Steve Harris, who was commissioned by the ABC board to audit ABC journalism, has applied to be a director of the ABC board. When contacted by Weekly Beast, Harris confirmed he had applied for the board role while he was conducting his editorial review of the ABC’s coverage of the higher education reform bill. We asked Harris if the ABC board was aware he had applied to join its ranks and he said he had disclosed it. “It’s a separate issue,” Harris told Beast. “It’s nothing to do with the ABC.” Harris said he believed his report was entirely separate from his application and was not a conflict of interest. His application will be considered by the nominations panel which includes two Coalition-appointed members, the Australian’s columnist Janet Albrechtsen and a former Liberal minister, Neil Brown, both of whom have accused the ABC of left-wing bias.
Marks man
Harris’s review was largely favourable. The former newspaper editor studied 54 segments across TV, radio and online which were broadcast in March 2015 and found just two were “unsatisfactory”. The former News Corp and Fairfax Media executive was appointed by the ABC board in April to undertake the review, a paid consultancy for which he will receive about $30,000. The ABC chairman, Jim Spigelman, is the architect of these editorial audits which he hoped would improve accountability but which are rapidly becoming a stick to beat the ABC with. “As I indicated in launching this process, the ABC has a reputation for strong, original reporting on issues of public importance,” Spigelman said when he released the Harris report. “But good work can always be improved, and these reviews provide fresh perspectives and fresh opportunities to reflect, learn and develop. This report by respected journalist, editor and publisher Steve Harris is consistent with that thinking.”
Accentuate the negatives
You wouldn’t know the Harris report was largely favourable by reading the Australian on Tuesday. Its media editor, Sharri Markson, cherry-picked enough that was negative in the report to make a front page story about “Shallow lobbyists at home on ABC” and a big spread inside including an interview with Harris. The Oz accompanied it with an opinion piece by Harris taken straight from the review and an editorial: “All the slips, accidents and mistakes – miraculously – seem to favour green-left views or, at least, run counter to a right-of-centre world view,” the editorial said.
Penthouse to pavement
Penthouse, which has been published in this country for 36 years, is winding up its Australian-produced edition and folding it into the international magazine, Beast can reveal. The editor, Ash Westerman, and the communications director, Mark Pangallo, have both quit in recent weeks. The publisher, Damien Costas, who last year offered Schapelle Corby the “coveted cover-model position”, told Beast the two men were made redundant because it was “unfeasible” to continue paying local writers 80 cents a word to fill the magazine with local content. The soft porn magazine featured Geoffrey Edelsten’s then fiancee, Gabi Grecko, on the cover in March, but like all men’s magazines has struggled to break even in the age of freely available internet porn. The restructured Penthouse will employ an editor-at-large in Australia and will have some local content in the printed magazine and online, Costas said.
Sackcloth and Ashes
There was some measured commentary on Australia’s failure to hang on to the Ashes … and then there was the Courier-Mail’s. Whereas other News Corp papers – including its tabloid sister the Daily Telegraph – marked Michael Clarke’s retirement from international cricket with some sympathetic coverage amid the post-series inquests, the Brisbane paper’s splash on Monday screamed “From loner to loser”, pegged to allegations, hotly contested by Clarke, that he had become estranged from his team. On Tuesday the paper used a pic of Peter Siddle and David Warner with two soft-toy Minions from the movie series, with the headline “From bad to despicable” – geddit? Warner had anticipated the joke on Instagram: “Yes we did it!!! We finally won a Minion or three haha.” This was evidently not enough for the Queensland Taliban, invoking the little-known rule that no Australian cricketer is allowed to smile until they have regained the Ashes in 2017-18. Subsequent letters pages in the paper this week suggested plenty of the readers were unhappy with the paper’s tone. “Shame on your front-page headline ‘From loner to loser’. How much better and representative of Michael Clarke’s true contribution to Australian sport would a positive headline have been?” wrote one. “No thought about the impact on the man, who like all of us, is far from perfect but who, unlike most of us, has achieved at the highest level.”
And we thought our papers were tough ........ @couriermail #ashes #michaelclarke pic.twitter.com/SWuRnNYHjC
— Rachel Brookes (@RachelBrookesTV) August 9, 2015
Front page of The Courier-Mail pic.twitter.com/TDzc4tFl4c
— Christopher Dore (@wrongdorey) August 10, 2015
Splutter and splatter
With Rupert Murdoch flying into Sydney last Saturday we all expected his News Corp papers to be full of messages the boss would love to read. But even Beast was taken aback by the Australian’s media diary on Monday. Written this week by Darren Davidson and Michael Bodey, it was little more than a list of alleged failures of the media company’s rivals. Nine, which annoyed News Corp by tying up the NRL, had “revenue problems” and “program flops”, Daily Mail Australia was a “loss-making operation” and Fairfax Media’s joint venture with Huffpost Aus is “distinctly old hat” and “an awkward tie-up”. Media and marketing website Mumbrella, which has inexplicably become a major target of the broadsheet, was lambasted for following “gullibly and desperately” Fairfax executive Greg Hywood’s mantra that “digital is the future, and print is the trash heap”. Because print is doing so well of course. And of course the usual attacks on the ABC: Paul Barry’s Media Watch tenure had “raised serious questions about fairness and balance”, diary said. And of Joe Aston, rival columnist at the Australian Financial Review, the diary said that his “self-indulgent, angry ramblings” made them “worry about the state of his mental health”. Classy.
There’s no such thing as a paywall-free lunch
We couldn’t help but notice that none of the people who were slagged off in Media Diary were lucky enough to score an invitation to Murdoch’s “high calibre lunch” at Sydney’s harbourside Catalina restaurant. “Addressing the crowd with an upbeat message, Mr Murdoch praised [NSW premier] Mr [Mike] Baird, and told captains of industry to accept and embrace technological disruption, saying the ‘future has never looked better for all of us’,” Davidson dutifully reported. Guests included Lachlan Murdoch, Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, Commonwealth Bank chief Ian Narev, Qantas boss Alan Joyce, former Telstra chief David Thodey and everyone’s favourite News Corp columnists, Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt.
