Fairfax Media may have decided it can do without many in its stable of brilliant cartoonists and illustrators, but one politician has seen an opportunity to make use of one of their considerable talents.
Earlier this month Fairfax cuts to editorial staff meant an SMH illustrator for the past 28 years, Rocco Fazzari, the Age’s John Spooner and the Fin’s Rod Clement all took redundancy packages. Beast can reveal that independent senator Nick Xenophon has hired Fazzari to make animated videos for his campaign to use on social media.
Last week Fazzari wrote of the way he became a “slow-moving target in the crosshairs of management”.
“More are sadly bound to follow, as clickbait fever runs amok and digital metrics fail to register the beauty of a quirky piece of line work or the cleverness of a metaphor.”
Senior 60 Minutes producer quits
As we await the release of the internal review of Nine’s 60 Minutes and the botched Beirut child abduction incident we can reveal one senior producer has already left the Channel Nine program.
The award-winning producer Mary Ann Jolley has spent most of her career at the ABC, working for Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners and picking up three Walkley awards along the way for outstanding journalism.
She decided to make the jump to the commercial world this year and took a job as a producer with 60 Minutes, working mainly with reporter Ross Coulthart on international stories.
But just months into the job Jolley quit and has gone back to freelancing, mainly for al-Jazeera. Sources say she found the difference in cultures and ethics between the ABC and the world of tabloid TV too hard to stomach. And that was before the Beirut incident blew up.
Peter Dutton cops a pasting
Australia’s asylum seeker policies have made the New York Times again, this time in an opinion piece. Roger Cohen, visiting Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival to discuss Europe in crisis, took the opportunity to discuss our offshore processing policy.
“Australian treatment of refugees trying to reach this vast, thinly populated country by boat follows textbook rules for the administering of cruelty,” he wrote. “It begins with the anodyne name for the procedures – ‘offshore processing’ – as if these desperate human beings were just an accumulation of data.”
Cohen took on the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, accusing him of playing to racist elements in society.
“This country’s history includes the long and unhappy chapter of its white Australia policy under which a vast land mass was portrayed as under threat of invasion by uncivilised ‘natives’ from across Asia,” he wrote. “Politicians like Dutton are playing scurrilously on similar fears.”
When Dutton responded, telling a journalist Cohen should stick to US immigration matters and Australia’s policy was successful in securing its borders, Cohen came back with more.
“With Mr Dutton’s permission, I’ll write about the subjects I choose. A policy that destroys human lives – men, women and children – as a form of cynical deterrence is no ‘success’. In fact it is shameful.”
And my response to Mr. Dutton @PeterDutton_MP pic.twitter.com/CsfBlbtb0r
— Roger Cohen (@NYTimesCohen) May 26, 2016
Not giving up his day job
After New Matilda’s publisher and editor, Chris Graham, failed to sell his house to raise money to keep New Matilda in operation, he decided to raise funds in a more conventional manner. He has taken a temporary position as general manager of the National Indigenous Radio Service.
Graham will be based in Brisbane for six months to lead a major revamp of the radio service, which has one of the largest radio footprints in the world and provides 15 news bulletins a day to communities which received other news.
Graham wrote in a fundraising plea he won’t give up his day job: “As for me personally, we’re still not pulling in enough to pay me a wage as well, so I’ve taken on some temporary work in Brisbane to keep the debt collectors at bay. I’ll still be working on NM every day, but it will be a labour of love largely performed at night (yes, I know how that sounds … That’s just a baseless rumour).”
Don’t let opinion get in the way of facts
The chair of the Australian Press Council, Professor David Weisbrot, has written to the editors of Australia’s news organisations strongly suggesting they adhere to the guideline on the responsible reporting of elections. In essence the council says it’s OK to advocate for one political side or the other but not to blur the distinction between news and opinion.
“The council upholds the right of a newspaper to have its own political position; to accept certain beliefs and policies and to reject others; and to favour the election of one party and to oppose the election of another,” Weisbrot said. “However, the council has emphasised strongly that newspapers that profess to inform the community about its political and social affairs are under an obligation to present to the public a reasonably comprehensive and accurate account of public issues.
“As a result, the council believes that it is essential that a clear distinction be drawn between reporting the facts and stating opinion. A paper’s editorial viewpoints and its advocacy of them must be kept separate from its news columns.”
So newspapers can run any opinion they like – even Mark Latham talking about Bill Shorten’s so-called man boobs – but the news should be straight. Noble as it is we reckon the press council’s guidance on such matters won’t change the way the more colourful members of the press, namely Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, report this election.
Could recent front pages featuring the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, be considered accurate accounts of public issues? “Bill Shorten and the money factory” on 24 May featured Shorten as Willy Wonka bribing voters with $200bn in giveaways, and “Wrong gear Bill” on 13 May reported that the real estate industry had declared war on Labor’s negative gearing policy.
Papering over the cracks
With Fairfax Media shifting ever closer to printing weekend papers only, it’s heartening to know that over at News Corp commitment to the printed product is as strong as ever.
The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Paul Whittaker, when relaunching the Weekend Australian Magazine last week, said the investment in the magazine sends a strong message to the market that “there is plenty of life left in print”.
