The Gold Coast Bulletin thought it had a big local scoop on its hands when an Arundel businessman told them he had witnessed an Underbelly-style murder in a carpark and was now “living in fear”. In a breathless report the man said he saw a group of bikies drag a lifeless man’s body into a car. “They dragged him out under the back of his arms … He was completely motionless,” he said.
“His legs kept falling out of the door while they were trying to put him in [the car]. They were parked outside when I arrived here. They were the only car in the carpark and they were all hovering around, very nervous and agitated. It looked odd straight away, so I sat in my car and took some photos. I watched them carry the body out of one car into the other one.
“Then they all had a big laugh. When I got out of my car I sort of eyeballed one of them and took my time opening up the door when they were putting the person into the back seat. It’s like they didn’t even see me and they were only 15 metres away – it was really weird.”
The only weird thing about it was that the witness saw something sinister when the reality was far less newsworthy. “It was just some guy with a broken toe who they were helping into a car,” a police spokeswoman said later. “They were just kind people.”
Mark Scott’s grand farewell
The outgoing ABC managing director, Mark Scott, will address the National Press Club on 24 February in what will be his final major speech before handing the reins to Google executive Michelle Guthrie in April. After 10 years heading the national broadcaster, during which he was forced to defend the ABC from attacks by the Coalition and News Corp Australia, Scott is expected to use the platform to throw a few bombs.
Autopsy of Abbott-Credlin years continues
Speaking of throwing bombs, the second of three books about Tony Abbott’s prime ministership will be published next week, after excerpts appear in the Australian Financial Review this weekend. Aaron Patrick’s Credlin & Co: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself details the relationship between the former prime minister and his chief of staff and its effect on the government. Published by Black Inc, Credlin & Co will hit the shelves a month ahead of Niki Savva’s book on the same topic. Savva’s The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government will be published by Penguin in March. Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott was published last year.
Patrick, the editor of the print edition of the Australian Financial Review, told Weekly Beast he had had absolutely no cooperation from Credlin or Abbott in researching his book despite numerous approaches. At the tail end of his research he thought he’d struck gold when Credlin’s husband Brian Loughnane, the former federal president of the Liberal Party, said he would be happy to talk to him, and he could even set aside three days for the interviews. Patrick was so taken aback by the offer he decided to tell Loughnane the title of the book. The offer was swiftly withdrawn.
Poachings and pay packets: the Australian mines Fairfax Media
The Australian is no fan of Fairfax Media – except when it comes to hiring journalists, at which point it becomes a rich source of talent. The News Corp paper loves to lure reporters over with a big cheque book, especially in its ongoing battle to overtake the Australian Financial Review as the nation’s best business paper. The former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell hired his son Jake Mitchell as the Australian’s media reporter just months before he retired, taking young Jake from the Australian Financial Review over to Holt Street late last year. Now Mitchell’s successor Paul Whittaker has also pulled out the chequebook, hiring Mitchell Jnr’s former colleague AFR reporter Will Glasgow to join the business team. Glasgow and Mitchell Jr joined the Fin as trainee reporters in 2012 but Glasgow’s pay packet on the Oz is said to be about $30,000 higher.
In the Weekend Australian it was reported that Glasgow would “work on a new business column at the Australian”, which has some people asking what will happen to the Australian’s current business columnist, Ben Butler, who writes Margin Call. The Oz poached Butler from Fairfax in 2014 in an attempt to take on Joe Aston’s well-read Rear Window column in the AFR. The Oz was so excited about Butler joining the paper the announcement was headlined: “New business columnist: Joe Aston watch out”, setting up huge expectations for the writer. Luckily for Glasgow they’ve taken a less enthusiastic tone in the announcement of his appointment, going for the more prosaic “New business columnist”.
Rita Panahi was there too!
No doubt most of you have seen Stan Grant’s stirring speech on racism by now. Filmed last October, it gained a new life after being posted on the Ethics Centre website to mark Australia Day. The speech has gone viral and is being compared to the greatest speeches of all time, but not everyone is happy about it. You see there was another speaker at the Ethics Centre that day – rightwing columnist for the Herald Sun Rita Panahi – and everyone seems to have forgotten her speech.
To remind us of Panahi’s eloquence the Hun posted both videos side by side on Monday alongside Panahi’s column in which she claimed it was her argument that the public backed not Grant’s. Quoting an Australia Day poll by the Institute of Public Affairs, Panahi said more than 90% of Australians said they were proud to be Australian and almost 80% agreed that the country had a history about which we could be proud. “No doubt the millions of BBC viewers around the world who might see the Ethics Centre debate will be misled into thinking Australia is a bigoted, backward place teeming with violent rednecks,” Panahi wrote. “The picture painted bears no resemblance to reality. I’ve often wondered why so many of the left are keen to paint this uniquely cohesive and inclusive society as some cesspit of racial hatred. This mass delusion manifests itself in a variety of ways, none of them helpful to the sufferer or the country they so desperately want to change.”
But in this battle of ideas Panahi was the clear winner – according to a Herald Sun poll anyway. The poll’s results were overwhelming: 83% of readers agreed with Rita Panahi and just 11% agreed with Stan Grant. A further 6% agreed with neither.
TV ratings system discovers the internet
The TV ratings system has finally caught up with the way many of us are watching network television these days. Next month OzTam will launch a digital TV ratings service called video player measurement (VPM) which will record audiences on internet-delivered TV, such as tablets, smartphones and computers. Channels Seven, Nine, Ten, SBS and ABC will all be measured, giving them a better picture of who is watching their shows outside their traditional broadcast on a television set. Catch-up TV recorded and watched on the big screen within a week of broadcast is already measured by OzTAM.
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