-19, but the issue of integrity.
The issue of Omicron was put on the backburner by Brisbane’s press gallery, as newsrooms were more interested in chasing claims of a stolen laptop, secret files deleted and two bombshell resignations.
The drama started last Monday, after The Australian’s Michael McKenna broke the news that Queensland’s Integrity Commissioner Nikola Stepanov had quit midway through her second term.
It follows allegations that the Public Service Commission raided Stepanov’s office, took her laptop and wiped its contents without consent.
Palaszczuk was visibly irritated when her Monday Covid press conference was hijacked by questions about the mystery laptop.
What was on it? Why was it seized? What was deleted? Is there a cover-up? Was Stepanov closing in on a major political scandal? Was she pushed?
After a series of increasingly tense exchanges, Palaszczuk tried to turn it back on the Brisbane press gallery: “People move jobs all the time, just like you in the media, you move jobs.”
For long-term watchers of the Queensland Premier, it wasn’t a surprise when she took the “break open glass in emergency” option by Tuesday and fired-up the VIP jet to … you guessed it … far flung Townsville. And no pesky Brisbane press gallery journalist in sight!
In a classic Palaszczuk “look over here” tactic, her Tuesday news conference focused on the construction of a new police hub at the site of the NRL Cowboys’ old home, Dairy Farmers Stadium.
But while the Premier was 1300km away, more negative headlines were breaking back in Brisbane on the integrity issue.
Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission Chair Alan MacSporran announced his resignation after weeks of political pressure brought on from a damning report about major failings in the CCC.
With no Premier in sight, LNP opposition leader David Crisafulli cashed in, calling a snap news conference at 4.30pm – giving him plenty of airtime in the lead stories on the nightly Nine, Seven and ABC news bulletins.
The integrity issue also seemed to suck the life out of the ratings for the Palaszczuk News Network – famously known as PNN and employing an army of ex-journalists to put it to air – on the Premier’s Facebook page.
The Queensland Premier’s Monday daily Covid-19 update on PNN, normally a ratings winner, attracted a paltry 52,000 viewers. In commercial TV-land, those sorts of numbers would be ratings poison.
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Piers Morgan’s ‘anti-woke’ 9.30 Sky show
Most of Sky News’s main line-up returns to air on Monday, with the return of Andrew Bolt and Peta Credlin, and the launch of a new 4.30pm business show featuring Ross Greenwood.
That leaves one big mystery in the Sky 2022 line-up: what will be the timeslot and starting date for its star new British recruit and noted Meghan Markle adversary Piers Morgan, signed on a global deal with News Corp and Fox News worth millions each year?
Diary has learnt that Morgan’s show, which has the working title Wake Up (the same name as his recent book), is set to run at 9.30pm from Tuesday to Friday nights in Australia, straight after Paul Murray Live, which now screens between 8pm and 9.30pm.
The other mystery is when Morgan’s new show will commence. Diary is told there is no formal start date yet nominated, as his team works furiously to build studios for Morgan from scratch.
At this point, the best guess is that Morgan’s studio will be completed around mid-March, allowing him to start soon after. Until then, Rita Panahi will occupy the 9.30pm slot from Monday to Thursday, reverting to Monday nights only when Morgan starts.
Much like his book Wake Up, Diary hears Morgan is planning to build his new show primarily around tackling “wokeism” and cancel culture.
Apparently the plan is to make the show broad enough to appeal to the three key markets in which Morgan will operate: the UK, the US and Australia, without the need for geo-targeted interviews to repackage the show to individual markets.
Morgan believes he understands all three markets very well, having of course hosted prime time talk show Piers Morgan Live on CNN in the US, as well as having been a frequent presence in Australia for several years.
And given his pet subject of Prince Harry and Meghan, which has plenty of appeal to the anti-woke brigade in all three markets, it’d be safe to assume plenty of editorials about the royal couple going forward.
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MasterChef back after Covid-19 halt
The contagiousness of the Omicron variant has taken its toll on the production of some major network franchises. Diary has learnt that MasterChef: Fans & Favourites only resumed filming late last week, after being forced to suspend production during January due to Covid-19.
We’re reliably informed the problem was a Covid-19 outbreak among a number of contestants on the show, who have now finally recovered.
Among the guest chefs we have learnt turned up to the resumed filming of the show last week were Curtis Stone and prominent dessert chef Reynold Poernomo. Already, our spies tell us that macaron king Adriano Zumbo and Shannon Bennett have already guest-starred in the filming of the latest MasterChef instalment.
Ten bosses are privately hopeful that the Fans & Favourites formula will breathe new life into MasterChef, after the show experienced a ratings dip in 2021.
Diary has also learnt that 2018 champion Sashi Cheliah and 2021 contestant Tommy Pham will join MasterChef Australia’s inaugural winner Julie Goodwin in competing on the show, in a bid to bring some familiar faces back to go up against a new batch of home cooks.
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McGowan shuts out 60 Mins on Cleo
Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s decision to backtrack on his original plans to open WA’s borders on February 5 is causing ripples in the media.
Most notably, it has cost Nine the ability to interview the family of kidnapped four-year old Cleo Smith in person about her abduction and extraordinary rescue 18 days later at a remote campsite. And that’s a potential problem when (after an intense bidding war with Seven) you’ve been pushed up to pay a rumoured $2m for the multimedia rights with the family over the affair, starting with a 60 Minutes interview, and moving on to Today show appearances, podcasts and even the potential for a serialised drama or documentary.
With WA’s borders chained and padlocked, Nine had a dilemma: to deploy the reporter it wanted, 60 Minutes’ own Tara Brown, to interview the family by Zoom from Sydney, or employ a WA local to conduct the interview in person.
In the event, Nine chose to go for the Zoom interview with Brown – and will get an early sign of whether its seven-figure investment was worth it when 60 Minutes returns next Sunday. Diary hears that Nine resisted the temptation to include Cleo in the 60 Minutes interview with her parents because of her age. However, there is extensive vision of Cleo that will be cut into the story.
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