Hazard a guess at ABC board talk highlights: Laura Tingle controversy, Kim Williams’ speech
Surely political journalist Laura Tingle, also a member of the ABC board, would recuse herself if her recent controversial remarks came up for discussion at a board meeting.
The ABC board met in Melbourne the week before last, not long after chief political correspondent for 7.30, Laura Tingle – who also happens to be the staff-elected member of the board – attracted a little bit of media attention.
You’ll recall that Tingle, and her many defenders, got upset when The Australian faithfully reported her comments at the Sydney Writers Festival about Opposition Leader Peter Dutton being an enabler of xenophobic slurs at house inspections (yes, it still sounds weird when we type it out), and how Australia is racist.
Knowing that her controversial remarks were likely to be discussed by her eight fellow board members, Tingle could be excused for feeling a little nervous ahead of the meeting in Melbourne. No journalist likes to become the story, right?
And if the matter were to be raised, would Tingle have to recuse herself from any discussions pertaining to Dutton and his alleged dogwhistling?
Board meetings are, of course, cloaked in secrecy and Diary can’t possibly know what was said about Tingle during the recent forum.
But it might be that the Tingle tirade was raised by the board, but the journalist wasn’t made to leave the room during the discussion.
Intriguing, no?
It’s also possible that the board offered its appraisal of the speech delivered by ABC chair Kim Williams at the State Library of Victoria on the previous evening.
That speech also caused a few ripples, both inside the ABC and beyond, after Williams said the taxpayer-funded media organisation would be much better if only the federal government would throw a bit more loose change its way. After all, $1.1bn a year only buys you so much.
“We all know greater investment will be needed. The ABC is an investment in Australia’s future because a revitalised ABC will be a source of great national strength,” Williams trumpeted in his speech.
“I am confident that we at the ABC can make the case for it. The budgetary outlook is tight; however the rationale is plain.”
No word on how that pitch was received within the PMO, but we can hazard a guess the response in these fiscally troubled times was along the lines of: “Probably not right now, Kimbo.”
Ghost of Gerard at Tucker talk fest
Liberal senator Gerard Rennick was gobsmacked last week after a gossip column in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald accused him of wagging question time.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had rolled into the nation’s capital alongside mining magnate Clive Palmer as part of the duo’s Australian “Freedom Conferences”, and Nine’s tabloids decided to name and shame a swag of pollies – including Rennick – for attending the Carlson/Palmer circus instead of the usual circus in parliament.
The gossip item stated that the conference was “such a hot ticket for … local political fans that a few even skipped question time to show up (gentlemen – priorities!), among them former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce; Coalition senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic and Gerard Rennick; and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts.”
Shame!
But the very next day both newspapers – the SMH, edited by Bevan Shields, and The Age, edited by Patrick Elligett – were forced to run an embarrassing correction. It turns out that someone who looks exactly like Rennick was at the Carlson/Palmer event, but not Rennick himself!
“Yesterday’s CBD column said senator Gerard Rennick skipped question time to attend the Tucker Carlson event. This was incorrect,” read the correction in the Nine mastheads.
Oops.
When Diary contacted the Queensland senator to ask about the case of very mistaken identity, he was far from impressed.
“It’s lazy journalism,” Rennick said.
So, Senator, did anyone from Nine’s papers actually pick up the phone to check if you had attended the event?
“No,” Rennick said.
But that’s not to say the Queenslander isn’t a fan of the former talk show host Carlson.
“I would have liked to have gone to see Tucker but question time was on, and I didn’t feel comfortable,” Rennick said.
“So I went to question time because I needed to go to question time.”
Rennick says when a Nine hack called to issue a grovelling apology, he issued a slapdown in return.
“I had a crack at them and said, ‘this is why you can’t trust mainstream media any more’. They couldn’t even pick up the phone and confirm my attendance’,” he told Diary.
“Anyway, I’ve had worse things said about me.”
Can it, says Neil
Former 3AW mornings host Neil Mitchell is bewildered by self-indulgent members of the fourth estate who moan about their day jobs and how tough they have it.
Battling a virus, Mitchell was feet up and with a hot cup of tea in hand last week while consuming wall-to-wall media coverage of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s release from jail, and the verdict in the murder trial of former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn, when something caught his attention.
Posting on X, Mitchell observed: “Sick of reporters and presenters telling me what a busy day it is. Just get on with it. Everybody has busy days.”
Sick of reporters and presenters telling me what a busy day it is. Just get on with it. Everybody has busy days .
— Neil Mitchell (@3AWNeilMitchell) June 25, 2024
Diary was curious to know if Mitchell was taking a swipe at his former colleagues at 3AW and Nine, or really just outraged with reporters all across the media whingeing about their workloads.
On Sunday, he set the record straight. “I was sick in bed and I’m dangerous on Twitter when I’m sick in bed,” he said.
“Everywhere I went, every journalist’s discussion I heard on radio was saying what a busy day it was. Yes, it was a busy day but stop talking about it. I would never open my program saying ‘oh we’ve got a very busy day today’, because you hope every day is going to be active.”
When asked if it was time journalists needed to cut out the moaning, Mitchell said with a laugh: “Well that’s our job. If journos stop whingeing we haven’t got anything to write about.
“Does the audience care if you’ve got a busy day?”
Some might say Mitchell came across as an old man shaking his fist at the moon, but Diary would never say such a thing.
Mitchell exited 3AW last year after hosting the station’s mornings program for 33 years, handing over the reins to Tom Elliott, but he said he still has plenty of media commitments to keep him, um, busy.
He has a weekly segment on 3AW drive, a weekly podcast, he writes a monthly column for nine.com.au, he has regular TV appearances, and also does ad hoc pieces of commentary and stories for The Age.
In fact he says his phone hasn’t stopped ringing since stepping away from the microphone.
“In fact I was lying in bed and people kept ringing me with stories,” Mitchell said. “Leave me alone,” he said with a laugh.
So does Mitchell miss the daily grind of radio? “Yes, I miss a lot of the immediacy and excitement of radio, but I do enjoy having this time to do things,” he said.
“I’m enjoying writing and the podcast very much because you have time to research and record it, and TV is always fun.”
Cash grabs
And while we’re on 3AW, Diary checked in to see how the fiasco surrounding the paid deals at Nine Radio is going given the industry regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, announced 10 months ago that the commercial partnerships of on-air talent were under the microscope.
The probe was prompted by the revelation that 3AW drive host Jacqui Felgate had 15 lucrative commercial deals that she and the station hadn’t declared – a breach of ACMA’s guidelines.
That investigation is ongoing but despite this, some stars are continuing on with their paid plugs.
Felgate, who has shed 107,000 listeners since taking over the drive timeslot from Elliott at the start of the year, is in Europe on holiday and inundating her followers with paid partnership posts.
As of Sunday, she still has 12 deals to her name and just last week, when Diary was asking Nine about her paid partnerships, within 30 minutes another deal was declared, this time with a mob called THANKYOU Group.
Felgate also has plenty of other commercial partnerships, including with BMW, Chemist Warehouse, Racing Victoria, Chadstone Shopping Centre, The Australian Luggage Company and Greenhouse Interiors.
On the weekend she was posting that she was en route to Greece with several Tosca travel bags in tow, boasting how thrilled she was with the bright-coloured goods from her paid partner in the post marked #ad.
“Rapt our @toscatravelgoodsau survived a ‘fall’ from the top of the escalator at the train station without a scratch,” she wrote.
Felgate last September blamed an “oversight” for the failure by her employer to declare the lucrative deals, but her colleague, 2GB host Ray Hadley, was having none of it and said she must have been “wearing ear muffs” at the meetings to learn about radio disclosure rules.
Diary has also noticed ex-AFL star Jimmy Bartel, who has been filling in on Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft’s 3AW breakfast program, has a lucrative deal with luxury German car brand Mercedes-Benz, which he’s been spruiking on Instagram, but it’s not declared on the radio register.
It's understood the breakfast program doesn’t have to abide by the Commercial Radio Disclosure Standard because it’s a “light-hearted” show and isn’t news.
Which is curious, as Howcroft has a declared deal with Sayers Group, headed up by executive chairman Luke Sayers of PwC fame.
A Nine spokeswoman said: “There’s no obligation for Russel to be on the register. We have added him as an abundance of caution due to his consultancy work with the Sayers Group which deals with investment and business issues.”
An ad hoc register of disclosure, then? What could go wrong?
An ACMA spokesman declined to comment.
Back in the ring?
Amid all the upheaval at Seven in recent months, Diary reckons a few ears pricked up after reading a profile of omnipresent celebrity Sonia Kruger in News Corp’s stellar magazine on Sunday.
Having promoted the hell out of the upcoming series of Dancing With the Stars, which premieres next Sunday with Kruger as host, the popular star offered this morsel about her husband Craig McPherson, who was Seven’s longtime director of news before stepping down in the wake of the Spotlight saga earlier this year.
Asked about the “challenges” faced by McPherson earlier this year, when the inner workings of Spotlight were laid bare during the defamation brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Ten and Lisa Wilkinson, Kruger said: “He’s not ready to retire, but I think he needed to step back from such a demanding job … the timing was right for him to step out. I’m excited to see what comes next.
“I’m biased, but he really is one of the best in the business. I know there will be something fun that comes for Craig where he can actually indulge a passion, which is sport. So, who knows?”
After decades spent in newsrooms, will sport be McPherson’s ticket back to the big time?
Stay tuned!
Kent exit
High-profile NRL journalist Paul Kent made headlines after some pretty intense late-night footage surfaced of him being involved in a street brawl outside Sydney eatery Totti’s restaurant in April.
‘Kenty’, as he’s more commonly known, got in a brief scrap with some random chap and the journalist ended up sprawled upside down against a tree in a suburban street.
Kent, a rugby league writer for News Corp (publisher of The Australian) and commentator on Fox Sports, was stood down pending an immediate investigation.
Diary can now reveal that Kent has officially parted ways with News Corp and Fox Sports. We contacted Kent for comment on Sunday but we didn’t hear back.
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