ABC production preserved, after a fashion
Nick Xenophon’s bill to amend the ABC charter to protect local content may have failed, but the last-ditch attempt by the independent South Australian senator to save TV production in his state will have a lasting impact. Late last year the local content bill was referred to a Senate committee, which tabled its report after parliament rose at the end of March.
Along with the committee’s recommendation that the bill not be passed was an expression of concern about the fate of the Adelaide TV production unit’s vast archive of film material. The committee wrote: “This includes interviews with world war one diggers and sporting identities. The committee considers that this material must be comprehensively catalogued before being transferred to ABC Sydney. This would not only be more efficient, but the committee also believes it would be detrimental for this material not to be archived by those people who were involved in creating the material and have a complete understanding of its significance. The committee will write to the ABC seeking a short extension of time for the relevant staff to undertake archiving activities.”
Now it is passing strange that the senators would directly interfere with the ABC’s redundancy process, so we asked around to see why the paragraphs were included in the report. It turns out an ABC manager in Adelaide had turned down a heartfelt request from a veteran ABC TV producer – who was about to be made redundant when the unit closed – for four weeks’ grace to review and catalogue 700 Betacam tapes of precious state memories he had filmed. He said only he knew what was on the tapes and he was the best person to sort them out before they could be sent to the relevant institutions.
When the ABC bureaucracy turned down his plea – instructing him to just box them up and ship them to Sydney – the Community and Public Sector Union got involved and asked ABC management to reconsider. The CPSU argued the tapes needed to be organised before they could be provided to the Bradman museum in Bowral, the Adelaide RSL and the State Library of South Australia. The senators had also been made aware of the plight of the producer and, under pressure from the committee and the union, the ABC overturned the decision at the 11th hour. On 31 March they granted the producer two weeks (not four, as requested) to complete the task. The material includes more than 160 interviews with the luminaries of world cricket which the Bradman museum has expressed an interest in.
Hark, the Labor Herald has an editor
Just short of a year after Labor’s national secretary, George Wright, called for supporters to fund “Labor’s own Crikey”, a news service called the Labor Herald to bypass the mainstream media, the party has appointed an editor. Alex Brooks, formerly the editor-in-chief of Kidspot, told Weekly Beast the digital masthead would launch in July and had a staff of just two.
“Like all good digital content brands, the Labor Herald will focus on collaborating with and engaging an audience on whatever device or platform they choose to use (it doesn’t really matter whether it’s email, website, video or social media). At this stage I have very grand visions, of course, but the Labor Herald aspires to be more of an ideas playground for Labor supporters than merely a political mouthpiece. Think Bleacher report rather than Washington Post, and you might get an idea of what I’m trying to articulate.” For the record, the Bleacher report is a US sports site.
The Checkout treads a Fin line
The ABC’s surprise hit show The Checkout returns to TV on Thursday night with a story about what rights you have when you buy a car that is a lemon. The story threw up a curious tale of a paid print ad that the Australian Financial Review refused to run. Presenter Craig Reucassel (of Chaser fame) tells the story of Aston Wood, who found numerous faults with the Jeep he bought and decided to take on the big car company with a public campaign “Destroy My Jeep” and a Kickstarter campaign. This put Wood on a collision course with Jeep.
At one stage the company demanded that Wood apologise with a paid advertisement in the Fin Review. Reucassel told Weekly Beast he thought it would be fun to place the ad on Wood’s behalf and the art work was createdand sent to Fairfax Media. But the ad department refused to run it. Reucassel said he wasn’t surprised the paper turned it down, but he was surprised that it then contacted Jeep and told them about it. “They weighed up the future ad revenue from The Checkout against the further ad revenue from Jeep and made their decision,” he said.
News Corp Australia settles over Andrew Bolt asylum-seeker article
Just before Easter, News Corp Australia reached a confidential settlement with the human rights lawyer George Newhouse over an allegedly defamatory article by its star columnist and host of Ten’s The Bolt Report, Andrew Bolt. The terms are confidential, but they included an order that the article be taken down and the company pay Newhouse’s costs. Newhouse sued Bolt over his July 2014 piece “Fearmonger’s Hateful Fraud” published in the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph and the Courier-Mail. Bolt had written of commentators on asylum seekers being forcibly returned to Sri Lanka: “If a crime against morality has been committed, it is surely this: that so many atrocity mongers and moral posers have inflicted upon us a gigantic fraud.”
The judge found that the imputation that Newhouse was a liar was capable of arising. After the settlement was reached, Newhouse said his reputation had been vindicated. “All I was doing was standing up for the little man,” he said. “I assisted a group of extraordinarily vulnerable men, women and children to make sure that they received fair treatment by the Australian government and that they were not sent back to harm.” A News Corp spokesman said: “The matter has settled and therefore did not proceed to trial so there was no judicial determination of the issues in dispute.”
