Andrew Bolt must have been so pleased with himself. He had a witty little yarn about Aunty wasting taxpayers dollars on a silly overseas junket to follow up his commentary about how the ABC deserved to have its budget cut because it is “captured by the Left for the Left” and “now the ABC must pay”.
ABC cries poor and sends team to Rome for chats, Bolt posted on his Herald Sun blog on Thursday, along with various tweets, including one from Fact Check presenter Del Irani who fronted the winning entry.
Super duper proud of this fabulous @ABCFactCheck team, who’ve just won a major fact checking award (one of only three presented) at the international Global Fact V conference in Rome.... here’s the video & link to the winning entry: https://t.co/LUuHkjXhys #Awards pic.twitter.com/hE5NPvCV2q
— Del Irani (@del_irani) June 23, 2018
Bolt mocked the ABC for apparently flying “four fact-checkers to a conference in Rome. Money no object”.
“Smile and wave, guys! The ‘major award’ was for the ‘most absurd fact checked’ - how many crocodile deaths are recorded in Queensland each year. Money well spent in flying to Rome to collect an award so ‘major’, right?”
Ah, if only it was true. It would have made a great story. But Bolt’s fact-checking yarn wasn’t fact-checked before publication. According to the ABC, four people did attend the conference but the ABC didn’t pay for any of them. Senior ABC Fact Check researchers Sushi Das and Josh Gordon, creative content lead Devi Mallal and director Russell Skelton financed the trip through a mixture of funds from RMIT and conference organiser the Poynter Institute, as Das was a speaker. ABC Fact Check is jointly funded by RMIT University and the ABC. By Friday Bolt had inserted a correction and an apology at the top of the story – which kind of made the headline, and indeed the whole story, redundant.
Maiden withdraws
Veteran political reporter Samantha Maiden announced her resignation from Sky News on Thursday. In a series of subsequent tweets, she said she had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression last year, and said her psychologist believed she was a “complex individual” because of her father’s suicide when she was three. . A former political editor at News Corp before moving to TV 18 months ago, Maiden was suspended by Sky News last month following complaints about her behaviour in the workplace.
She tweeted fondly about how she had famously been called “a mad fucking witch” by the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, two years ago when he accidentally sent a text message about her to her.
Maiden thanked Sky news boss Angelos Frangopoulos and political editor David Speers and said she was taking a long holiday in the sun with her three young children.
“Late last year, I was also diagnosed for the first time with anxiety and depression, which although I still believe never stopped me from breaking big political stories, has not been fun.”
Peter Dutton was also right about me being a mad f....ing witch but that's unrelated to my earlier point. It simply remains a glorious, splendid compliment I should have embossed on my bath robe pic.twitter.com/2VPqTCE6Xe
— Samantha Maiden (@samanthamaiden) June 28, 2018
Sky’s door still open to Latham
A little over a year after he was released for offensive comments by Sky News, Mark Latham popped up on Paul Murray’s talk show this week. The former Labor leader was commenting on Labor party ads about Malcolm Turnbull’s wealth, and we wondered what it took to keep him off air.
It was only March last year when Sky News political editor David Speers announced Latham’s contract for the Outsiders show was over: “This follows a number of controversies in relation to his comments around Kristina Keneally, Wendy Harmer and indeed the story that’s been doing the rounds on a lot of news sites today in relation to some SBS students and a video they made for International Women’s Day.”
Frangopoulos said on Twitter that while the channel welcomed “strong opinions” it prided itself on offering them in a “civil and respectful manner”. It’s not the first time Latham has departed a media organisation under a cloud. In 2015 he left his job as a columnist on the Australian Financial Review after using Twitter to attack the Australian of the year, Rosie Batty, and the journalists Anne Summers, Leigh Sales, Lisa Pryor, Mia Freedman and Annabel Crabb.
Sky was keen to tell us that Latham was only a guest and was not paid.
.@RealMarkLatham on @AustralianLabor ads targeting @TurnbullMalcolm's wealth: I think they're just trying to knock back some of the gains he's been making in his personal popularity by saying, 'This guy is way out of touch'.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) June 25, 2018
MORE: https://t.co/5WizPEfB6e #pmlive pic.twitter.com/agIPs5HwIe
Culture of complaint
The Coalition is increasingly using the ABC’s independent complaints unit, Audience and Consumer Affairs, as a weapon against ABC journalists. When a complaint is made it has to spend hours responding, even if the complaint is clearly absurd. At the beginning of June, communications minister Mitch Fifield complained that the ABC had repeated “Labor lies” in its reporting of the setting of the date for the 28 July by-elections. He pointed the finger at political journalists Laura Tingle, Barrie Cassidy and Andrew Probyn, as well as two Fairfax journalists for what they said on Insiders.
The unit upheld one complaint about Probyn’s report, saying his conclusion that Turnbull chose the date was reasonable but “should have been attributed to sources, or should have been presented in the context of the government’s saying it was the Speaker who had set the date”.
Probyn told Weekly Beast: “I work for the national broadcaster which, to its great credit, is subject to very high editorial standards.
“I will say this, however: anyone who suggests the government didn’t have significant input into the selection of the July 28 byelection date doesn’t know how this place works.
“Secondly, the prime minister sits at the apex of government.
“I conflated the two in the 7PM ABC News bulletin. As they say, my bad.”
As Graham Richardson wrote in the Australian: “You would have to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden if you don’t realise that a critical decision such as that would require prime ministerial assent before it was announced.”
Complaints about Tingle’s opinion piece and Cassidy’s program were not upheld.
Magistrate v media
A Queensland magistrate has given a scathing assessment of the media in her valedictory speech. Bernadette Callaghan said News Corp papers had repeatedly misreported her cases and wrongly targeted her personally as a soft touch. She detailed two articles in the Gold Coast Bulletin and the Courier-Mail which had wrongly reported what happened in the court room.
“Journalism of this calibre simply lacks any semblance of integrity and validity, the cornerstones upon which the free press was founded and built,” Callaghan said.
“Both of these articles, as in the vast majority of the false, misleading and malicious articles written about my judgments, were published in newspapers owned by News Limited.
“I would like to know what these newspapers editors think they are doing to our democracy. These attacks on the various judicial officers who sentence those that come before the courts harms our society when they are not a fair, nor accurate representation of what in fact occurs.”
The Courier-Mail turned her speech against her, interviewing victims’ rights advocates and claiming Callaghan “granted immediate parole to an ice-addicted thug who bashed his pregnant girlfriend until she was unconscious”.
Courier-Mail: “Brisbane dad Paul Stanley, who tragically lost his teenage son Matthew in a coward’s attack in 2006, said he was disgusted that years later, Ms Callaghan was attacking the media and not addressing the ‘real issues’.”
‘A raw moment’ captured
A powerful photograph of Penny Wong breaking down after the same-sex marriage postal survey has won Guardian Australia’s photographer-at-large Mike Bowers a prize in Adelaide University’s Images of Justice competition.
Organised by the university’s pro vice-chancellor and former law school dean, John Williams, the competition’s theme this year was justice in an era of fake news.
Bowers told Weekly Beast the image had resonated with those who were on the yes side of the debate.
“To be honest it is just such a raw moment I feel a little uncomfortable in pushing it out and entering it in competitions,” Bowers said.
Bowers said the competition run by Williams made a valuable contribution to an area that receives little love and attention compared with news, sport and feature editorial photography.
“Photography has from its very early days always been a powerful agent of change for social justice issues,” Bowers said. “The Adelaide law school continues to celebrate photography in the justice arena and I would like to thank them very much for this honour.”
Bowers’ honour follows another big win this month by the Guardian Australia team at the New York Festivals’ radio awards. The podcast about the royal commission into institutional child abuse, The Reckoning, picked up a Gold Radio Winner and and Grand Award for best radio documentary. Presented by David Marr and Melissa Davey and produced by Miles Martignoni, The Reckoning examined how the royal commission came to investigate decades of child abuse, hidden by the Catholic church and other institutions. Martignoni was in New York to pick up the award.
