One network’s pain is a rival network’s joy. Seven’s Sunday Night program has filmed an exclusive interview with Adam Whittington, the bloke who organised for Sally Faulkner’s children to be abducted from a street in Beirut after they were taken to Lebanon by their father. The doomed abduction – organised with the help of Channel Nine – ended up with Faulkner, Whittington and two of his colleagues, the 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown and three other Nine crew members being jailed in Beirut on kidnapping charges. The head of Child Abduction Recovery International, Whittington was released from jail in July, months after the 60 Minutes crew made it out, and he is really angry about being left behind by the network.
Cue scenes with Whittington strolling on a Gold Coast beach, after being reunited with his family. But Seven was quick to dispel the notion that any chequebook journalism was involved, saying: “Sunday Night made no payment to Mr Whittington, his family or any other party for the interview. The fact that he wasn’t paid will be disclosed in the program.” Nine revealed in its financial results that the 60 Minutes incident along with two other court cases had cost the network an additional $7m in legal fees.
There’s no such thing as a free launch
BuzzFeed’s political editor, Mark Di Stefano, thought he was a very lucky first-time author when the politician he chose weeks ago to launch his book, the Labor senator Sam Dastyari, became the man of the moment and his launch was suddenly attracting more attention than it deserved. On the morning of the unveiling of Di Stefano’s campaign diary, What a Time to Be Alive: That and Other Lies of the 2016 Campaign, Dastyari spoilt the party by pulling out. He was replaced by the Labor MP Terri Butler at the last minute. But Butler, who won Kevin Rudd’s old seat of Griffith at the election, was so funny the crowd soon forgot all about Dastyari. BuzzFeed Australia’s editor, Simon Crerar, revealed that when Di Stefano was the ABC’s Darwin reporter he applied for a job at BuzzFeed by sending through his CV with a list of “nine reasons why you should hire me”.
Triple J, aka the decline of western civilisation
In other publishing news, the new book by the Australian’s former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell will be launched by Malcolm Turnbull in Sydney this month. If it’s anything as entertaining as his Monday media columns we can’t wait to grab a copy. This week’s column in the Oz explored Mitchell’s theory that Triple J is to blame for everything that is wrong with the media today, like young reporters having no corporate memory and the legacy of the “skinny-tie political chic” of Triple J alumni Steve Cannane, Angela Catterns, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, Wil Anderson, Roy and HG and Robbie Buck. The Lateline host Tony Jones didn’t work at Triple J, Mitchell says, but he is still annoying because he affects a “Triple J kind of radical chic”. Mitchell: “Like [Chris] Kenny, I blame the ABC. In my view, the ABC has been slowly taken over from the inside, culturally at least, by Triple J. The anti-establishment ethos of the ABC’s home of alternative music eventually infiltrated television and radio.”
All mouth
In his book, which we hear was dictated rather than typed, Mitchell is very keen to paint himself at the centre of national life, sharing his tales of dealing with the powerful elites while editing newspapers for Rupert Murdoch, who is, of course, pictured on the front of the book, Making Headlines.
Male, pale and stale
It would have to be one of the ABC’s strangest commissions, a program that gives Andrew Bolt a platform to argue against recognition for Indigenous Australia. The one-off documentary, Recognition: Yes or No?, which also stars the new Labor MP Linda Burney arguing in favour of recognition, will screen on the ABC on 20 September. But Aunty’s star recruit from the Murdoch empire is already talking down the show, implying it is stale in comparison with Sky News programs which are made on the smell of an oily rag but are live and dynamic. “I did a show for the ABC,” Bolt said on stage at the Astra pay TV conference in Sydney this week. “We stopped filming in January. It was finished and edited in July and it will be on air in a few weeks. You think, where is the freshness?”
Stop me if think you’ve heard this one before
Warming to his theme, Bolt then went on to trash another ABC show, Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders, on which he used to feature before picking up his own TV show The Bolt Report. “I was [on Insiders] for 10 years as the token guy on the far right of the screen. Now they have dropped all pretence of being balanced – you will get a show with four people on the left agreeing with each other. Don’t think you will find that on our shows. You have a broad range of opinions and so do I. I don’t think anyone could say, fairly, the other side is excluded from the argument. That is my beef with the ABC. We don’t have a law saying we have to be balanced [at Sky News] – they do, but they are not.”
Cool … for cats
Do you remember all those ads on Channel Seven while you were watching the Olympics: “After the Olympics on 7”? Well the strategy behind laying down $170m for the rights to the Olympics through to the 2020s was that showing the Olympic games lends exposure to your programs and high ratings and advertising revenue will flow.
Unfortunately for Seven, The Durrells – “the biggest new series since Downton Abbey” – and Zumbo’s Just Desserts have failed to sustain interest. After a good start Zumbo has bounced around, dropping to just 657,000 on Monday and then back up to 794,000 on Wednesday. The Durrells is no Downton Abbey after all and dipped below 600,000 for the first time, with just 523,000 viewers this week. The home-grown drama 800 Words, which was heavily promoted during the Olympics too, has also fallen to 793,000 this week, well behind the figures it enjoyed in season one.
But living up to its name for screening cutting-edge television, Seven has two upcoming shows you can look forward to this month: All-New CATS MAKE YOU LOL 3 next Thursday followed by DOGS MAKE YOU LOL 3 the week after.
