Emma Alberici’s position as the ABC’s chief economics correspondent may have been made provisionally redundant last month, but it seems there may yet be another twist for one of Aunty’s most high-profile identities. Could a new career as an ABC shock jock be beckoning?
Diary was intrigued to hear Alberici filling in for regular host Sarah Macdonald on ABC Radio Sydney’s evening program for four nights last week. That’s about as many appearances as Alberici had made in the whole of 2020 as chief economics correspondent!
But Alberici’s sudden appearance on radio didn’t go unnoticed, either within or outside of the ABC, with talk she could become its new golden tonsils.
Adding to the intrigue is Alberici has form as an ABC radio presenter. Back in 2016, she stood in for Richard Glover as drive host on 702 Sydney.
As Diary noted a few weeks back, Alberici is in the middle of a “consultation process” about her redundancy, in which the ABC is looking at areas other than economics that fit her “skill set”. Could those skills include hosting a radio show?
If so, Alberici wouldn’t be the first recent high-profile ABC female to make the transition from the news division to local radio. There was, of course, last year’s internal ABC poaching of Virginia Trioli from TV’s ABC News Breakfast to take over Jon Faine’s morning radio shift in Melbourne.
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‘Shorten 2.0’: proof Bill is back
Has the 2020 COVID crisis been the catalyst for Bill Shorten to reset his political career, and take yet another shot at the prime ministership?
Research Diary has commissioned from media monitoring leader iSentia proves beyond doubt that Bill is back, and once more front and centre in news bulletins across the country.
The iSentia numbers show Shorten’s media appearances have increased in huge increments in recent months, suggesting a political comeback isn’t as fanciful as it seemed 14 months ago.
The Queen is a nice lady, but the disclosures in the palace letters saga earlier this week reminds us exactly why we need an Australian head of state. #auspol pic.twitter.com/wAiUoli9S4
— Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) July 16, 2020
Remember the fateful May 18 election night when Shorten had to pull out his so-called “speech No 3” to concede defeat and resign as Labor leader, consigning him to the political dustbin as a two-time election loser? That’s all ancient history now.
Diary’s iSentia statistics show Shorten’s media appearances have shot up an extraordinary 2000 per cent between his dark days of June last year and June 2020.
Recently, I sat down with Jon Faine and Andrew Grech to talk about the massive impact of Robodebt, the importance of the @gordonlegal_au class action and how we now seek compensation and accountability from those who created this unlawful system. #Robodebt #Auspol pic.twitter.com/JUFuj5orhx
— Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) July 10, 2020
The iSentia numbers show that during June 2019, Shorten was a political pariah, featuring as an interviewee or spokesman on TV and radio a mere 118 times across Australia. But exactly a year later, the story couldn’t be more different. Diary’s iSentia research shows that Shorten’s number of appearances in the electronic media soared to 2603.
Those included his first appearance on Q&A since his federal election defeat, a vintage Shorten performance last month featuring plenty of eye-rolls and put-downs of fellow guest, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.
Every one of us owes our fellow Aussies in lockdown a debt of gratitude.
— Bill Shorten (@billshortenmp) July 6, 2020
They’re doing their bit, so that every one of us is safer.
Thank you, to every one of you who is enduring this stressful situation. #auspol pic.twitter.com/IczUMrrnVY
It turns out Shorten’s media appearances have gone through the roof post-COVID. The iSentia figures show he made 710 appearances in April, but that doubled to 1478 in May, before again nearly doubling in June.
And Shorten is well on the way to another strong media month in July, after featuring heavily on TV bulletins during the Flemington housing towers lockdown in his electorate.
It all has the smell of a “Beaconsfield moment”. And Diary is told Shorten’s reinvigorated COVID-driven media presence has been noted with curiosity at the highest levels of Scott Morrison’s government. Does Shorten, they muse, see himself as another John Howard: Labor’s answer to “Lazarus with a triple bypass”?
"Just imagine it for a moment in your living room... if you were told you couldn't leave the house and in many cases you were told you can't even pick your shopping" - @billshortenmp speaks on the residents trapped inside the Melbourne towers. #9News pic.twitter.com/rZEmDWKaoT
— Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) July 6, 2020
‘‘Shorten 2.0’’ has emerged at a time when his great rival, Anthony Albanese, has been under increasing pressure because of his failure to achieve media cut-through during the COVID crisis. Watch out Albo – Bill’s back.
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ACA frets about ‘Dan’
In the midst of a global pandemic, you can always rely on Nine’s A Current Affair to put its foot in the door and ask the tough questions Australians want answered.
Very few things make Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton laugh these days. But ACA’s Luke Mortimer made Sutton crack up on Wednesday, during his daily media briefing with Premier Daniel Andrews.
Interrupting an intense dialogue between Sutton and gathered reporters about contact tracing and Stage 4 restrictions, ACA’s Mortimer asked the real question on everyone’s mind: “Is there any chance bottle shops will be closed?” After the initial laughter died down, there was bad news for ACA: an extreme “dry July” scenario couldn’t be ruled out, with Sutton stating: “Nothing (is) guaranteed”.
We recommend ACA gets down early to Dan Murphy’s (not to be confused with the other Dan) to avoid disappointment.
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Viral in Victoria
COVID-19 wasn’t the only contagion Dan Andrews was trying to contain last week.
Rumours of more stringent lockdowns proved as tough to kill as the virus. The Victorian Premier’s office even took the unusual step of responding to the rumours through a spokesman on Monday evening, as anxiety reached fever pitch. There had earlier been social media rumours about a Stage 4 lockdown coming from credible sources like 3AW.
Melbourne radio talkback lines ran hot with both panic and mischief. One call showcased the best of Melbourne gallows humour: “News just in. My neighbour’s dog was just chatting to a dog down the street whose owner works for the Treasury office … Stage 5 is coming on Saturday which means you’re not actually allowed to wake up in the morning. It’ll be enforced by the military …. Once everyone in Melbourne is dead, then I think they’ll be pretty safe that the virus is gone and the country can open back up.”
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Nine’s cabinet reshuffle
Nine newspapers are engaging in their own version of a cabinet reshuffle in their Canberra bureau while parliament locks down.
The most interesting change is the return to the national capital of James Massola, still officially the Jakarta-based South-East Asian correspondent for the papers, according to the websites of the SMH and the Age.
Diary hears that with Jakarta overrun by COVID, Massola and his family quietly came back to Australia a few months back, in the virus’s first wave.
Indonesia’s total number of Coronavirus cases has reached 50,187. Another 1,178 reported today and 47 more deaths - taking the total to 2,620 people.
— James Massola (@jamesmassola) June 25, 2020
Canberra is where Massola will most likely stay for good now, with his Jakarta tenure expiring at the end of 2020 and no sign of the virus dying down quickly. He’ll most likely cover national politics in 2021, after covering South-East Asia in 2020 out of Canberra.
But what job will Massola return to? His old role of chief political correspondent for the papers is now filled by David Crowe, so he’ll need a new round.
And Massola isn’t the only change in Canberra for Nine papers. Federal education reporter Fergus Hunter is moving to the SMH to cover crime, replacing Lucy Cormack, who’s off to NSW politics. Completing the musical chairs, NSW political reporter Lisa Visentin will join Massola and co for a new role in Canberra.
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Dannii’s detour
Spare a thought for Dannii Minogue.
She may have dodged a crappy hotel by serving out her quarantine on a luxury private property on the COVID-free Gold Coast. But she has one more trip left, and it’s considerably less enviable: a flight to her virus-ridden home state of Victoria.
Diary hears as soon as Minogue’s allowed out of her boutique Gold Coast quarters this weekend, she will be racing to Melbourne to film Ten’s breakout hit of last year, The Masked Singer, the show where famous people belt out songs, hidden behind elaborate costumes. Minogue couldn’t fly direct from LA to her hometown because of Dan Andrews’s international flight ban. But luckily, she won’t have more quarantine time in Melbourne — because Victoria thinks it’s pointless to impose iso on visitors from other, less virus-riddled states.
Minogue isn’t the only cast-member locked down. Diary hears Lindsay Lohan’s late replacement, Urzila Carlson, is now also on a two-week quarantine in Sydney after flying in from New Zealand. But, unlike with Minogue, there’s no luxury property on tap: Carlson is serving it out in a common garden variety iso hotel.
When all the quarantines are over, we’re told The Masked Singer will fast-track on to filming in late July, in time for an August launch.
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Basil’s ‘hats’
It’s hard to keep up with the number of hats that Basil Zempilas, Western Australia’s best-known TV talent nationally, wears these days.
Last week, days after confirming he’d run for mayor of Perth, he used his radio show on Nine’s 6PR and his column in Seven’s The West Australian to call on WA Premier Mark McGowan to seize the AFL grand final, And if that were to happen, Zempilas would again play a big role, wearing yet another hat as one of Seven’s top sports anchors.
The “Grand Final for Perth” push is something Seven’s ultimate boss Kerry Stokes is throwing his ample media resources behind. All he has to do is convince yet another WA boy, AFL chair Richard Goyder, to bring the big game to his home city.
But it’s also a cause which dovetails nicely into Zempilas’s mayoral ambitions, as a big potential vote-winner.
Zempilas was in full campaign mode when Diary caught him on the weekend: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to host a Perth grand final, and Mark McGowan should do what it takes to make it happen.”
Right now, Perth seems to be in a ‘‘race in two’’ with Brisbane to host the AFL’s big game, given that the chances of the MCG, both in COVID-ravaged Melbourne and in Sydney are fading.
If the AFL sends the grand final to Perth, Zempilas could be a big winner. Diary hears Zempilas will be the only man on the ground for Seven, giving him a prominent role in Seven’s broadcast. And a Perth grand final would also demonstrate he’s capable of helping to bring major events to his home city.
If it all works out, the timing is exquisite for Basil. The City of Perth election day is October 17 — the very day of the AFL grand final. Some campaign platform!
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Voice’s four endings
There’s an amusing postscript to Sunday night’s announcement of the winner of Nine’s The Voice, starring local coaches Delta Goodrem and Guy Sebastian.
With COVID forcing the normally live grand finale to be pre-recorded, we hear the network faced some unprecedented logistical challenges.
Diary hears Nine had to film four alternative endings, in which each of the finalists hammed it up for the cameras with their best versions of a pre-vote victory dance to celebrate their “win”.
But only one ending was used. The real winner remained a mystery until viewer voting closed on Sunday, after the finalists’ performances had screened.
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The New ‘Woke’ Times
The newsroom of The New York Times seems about as united as The Age’s right now, after opinion writer Bari Weiss shook things up last week with a furious 1500-word resignation letter that accused the paper of making Twitter its “ultimate editor”.
Surprisingly, the NYT’s own readers were some of its harshest critics after Weiss’s letter was released. One published NYT letter, from a reader who identified as a “left-leaning centrist”, said that he felt “elation” that Weiss called the paper out on its “new toxic woke culture”.
“You’ve handed the keys to America’s greatest paper to a strident, new orthodoxy that will not tolerate intellectual diversity. God, how sad.”
He went on to conclude: “I never thought I’d turn to The American Conservative for comfort, but at least it has the guts to publish controversial opinions that run counter to conservative orthodoxy. I used to get that from The Times.”
Unsurprisingly, bitter critic Donald Trump joined the pile-on, claiming the NYT was “under siege … People are fleeing, a total mess!” Even USA Today said the Times now seemed like “a middle school run by the Mean Girls crowd”. But the NYT did have its share of public supporters. Former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson said: “The idea that The New York Times is edited by a cabal of left-wing journalists is just not true at all.”
Meanwhile, the New York Daily News’s Ross Rosenfield attacked Weiss, accusing her of having “a fine whine”, and advising her: “If you don’t like what people say about you on Twitter, here’s a crazy idea: Don’t use Twitter.”
Lattouf ‘pushed back’ on ABC social media edict
The fill-in radio host refused an ABC management request to stop posting on social media during her week-long stint after she was informed of complaints from listeners about her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
New set, new host … but not much has changed at the ABC’s Media Watch
Paul Barry’s successor Linton Besser signalled that, as it has in the past, MediaWatch will continue to attempt to keep journalists contained within Green Left ideological guard rails.