An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday declared the ABC was “an indulgence we can no longer afford” and that with the proliferation of content now available on the internet a public broadcaster was no longer needed. “YouTube frequenters will know that there are high-quality news and panel shows that focus on almost any topic imaginable, no matter how niche,” argued the writer, Harry Stutchbury. The existence of all that random content on YouTube may be exactly why we need the ABC, but no matter.
He voted on the very issue he writes about. The vote was in a public forum, open to media, not the privacy of a ballot box. It's directly relevant to what he wrote.
— David Crowe (@CroweDM) June 19, 2018
Publication of the column, which advocated for the privatisation of the ABC, was not very well received by legacy SMH staff, who fear the paper may be moving more to the right under the executive group editor, James Chessell. Chessell, along with the Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston, is a former media adviser to the former Liberal minister Joe Hockey, who is now Australia’s US ambassador.
The author of the piece is the president of the New South Wales Young Liberals, and he voted in favour of the privatisation motion at the weekend. Harry is also the son of the editor-in-chief of the AFR, Michael Stutchbury. Fairfax insists Stutch Sr had nothing to do with Stutch Jr getting published in a Fairfax paper. But the Stutchbury dynasty must think alike because on the very same day Harry’s piece appeared the AFR published an editorial, Lies about the ABC, saying the $84m cut was “trivial” and, anyway, we couldn’t afford two public broadcasters in Australia.
“[The ABC] should fully expect an inquiry into competitive neutrality – a level playing field between publicly funded and private media – when it splashes taxpayer cash so lavishly to crowd commercial rivals out of news, comment, and video streaming. And surely there are no grounds for not just one public broadcaster – but two,” the AFR said.
After the SMH chief political correspondent, David Crowe, pointed out that Stutch Jr had not disclosed he had personally voted for privatisation at the conference, the SMH added a note to the foot of the article.
Harry Stutchbury has added to his article today to confirm he was one of the delegates who voted for the motion to sell the ABC. https://t.co/2ojXfvPGk5
— David Crowe (@CroweDM) June 19, 2018
The Optus pot calling the kettle black
It couldn’t really have gone any worse for Optus as its World Cup streaming offering faltered and SBS had to step up and broadcast the matches on free-to-air TV. But that was lost on the person behind the Optus Sport Twitter account. @OptusSport was quick to point a finger at SBS when it had a typo in its tweet about an upcoming game. All class, Optus.
Good grief.
— Alistair Hogg (@alistairjhogg) June 18, 2018
Just hours after handing their #WorldCup coverage over to another network due to broadcast delivery issues, Optus is throwing petty shade on Twitter (or admin forgot to switch to their burner) 🤔 pic.twitter.com/4Q5YFIhxd6
When the personal goes public
The News Corp journalist Brontë Coy was very polite in her response to a job offer from a rival publication this week. “Thank you for the offer, especially with it being upgraded, but I am going to stay here at news.com.au,” Coy wrote to her suitor. “The bosses here have been (surprisingly) very generous with coming back with a counter offer so I’ll stay where I am.” It was a win-win situation for the young reporter who scored a pay rise out of a job offer. But what Coy realised too late was that she had somehow cut and paste her polite email into the copy of an article which she had published on news.com.au. The article about Lady Kitty Spencer, the niece of the late Princess Diana, suddenly veered from talking about her Dolce & Gabbana and Bulgari wardrobe into “I wanted to get back to you with an answer” . Coy did not respond to anyone who pointed out her blunder on Twitter and declined to comment.
When you don't check your work before posting... @brontecoy was this supposed to be on the article? pic.twitter.com/rFWL5vcMqO
— Sam Bucco (@sam_b_dobie) June 18, 2018
Mail in breach
When the Daily Mail happened to have a reporter on the scene after a suicide at a Sydney railway station, they took full advantage of the situation, perhaps forgetting there were specific standards in place for the reporting of suicide.
According to the Australian Press Council, which found the publication in breach of several standards, it did not try to contact appropriate relatives or close friends for consent before publishing photographs and details about the tragedy. The Mail argued that the story was in the public interest because the transport system was disrupted at peak hour. “Although the council accepts that reporting on the public transport disruption was in the public interest, this public interest could have been served without reporting the incident as an attempted suicide,” the adjudication said. The Mail also breached standards by reporting the method of the attempted suicide and using explicit language to describe the accident and its aftermath in the headlines, text, captions and photographs.
Weekly wins in Joyce joust
In the battle of the political media interviews it was Sunday Night with Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion 0 and Australian Women’s Weekly with Natalie Joyce 1. The Weekly didn’t have to fork out $150,000 for an interview like Seven did but they ended up with the juiciest content. In her unpaid interview, Natalie dished the dirt that Barnaby and Vikki had kept quiet about. Vikki wouldn’t say what Natalie had said to her when she confronted the former staffer over her affair with her husband: “I can’t repeat the words on TV,” Vikki told Sunday Night’s Alex Cullen.
Natalie didn’t hold back. “I was very measured,” Natalie told the women’s magazine. “And made sure I didn’t raise my voice. She and Barney were smoking outside. He bolted when he saw me.
“I turned to her and said, ‘My husband is out of bounds, off-limits, he’s a married man with four children,’ and then I called her a home-wrecking whore.” Natalie also disclosed that Sebastian was the name she and her husband had chosen together for if they ever had a son.
A great paper going up in smoke?
The ABC has had quite a week. As if the politics of privatisation weren’t bruising enough, staff were told the very building most of the staff are housed in in Sydney’s Ultimo does not meet safety standards for cladding. Although they’re not evacuating, staff do have to take precautions and they have to give up any bar fridges, toasters, microwave ovens and any other personal equipment which may cause a fire. The Australian’s notoriously under-moderated comments section published reader comments that joked about the ABC burning down. The Australian’s Twitter account apologised, saying the comments were published overnight.
It’s not the first time the ABC has had to complain about highly offensive comments being published in the Oz. The comments moderation has been outsourced and is very lax. The apology gave some senior journalists a chance to call the Oz out for their constant attacks on the ABC. The former Oz writer George Megalogenis was joined by the ABC 7.30 presenter Leigh Sales in asking the Murdoch paper to drop the vendettas and return to being a great newspaper.
Apology accepted (as an ABC contributor). But those reader comments were no better or worse than what some of your senior commentators write/tweet about the ABC on a daily basis. Time to drop the vendetta and return to the national affairs journalism that made my old paper great. https://t.co/eR25n3kLTj
— George Megalogenis (@GMegalogenis) June 21, 2018
Once more unto the breach
But wait, there was more ABC drama this week. There was an IT security incident when one of the ABC’s vendors, PageUp, a company that provides recruitment software services, suffered a data breach. Anyone who applied for a job at the ABC may have had their personal information including name, street address, email address and telephone number, exposed.
“Additionally, biographical details including gender, date of birth, maiden name (if applicable), nationality and whether the applicant was a local resident at the time of the application may be affected.” Just about the only information which wasn’t accessed was résumés.
• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78; Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
