The guilty verdict this week for former detectives Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara for murdering 20-year-old university student Jamie Gao has opened the door to several media projects which were just waiting for the wheels of justice to turn. First off the ranks was Channel Nine which broadcast a 60 Minutes special on Wednesday night. Titled Good Cop Bad Cop, it didn’t hold back, saying Rogerson was “evil beyond belief” and that he was implicated in other murders. On Monday Seven News will screen a special on Rogerson, The Devil You Know, which is largely a reconstruction of a crime captured in part so vividly on CCTV.
But the project the industry has been waiting for is the sequel to ABC TV drama Blue Murder, starring Richard Roxburgh as Rogerson.
Blue Murder was made 20 years ago but was unable to air in NSW for six years for legal reasons. Now prolific producer John Edwards (Offspring, Puberty Blues, The Beautiful Lie) is filming a sequel, The High Road, with Roxburgh again portraying the policeman’s life of crime.
One media identity who is lying low after Rogerson’s verdict is broadcaster Alan Jones, who inexplicably launched a book written by Rogerson in 2009 as well as interviewing him for his top-rating show.
Coffs Coast Advocate’s ‘gotcha moment’
The Coffs Coast Advocate has accused former independent MP Rob Oakeshott of staging a hoax and tricking the Daily Telegraph into believing he was standing for parliament again. The curious editorial appeared after the Tele reported Oakeshott was “about to announce another crack at politics” and published a paparazzi shot of him mowing his lawn in Port Macquarie. The Coffs Advocate told readers Oakeshott was laying “a gotcha moment” on the Tele. “Rob’s stunned mullet look while mowing the lawn was priceless,” the Advocate reported. “We have all been there who wears their best behind the Victa?” The Advocate said it had checked with independent MP Tony Windsor and he backed up the theory that “Rob was having a bit of fun”.
Only it wasn’t a media set-up at all. Oakeshott is indeed contesting Cowper and the Tele story was correct. The Advocate removed the story without explanation and replaced it with an editorial, “Another Shott at Politics”. On his Facebook page Oakeshott posted the original article with the comment: “oh dear ... I hope Media Watch are kind if they see this. Hopefully all can laugh about it now ... It was really weird.”
But to add another twist to this tale, when Beast asked editor Matt Deans to comment on the odd editorial, he said he didn’t know anything about it.
Bill Leak’s cigarette cover-up
Not content with enraging some people with his politically incorrect cartoons for the Australian, Bill Leak told Beast he is now producing and selling his own “anti-pornography, anti-nanny state cigarette packet covers ... I started making them for my own personal use when the plain packaging laws came into effect in 2012 but I’m now getting them manufactured properly and am selling them online, through my website”, he told us. “I also find it incredible that so many of the people who regularly accuse me of causing offence with my cartoons don’t complain about the government requiring us all to look at pictures of dead bodies or gangrenous body parts every time someone takes a packet of smokes out of their pocket.” Leak says he is fighting back against humourless “offenderati” as well as the high tax on cigarettes.
All the news that’s fit to be paid for
Australia has been part of the global survey on news consumption led by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford for two years now. The Digital News Report found people are increasingly heading to social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for news, making it more difficult for publishers to attract and make money from readers.
Consumers are also very reluctant to pay for news, no English-speaking country surveyed having more than 10% of people willing to pay for news. While just 7% of people in the UK pay for news, Australia is relatively high with 10%. Increasing the challenge for publishers, ad-blocking software is becoming increasingly popular: 23% of Australians are using ad-blocking software, although the numbers are higher in, for example, Poland (38%) and Greece (36%).
The people who still buy a printed newspaper are now in a minority: 38% of respondents said they had paid for a printed newspaper in the past week. But even more worryingly for the industry, only 10% of people had paid for digital news in the past year. The report’s authors say “survey data has consistently shown that only a small minority in most countries is prepared to pay anything for online news”.
Briefcase of money too hot to handle
It’s well known that the TV networks like to copy each other if they have a good idea which rates well. But it would seem they sometimes scare each other off too. Channel Nine’s The Briefcase, which premieres on Monday, attracted criticism of poverty porn and exploitativeness before it had even gone to air.
The pitch: “What would you do with $100,000? Each week on The Briefcase we meet two families who, through no fault of their own, are facing crippling financial troubles. They have agreed to tell their stories about how they struggle to make ends meet. But how will they react when a briefcase containing $100,000 in cash lands on their doorstep? With the briefcase comes a huge decision. Will they keep all the money? Share it? Or give it all away to the other family who they’ve never met?”
The question of ethics was raised because people are made to choose between helping themselves or someone else who is in an equally tough situation.
Perhaps scared off by the outcry over The Briefcase, Seven has quietly dropped a similar show it announced at a program launch last year, The Day the Cash Came. Based on a UK format, The Day the Cash Came furnished a family with a stash of money and then followed them around to see if they wasted it.
