A supreme court justice has condemned the response of News Corp and Seven West Media to a female employee who quit News Life Media to join Seven’s magazine division in September last year.
In response to News’s attempt to thwart the woman’s efforts to start her new job, Justice Robert McDougall said: “This litigation presents the less than edifying spectacle of two giant media organisations fighting over the services of an unfortunate young woman, whose only mistakes were to work for one, and to seek to work for the other.”
When Evadne Janeke told her bosses at News she was resigning to join Pacific Magazines, they told her to pack up her desk and leave immediately. She spent eight weeks on gardening leave and then the company took her to court to extend her restraint period, arguing she was in possession of confidential information. Rejecting the submission, the judge said the confidentiality claims were “greatly” overstated. “The first point to make is that I am far from satisfied, on the evidence as a whole, that much of the material to which Ms Janeke was exposed in the course of her employment was confidential so as to warrant protection by a covenant in restraint of trade.”
Seven executive Bruce McWilliam, who was a key figure in the other legal dispute at Seven involving Amber Harrison who had an affair with Seven CEO Tim Worner, was described as “pugnacious” and “did little to calm the dispute that was brewing”.
McDougall said News Life Media’s correspondence to Janeke was “wrong, incorrect and misleading” and that it was “quite extraordinary that someone describing herself as a ‘senior HR business partner’ should so misstate the effect of a very important clause in a contract of employment”.
But it was News’s chief digital officer Julian Delany who was on the receiving end of McDougall’s sternest words. He said News overstated the confidential nature of the material to which Janeke was exposed, and that Delany “conceded in the course of their cross-examinations, that many of the ‘insights’ that were claimed to be confidential were either no more than common sense or were matters that would be known to any competent media practitioner in Australia in the 21st century.
“I add that some of the submissions put for NLM [News Life Media] veered perilously close to suggesting that Ms Janeke should be restrained from using her own know-how: know-how that she had built up before she was employed by NLM, and developed during her employment with NLM.”
ABC puts foot in it
The buzzwords at the national broadcaster under Michelle Guthrie are diversity and digital. In an email to staff on her first official day as managing director, Guthrie said the ABC must “extend our reach and our relevance into areas where we are under-represented”, which “means more diversity in both our staff and our content”. The ABC continues to trim from traditional broadcasting areas to fund digital. So it comes as no surprise that Radio National, under pressure to attract a younger and more diverse audience, is producing Buzzfeed-style videos that can be shared on Facebook and other platforms. This week a video surfaced which was designed to celebrate Chinese lunar new year, called “Trying chicken feet for the first time”. It featured RN staffers tucking into the Chinese delicacy, mostly with some trepidation: “It looks a bit like a baby’s hand, said one young man. “If the baby’s dad was a lizard”. Much mirth about eating something so “weird” ensued.
Literary magazine Overland has published a response titled “Chicken feet with a side of racism” which argues the video is off-colour. “I guess it was a nod to diversity that the group included a mix of gender and ethnic backgrounds, but the ABC Radio National team either couldn’t or didn’t want to find even one person of Chinese heritage to explain to viewers what phoenix talons are and how to eat them,” Diana Tung wrote. “Instead, they went with the cheap way of generating social media engagement by creating a sensationalist video about Chinese culture for an audience that markedly excluded the very community it was talking about … What I see playing out is the embodiment of white privilege by a powerful media institution in having the ability to pass judgments on the palatability of other people’s cuisines and culture, to define what is ‘normal’, and to have a national platform to broadcast these pronouncements.”
Daily Tele migrates south
The Daily Telegraph appeared to revel in labelling migrants from the Middle East dole bludgers in a front-page story on Wednesday. The “exclusive” report by Natasha Bita said Middle Eastern migrants were “piling on to the dole queue” and were “three times more likely than European or Asian immigrants to be out of work in the first five years of settlement”. “And their 33% jobless rate is six times higher than the national average.”
The reason for the higher unemployment rates was buried in the story, where an expert explained that most Middle Eastern migrants were refugees and arrived without English language skills which made it almost impossible to find work.
But photographs of women wearing the niqab entering Centrelink offices, along with the headline “How work shy migrants are quite happy to take it … Middle Easy” made it clear the Tele was portraying them as lazy dole bludgers.
Hoping for Sky-high numbers
Sky News is now wholly owned by News Corp, so we can expect more cross-promotional stories in the Murdoch papers like this “exclusive” story on what Sky has planned for star broadcasters David Speers, Paul Murray, Keiran Gilbert and Caroline Marcus this year. The Daily Telegraph breathlessly reported that the Sky team would spend more time on the road to listen and learn from voters in the regions. Sky would do well to place more of these exclusives in the News Corp tabloids because the ratings for many of the shows are dangerously low. Paul Murray Live – Monday to Thursday at 9pm – for example attracts tiny numbers. According to official OzTam ratings, Murray had 33,000 viewers in the five capital cities on Monday; 35,000 on Tuesday and 25,000 on Wednesday. In Perth the ratings came up zero, which is what happens when the sample is too tiny to count.
Back from the wilderness
Sometimes reality show contestants, bored and starving in the jungle, reveal information that some people would rather did not get out. And so it is with I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! contestant Tziporah Malkah. The former fiancée of James Packer, Kate Fischer, now known as Tziporah Malkah, has dropped a few bombshells on the Channel Ten reality show this week and in pre-recorded interviews with Ten interviews. Malkah has said she felt “muzzled” and “intimidated” by her billionaire boyfriend during their relationship in the 1990s and that contrary to receiving a reported $10m from the former media mogul he gave her a $1m apartment in Bondi and a few hundred thousands dollars. She later ended up homeless and living in a women’s shelter in Melbourne.
Malkah also revealed that her relationship with her mother, NSW Liberal minister Pru Goward, has deteriorated so much that she no longer is in contact with her and that she has suffered from an eating disorder since the age of eight when Goward split from her father. None of these stories would have surfaced had Woman’s Day not published unflattering photos of the former model in a bed sheet collecting the mail. Since those fat shaming stories, Malkah has embraced her renewed celebrity and is now settling old scores.
New year, new routine
Next Monday is the day all your ABC news shows return, albeit with a few changes. Lateline is back without Tony Jones or Emma Alberici who are both taking extended leave. Sydney’s weekend newsreader Jeremy Fernandez will host Monday to Thursday with political correspondent David Lipson and senior reporter Matt Wordsworth sharing presenting duties on Friday nights. Alberici returns on 1 May and Jones will only appear on Q&A this year because he is writing a book.
