Ban the boo: Patricia Karvelas puts football fans on notice
Fans, you’ve been warned: if Q+A and Radio National breakfast host Patricia Karvelas parks herself next to you at the footy, you’re under surveillance.
Picture this – you’re a Collingwood fan sitting in the stands at the MCG, having purchased an overpriced ticket to watch your beloved Magpies play. You’re cheering on your team, and you’re also getting stuck into the opposition. All part of the theatre of footy.
All of a sudden, there’s a tap on your shoulder.
You freeze. Is it the police?
Well, sorta. It’s a sole officer from the fun police. Her name is sergeant Patricia Karvelas, host of niche chat show Q+A, as well as the breakfast show on ABC Radio National.
“Stop booing right now,” orders sergeant Karvelas, a proud Collingwood fan.
After picking your jaw up from the tomato sauce-encrusted ground, you give sergeant Karvelas a piece of your mind …
The above scenario is a dramatisation of an event that supposedly took place at the home of AFL footy some time last year.
Diary admits it has taken some liberties in the re-creation of this moment – for example, we have no way of knowing if there was tomato sauce on the ground when the alleged incident took place – but it’s pretty close to the money, according to the anecdote provided by chief antagonist Karvelas herself.
The ABC presenter told her listeners last week that she can’t stand anyone booing at the footy, and when she hears it, she calls it out.
“Look, I’ve actually been at a Collingwood game where Collingwood supporters, who I know are very contentious people, were booing the opposition, so to speak, and I did tell them not to boo,” she said on her Radio National breakfast show.
“That’s how serious I am about it. I said, ‘not cool’.
“(It) didn’t make me very popular,” Karvelas concluded, in what is surely the early leader for the greatest understatement of 2024.
Karvelas offered her personal “footy fan” anecdote in the context of a discussion with RN reporter Luke Siddham Dundon about the booing of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the Australian Open men’s final on January 28.
It’s possible there weren’t many Collingwood fans listening when Karvelas went to the station’s text line, because she was inundated with messages of support for her anti-booing stance.
Listener Brendan said: “I’m also not a fan of booing, whether it’s at a sporting event or directed at politicians, I think it’s a cowardly activity done in the safety of a crowd, I don’t think individuals would be brave enough to do it on their own.”
Another RN listener, likely an Albo fan, messaged in: “In my house we booed those elites at the tennis who were booing the Prime Minister”.
But Diary’s favourite was this sweeping statement from an ABC listener: “Booing reveals what adolescent bogans we are; I hate it.”
Waleed Aly, co-host of The Project, also featured in Siddham Dundon’s report on booing. And surprise, surprise, Aly was another to give the thumbs down to booing, although at least he had a humorous take on his by-the-book behaviour.
“Great sporting atmospheres are the product of people doing things that I would never do and that I probably wouldn’t condone on paper,” he told Siddham Dundon. “I fully concede that if everyone behaved in crowds the way I do then sport would be dead.”
Anyway, Collingwood fans, you’ve been warned: if Karvelas parks herself next to you at the footy, you’re under surveillance.
Julie Bishop declines to spill beans on ABC’s Nemesis
The absence of a certain former prime minister from the ABC’s docu-series Nemesis left a Tony Abbott sized hole in the first episode of the three-part program that aired last week. But there was another glaring no-show who hardly rated a mention.
Julie Bishop was deputy leader of the Liberal Party both in opposition and government from 2007 through to 2013, when the Coalition rotated through four leadership changes from Brendan Nelson to Malcolm Turnbull to Abbott and then back to Turnbull.
In episode 1, The Abbott Years, reporter Mark Willacy noted on screen that Abbott is “the first prime minister not to be interviewed in the 30 years the ABC has been making these series.”
But what about Bishop? The taxpayer-funded broadcaster attempted to convince the former foreign minister to agree to a sit-down, but she was having none of it. She told Diary: “I was invited and I declined.
“I have moved on from politics and I had no desire to revisit past events that are already well documented.”
So it seems there will be no spilling of the Bishop political beans any time soon, although in 2021 she famously told Annabel Crabb that she tried to “keep a straight face” when defending Abbott’s male-dominated cabinet in 2013.
By contrast, Bishop’s former boss Turnbull jumped at the chance to launch more bitter attacks on his former colleagues, and was given ample oxygen to do so in the series, which was led by Willacy, executive producer Morag Ramsay, head of investigative journalism and current affairs Jo Puccini, plus another 40-odd names in the on-screen credits.
Turnbull played a key role in episode 1 and appeared to speak with delight at the downfall of his long-time political enemy, even labelling Abbott “a very dangerous prime minister.”
Diary asked Abbott why he declined to take part in hours of filming with the ABC, as did his former chief-of-staff turned Sky News Australia host and News Corp columnist Peta Credlin.
“I didn’t especially want to rake over old coals or get dragged into making adverse comments on colleagues and felt that I’d said all that could and should be at the time,” he said.
But Credlin was more scathing of the ABC: “I didn’t think I was ever going to get a fair go on the ABC.
“The ABC have an agenda with every single program they do under the guise of ‘current affairs’. With Labor, it’s always about finding a way to redeem a bad government and with the Liberals, it’s about tearing them down.
“The ABC decide who their heroes and villains are based on their politics, not the facts. It’s never an attempt at an objective assessment.”
Credlin, who spent a year working for Turnbull as his deputy chief of staff when he was opposition leader, said there was an obvious motive for the ABC.
“Turnbull will come out of it smelling like roses because he’s an ABC favourite. Scott Morrison will be their real target, and Abbott will just get beaten up along the way,” she told Diary.
“But what the series has done already is expose just how duplicitous and conniving Scott Morrison was from day one of the Abbott government.”
ABC radio shake-up
The past few months have been a tumultuous period at ABC Radio, with the fallout from the contentious sacking in December of fill-in Sydney breakfast show host Antoinette Lattouf still reverberating through the media organisation.
But the taxpayer-funded broadcaster’s radio arm is set to announce a new senior appointment this week in a bid to help turn things around in 2024.
Mike Fitzpatrick, who previously worked at Southern Cross Austereo and ran Triple M for 11 years, will be named as the new head of the ABC’s capital city radio network, a role which ABC Sydney manager Steve Ahern was overlooked for.
Diary understands that Fitzpatrick’s role is likely to also include the overseeing of ABC Radio’s sports division.
Spies told Diary that after the Lattouf debacle (which is still being thrashed out at the Fair Work Commission), Ahern was Buckley’s chance of getting the gig, so instead it’s an outsider who will join the fold.
Fitzpatrick will report to ABC head of audio content Ben Latimer who reports to chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor – all three are all newbies to the ABC in the past 12 months.
Latimer, Ahern and Oliver-Taylor, according to Fair Work documents, were told of Lattouf’s social media indiscretions in December and following a discussion among them and ABC editorial Simon Melkman, she was shown the door.
Lattouf, a prolific social media user, posted a selfie on the weekend with Maurice Blackburn principal lawyer Josh Bornstein, on X and Instagram: “A couple of Semites walk into a bar.”
Her crowd-funding campaign to pay for Bornstein’s services has hit the six-digit mark, reaching a tad over $100,000.
Crikey fail
Niche news website Crikey loves to trumpet its own virtue.
“We are guided by a deceptively simple, old idea: tell the truth and shame the devil,” according to its pious mission statement.
So, then – no room for shades of grey? Nuance, be damned? But sloppy gotcha journalism? Bring it on!
On Tuesday, Crikey launched an extraordinary hit job on its devil du jour, Nine’s freshly minted publishing boss Luke McIlveen.
McIlveen’s crime? When working for The Daily Telegraph two decades ago, he wrote a column about a tragic car accident that took place near his childhood home on the NSW Central Coast. The crash claimed the lives of three people and an unborn child.
Under the extraordinary, context-free headline, “New Nine boss once defended a man’s sexual relationship with a minor”, Crikey journalist Daanyal Saeed “revealed” the existence of the article (published on November 26, 2004) in which McIlveen outlined some hitherto unreported elements of the relationship between a 33-year-old man and the pregnant 15-year-old girl, both of whom had died in the car accident.
Crikey said it put a series of questions to Nine, including whether it was aware of the article before hiring McIlveen, and whether it believes the views he presented as a junior reporter (20 years ago) “were appropriate for editorial leadership”.
Nine, unsurprisingly, declined to comment.
Furthermore, Saeed suggested that McIlveen’s appointment as Nine’s executive editor had divided staff, as evidenced by a couple of decade-old tweets that “have been circulating in Nine’s newsrooms”.
The subject matter of the tweets? One was promoting an article about former Miss World Australia when McIlveen was editor of the Daily Mail, and another was from 2013, with McIlveen suggesting that former Peter Costello was packing a few extra pounds, “and could do with a run round the block”.
So, do these revelations suggest that McIlveen is already being white-anted from within Nine?
It seems quite likely that a disgruntled Nine staffer or two may have assisted Saeed with his “expose” on McIlveen, as it’s hard to imagine the junior Crikey scribe thumbing through old print editions of The Daily Telegraph at the NSW State Library in the hope that he might randomly stumble upon a dodgy McIlveen article from the pre-internet age.
But Crikey’s limp story doesn’t exactly paint a picture of a full-scale revolt against McIlveen across the company’s newsrooms, and nor do its revelations “shame the devil”.
Diary asked Crikey editor-in-chief Sophie Black if she approved the story before publication, and if Saeed’s article met the Private Media-owned outlet’s editorial standards. “We stand by the story and our media reporter Daanyal Saeed’s work on this,” Black said.
McIlveen declined to comment when approached by The Australian.
The former News Corp, Daily Mail and Foxtel journalist has been at Nine for only a week, and faces a tough task to quell some newsroom issues that predate his arrival, most notably at The Age, where staff members are at odds over the masthead’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
It’s also unlikely McIlveen will offer his thoughts on Peter Costello’s waistline again. These days, the former treasurer is the chairman of Nine.
Où est Lisa?
Ten’s highest paid on-air personality Lisa Wilkinson has been absent from our screens since November 2022, when she bade a teary farewell as host of The Project.
Wilkinson is contracted to Ten until the end of this year, and despite murmurings last year that she’s planning a 2024 return with a series of “blockbuster interviews”, there is no word out of the Paramount-owned network of any upcoming on-air projects involving the former Today show host.
Diary understands that Wilkinson remains on an indefinite break until the conclusion of the defamation trial involving Bruce Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins, at which she was a key witness.
Diary has also been told that Wilkinson and her husband Peter FitzSimons spent an extended period in France over the summer, around the same time that Higgins and her partner David Sharaz moved there.
Wilkinson did not respond to The Australian’s request for comment.
There is no fixed timeline for the handing down of the judgment in the defamation trial.
Nick Tabakoff is on leave
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