The former editor-in-chief of the Australian Chris Mitchell was given a six-figure pay rise in 2012 after telling Rupert Murdoch to choose between him and then CEO Kim Williams who he believed was “killing off” the broadsheet with his digital first strategy.
According to a report in the Australian, in his memoir – Making Headlines – Mitchell writes that Murdoch received his ultimatum in an email and then called him to say: “I have told Kim you will be buying him lunch tomorrow, and he is to sit there for two hours and let you explain your position. No arguments. Just listen. Oh, and he will be giving you a decent pay rise.”
Mitchell, who retired as editor-in-chief at the end of 2015 and now has a weekly media column, says he met Williams at a Sydney restaurant where he was handed a letter confirming a pay rise of at least $100,000.
“I decided to play the trump card newspaper editors sometimes need to play: resignation,” Mitchell says in the book to be published by MUP on Thursday.
“I would offer to leave the business on the same basis as a couple of the tabloid editors had departed. I would offer to take a redundancy. This would bring my differences with Williams to a head.”
Murdoch is quoted in Making Headlines making disparaging remarks about Williams: “Chris, tell me why that man Kim was in such a hurry to get to the bottom of the toilet before [Fairfax Media CEO] Greg Hywood gets there? I told him he had three or four years to sort things out. What the hell was the race about?’”
Williams, who is now chair of the Copyright Agency, declined to comment on the claims. But in 2013 he said News Corp Australia was a company run along feudal lines which was “vaingloriously ignoring the facts” about the digital future of news.
Mitchell’s memoir also controversially reveals private conversations he had with former prime ministers – in the face of journalistic convention which requires reporters to keep confidences.
His decision to disclose the contents of private conversations contrasts with his vehement criticism of three political journalists, then Bulletin writer Paul Daley, the Age’s Tony Wright the ABC’s Michael Brissenden, over their reporting of a dinner with Peter Costello in 2005.
Brissenden reported Costello had said he would “destroy” John Howard’s leadership if he did not stand aside from the prime ministership midway through his third term.
Under Mitchell the Australian was highly critical of Brissenden, who has always maintained he did not betray a confidence because the story of Costello’s leadership aspirations “was given willingly by the treasurer himself”.
“Brissenden broke the journalist’s code of ethics and reported comments by Peter Costello which were made to him off the record,” the paper said in an editorial in 2007.
In May, Mitchell once again criticised Brissenden in his media column, claiming he “once betrayed a confidential lunch [sic] with Costello”.
But more than 10 years after the Costello dinner, the former editor has revealed dozens of private conversations with politicians, including during social events at his home in Manly.
Then opposition leader Tony Abbott mocked prime minister Gillard’s figure in front of fellow dinner guests, journalists Greg Sheridan and Ross Fitzgerald, Mitchell claims, according to an extract published in the Weekend Australian.
“Tony even stood up in the middle of dessert to ape Julia Gillard’s walk for us all in the middle of a discussion about Germaine Greer’s Q&A critique of the Gillard derriere,” he writes.
But Mitchell claims he personally liked Australia’s first female prime minister and thought she was very attractive. “Apart from her obvious intelligence and easy manner, I found her engaging and pleasant company,” he said in an extract published by the Sunday Telegraph. “After she became prime minister many Gillard critics did make dreadfully sexist remarks about her, but I found her an honest and thoughtful leader of opposition business in the House at that time. She also seemed to me to be overtly attractive and feminine in person.”
In another anecdote Mitchell discloses Abbott’s attitude towards the former treasurer Joe Hockey.
Mitchell to Abbott: “I like Joe, but he is lazy. A big roly-poly bloke who manages to gain weight after having his stomach stapled needs to be giving money away.”
Abbott: “When I was captain-coaching the Sydney Uni seconds, I would never select him for the run-on team … Joe loves his food. He loves his family. He would be at a big family dinner every Friday night. He would have a big breakfast. He would sleep in. He would be late to the game. I got to select the run-on team, and I always had all those things in the back of my mind.”
But it is Kevin Rudd who is singled out as being particularly close to the conservative newspaper and Mitchell says the relationship between the two Queenslanders benefited both parties: the paper got “lots of good stories” and Rudd increased his profile.
Mitchell revealed that in private conversations Rudd forgave him for publishing a highly damaging piece about his prime-ministerial style, Captain Chaos by John Lyons, in 2008.
“[Rudd] said he now realised that I had done what I did for the right reasons and was trying, in my own way, to give him a message his colleagues were too weak to give him,” he writes.
Mitchell says Rudd once asked him to get Rupert Murdoch to personally support him for the job of secretary general of the UN and in an angry mood once threatened him with a media inquiry in Australia after the phone-hacking scandal broke in Britain.
“Rudd said he ‘thought there was something to be said for [UK Labour MP Tim] Watson’s advice to him’ for an Australian version of what would be the Leveson inquiry in Britain,” Mitchell writes. “Only this would not be into general media practices ‘but into the relationship between my paper and him’.”
