Media Diary: How Alan Jones tore a strip off Twiggy Forrest
When Andrew Forrest refused to appear on Alan Jones’ show after his controversial press conference, the radio host called him out over his excuse.
Ahead of his controversial press conference on Wednesday to announce his sourcing of 10 million COVID-19 test kits from China, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest was awfully keen to spruik himself in the media.
Diary is reliably informed Twiggy’s minders offered 2GB’s breakfast king Alan Jones an “exclusive” interview with the mining billionaire that morning. But we’re told Jones knocked him back. Sources close to the Jones camp say there was something “not quite right” about the proposed interview.
Jones’s antennae appear to have been spot-on. As we all know now, of course, Forrest blindsided Health Minister Greg Hunt at the press conference later on Wednesday by helping Chinese consul-general for Victoria, Long Zhou, to gatecrash the event’s speaker’s podium, at a time of fierce dispute between Australia and China.
Government MPs accused Forrest of expediently using the press conference to earn brownie points with China, on which his mining business is hugely reliant.
By Thursday morning, Jones unleashed fire and fury on Twiggy on his show, claiming the mining entrepreneur was “a Beijing propaganda sock puppet”, a “total phony” and “an absolute Judas”.
By Friday, Jones made an offer to Forrest to appear, but on one condition: that he had to apologise to Australia.
“We’re not going to do a Turnbull and release the details of personal communications,” Jones mysteriously said on air. “(But) you were invited to come on here at (7.40) this morning and apologise to Australia for the stance that you’ve taken.”
But this time, Twiggy went all shy about a Jones interview. The broadcaster said of Forrest: “You told me that you had a plane to catch. I told you it was crap, because you own the plane. It can leave whenever you want.”
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PM’s attack on ABC’s app attack
The office of Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made an official written complaint to the ABC over some of its reporting on the government’s much-discussed COVIDSafe app.
Diary can reveal that a formal letter, with “COMPLAINT” written in block letters in its subject line in case anyone missed it, has been emailed by ScoMo’s senior media adviser Nick Creevey to ABC news supremo Gaven Morris. The email objects to reporting by ABC investigative journalist Dylan Welch online and on TV about the app, on April 24.
Among the claims made by Creevey was that Welch’s reporting online and on ABC news bulletins about COVIDSafe that day was “unnecessarily alarmist”.
Diary hears there are no problems at a personal level between ScoMo and Morris, who have maintained a cordial relationship throughout. But it’s still probably the most significant editorial run-in between the PM’s office and the ABC since 2018, when Malcolm Turnbull famously officially complained twice about Emma Alberici’s reporting.
The concerns raised about the app in Welch’s reports involved US tech giant Amazon winning the contract for the app’s data storage. Welch’s pieces raised security concerns about the data contract going to a US company, and even claimed the data could be “obtainable by US law enforcement”.
Can the US obtain COVIDSafe data? The answer, for the moment, appears to be yes. @lb_online https://t.co/WThKCMnMBq
— Dylan Welch (@dylanwelch) April 27, 2020
But the PMO’s intervention has already made its mark. After its complaint, the ABC inserted a note in the online story in question that it had been “changed” — to clarify that “the COVID-19 tracing app will not record people’s movements, only their contact with other people also using the app”.
But there was another element of Welch’s reporting that annoyed the government: an email he sent to a minister’s office in preparation for the article that asked seven questions about Amazon and other issues. Welch’s email insisted that the minister answer every query individually, with any blanket response to his seven questions treated as a “no comment”.
“Please note: if the minister chooses to respond to the below questions with a single, overarching response, I will take that to be a failure to respond to my questions,” Welch wrote. “As a result, I will not quote your overarching response in news stories and will instead state words to the effect of: “the minister declined to respond to questions put by the ABC.”
A comment that’s a “no comment”? That’s a new one. And an interesting concept to put in writing.
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Adding a K is not OK
Any media coverage of the government’s COVIDSafe app that creates connotations of spying on the population isn’t going down well in Canberra, at a critical time.
One headline at the very top of the ABC 7pm bulletin in Sydney read by Juanita Phillips last Monday night raised some government hackles for that reason: “Authorities delighted with the response to the COVID-19 tracking app.”
Government insiders involved with the app are sensitive about media outlets throwing around terms like “tracking” to describe COVIDSafe, because they give it big brother-style surveillance connotations.
But interestingly, five minutes and a dropped “k” made a world of difference on the ABC Sydney bulletin. By the time the actual story ran, at 7.05pm, the term “tracking” had mysteriously disappeared. By then, Phillips was describing COVIDSafe, much more innocuously, as a contact “tracing app”.
That may have appeased the government, but it wasn’t the only ABC reference to “tracking”. Dylan Welch’s emailed list of questions to a minister’s office about the app, mentioned in the top item, continually referred to COVIDSafe as a “tracking app”. He made repeated references to both “the tracking app project” and “the tracking app tender” in the email.
For the record, the government says “tracking” the population is not the app’s purpose. It is rather seen as a tool for health authorities to protect the public and help the resumption of normal life at a time of crisis, by speeding up the contacting of people exposed to COVID-19.
And the government is receiving support for this thesis in the unlikeliest of quarters in the media. Lisa Wilkinson and others on Ten’s The Project, a show rarely shy about attacking the government, have been vocally supporting the app.
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Karl’s baby brain
While Alan Jones was giving Andrew Forrest the rounds of the kitchen on Thursday, others in the Nine media stable weren’t nearly so tough.
After his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Twiggy received a rails run from Karl Stefanovic, the day before the Nine host became a dad for the fourth time, on the Today show. To call it a fawning interview with the billionaire would be a significant understatement.
Three lowlights of the Twiggy/Karl love-in were Stefanovic describing Forrest and wife Nicola as the “King and Queen of Australia”, his wholehearted agreement with Forrest that the press conference was “the biggest non-story ever”, and his Dorothy Dixer to Twiggy about whether Australia needed to take a “chill pill”.
But the clincher was Stefanovic’s sign-off to Forrest before the interview ended, in which he bizarrely told Twiggy: “I’ll always be here sucking up to you.”
Karl, for one time only, we’ll let you off the hook for that horrendous suck piece. Let’s put it down to baby brain.
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Paternity leave
Speaking of Karl Stefanovic, Nine bosses will be keenly watching the performance of the Today show this week as the new dad takes at least three days of paternity leave: amid tabloid mania over his new baby girl with partner Jasmine Yarbrough. It’s Stefanovic’s first significant absence since his much-trumpeted return to the show.
David Campbell, the other main contender in the mix when Nine CEO Hugh Marks made the call for Stefanovic to come back late last year, will be co-hosting with Allison Langdon from Monday.
It’s fair to say Stefanovic’s return has not been the breakfast ratings heart-starter Nine was hoping for after last year’s ratings disasters. Today still hasn’t won a single day of ratings in 2020, and has even been beaten by ABC News Breakfast (which is admittedly screened on two channels) for several weeks this year. So we’re sure Karl will be extending Campbell every good wish — but secretly hoping his stand-in doesn’t go too well.
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Campion speechless
The coronavirus has killed off ex-Daily Telegraph journalist Vikki Campion’s bid to return to working life, at least for the time being, Diary can reveal.
Campion, the high-profile partner of ex-deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, had intended to make her big Canberra comeback as a writer of speeches and op-ed pieces for the federal parliament’s deputy speaker, Llew O’Brien, on March 23.
Campion broke a self-imposed two-year silence in March, when she revealed to Diary: “I want to challenge myself with more than wiping babies’ faces.”
Unfortunately for Campion, wiping babies’ faces will have to suffice for a while.
That’s because her intended March comeback coincided with the introduction of strict social distancing measures in federal parliament. “At the time, Scott Morrison got on a teleconference call and said there would be only essential staff for ministers, and basically no staff for members,” she confides.
With Campion having intended to come back initially as a casual, that left her firmly in the “non-essential” basket: meaning no job while the lockdown continues.
That means Campion and her high-profile partner are now firmly ensconced on a family property in Joyce’s sleepy childhood hometown of Woolbrook, north of Tamworth, in his New England electorate, where she’s now throwing herself into doing it up: “I’m painting the whole place.”
At least the Campion/Joyce clan are unusually safe there from the coronavirus. “Social distancing isn’t a problem,” she confides wryly. “It’s a 40-minute walk in one direction, and two hours in another, before I see another soul.”
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MasterChef distancing
Insiders at Seven have been grumbling about how filming on Ten’s MasterChef Australia has been allowed to continue, while its own new cooking show, Plate of Origin (affectionately known by its acronym, POO), starring ex-MasterChef judges Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, was forced to hurriedly end filming last month.
So Diary decided to put Seven’s gripes direct to its rival. Ten argues the real reason the top-rating MasterChef has been allowed to continue is because the network and the show’s production house, Endemol Shine, made significant adjustments to its filming, including the abandonment of guest stars.
Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and Katy Perry all filmed high-profile guest stints pre-lockdown. But we’re told once things became more restrictive, the show’s producers pared the show back to its bare bones: its three regular judges, Jock Zonfrillo, Andy Allen and Melissa Leong, the contestants and the kitchens.
Episodes currently screening are still showing the pre-lockdown kitchen, and will continue to do so for a few more weeks. But after that, the show will start to look very different with tastings to be conducted at a distance, and utensils and plates no longer to be shared by the judges.
The separation process is helped by the fact that the set is based in a huge, cavernous building at the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds.
“We’ve taken the word of the law and executed it to the letter,” one MasterChef insider said. “Social distancing is strictly observed for both the judges and the crew. We’ve got the bare minimum number of people on the set, extra medical professionals on site, the right square footage per person, and everything is deep cleaned.”
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Barrie’s Logies rant
Last week’s controversial cancellation of this year’s Logies had a certain former host of the ABC’s Insiders up in arms.
That’s right, folks: Barrie Cassidy, still a political animal at heart, sees calling off the Logies as a scandalous betrayal of the democratic process of TV’s night of nights.
Cassidy’s beef is that the decision means that Hard Quiz host Tom Gleeson now undemocratically holds the Gold Logie gong for a second year, after he only won last year from a guerrilla campaign against his rivals such as Amanda Keller.
“He humiliated the Logies and now he gets a second term without an election?” Cassidy rhetorically asked his 166,000 Twitter followers. “This is insane. The Logies are not an event. They are a series of awards. Why would you not hand them out anyway for the record! And that way not allow Tom Gleeson to be the carry-over champion.”
But in the true manner of undemocratically elected despots, Gleeson was unapologetic, even suggesting the cancellation was part of his Dr Evil-like plans. “I ate the bat in Wuhan. Everything has gone to plan. GOLD LOGIE WINNER FOR TWO YEARS!”
Be afraid, Barrie, be very afraid.
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