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Media Week: Seven’s kind axe, more rudeness, budget charades

May 22, 2015, updated Nov 20, 2015

In this week’s column, the upside of cuts for Seven’s Today Tonight, more on radio “rudeness”, Rupert Murdoch’s “soft” power, crowdfunding journalism and much more.

Seven cuts benefit Today Tonight?

Strangely enough, cuts to the Seven Network’s Sydney newsroom look like they will benefit Adelaide’s Today Tonight – at least, that’s what the network insists.

The weeknight current affairs show is only produced in Adelaide and Perth – Seven’s strongest network stations for news and current affairs.

The story is different in the big eastern states markets, with Nine News ruling. This might explain management’s decision to disband its Sydney investigative unit, headed by news veteran Max Uechtritz who has reportedly quit after the “restructure” which will see some staff redeployed.

While the unit was responsible for filing Today Tonight stories and producing one-off specials, Seven in Adelaide believes it will benefit from the restructure.

A Seven Adelaide spokesperson says the restructure will mean additional on-call resources for Today Tonight, with a Sydney-based reporter, producer and cameraman to report to TT executive producers in Adelaide and Perth.

Media Week has been told the restructure will also include a “sizeable” travel budget to allow both the Sydney crew, as well as Adelaide and Perth-based reporters, to seek out stories suitable for both markets.

Rude, crude and a feud

For another week, the commentariat exercised themselves about whether journalists are sufficiently polite to politicians.

This week’s version of the debate was about whether ABC television journalists, particularly Leigh Sales and Emma Alberici, were too aggressive in their post-Budget interviews with Government ministers.

Federal communication minister Malcolm Turnbull suggested on News Corp thunderer Andrew Bolt’s Sunday TV show that ABC interviewers should be more forensic, and less aggressive.

Bolt furiously agreed. And Alberici, the host of Lateline, weighed in suggesting that a double standard is at play: “When I do a tough interview I will be called an ‘aggressive bitch’ but when Tony Jones does a similar interview he is just tough. No one would call him a bitch. That’s something we grapple with because people don’t want us to be tough.”

Bolt, without a sense of irony, shot back: “That is hiding behind a skirt.”

Meanwhile in Adelaide, Triple M announcer Andrew Jarman returned to the airwaves one week after being suspended for shocking audiences with his graphic and offensive “advice” for bringing on labour (see last week’s column).

Advertiser columnist Amanda Blair, who in a recent column castigated the ABC’s Matthew Abraham and David Bevan for being rude to politicians, was more forgiving of Jarman’s foul banter.

She suggested that we should save our gravest sense of offence for men who kill their partners, rather than those who merely make crude blokey comments like Jars – with which it is difficult to argue.

“This was the really shocking part for me,” she wrote. “The fact that one unfunny and ostensibly harmless comment could cause such a stir and have everybody talking. It was just a throwaway line, the sort you’d hear anyway down the pub or in the locker room.”

In her previous column about Abraham and Bevan she was “shocked by the decrease in decorum”.

Are there different standards for AM and FM?

The annual Budget charade

In the lead-up to every budget, state or federal, the media and governments play a carefully choreographed game of charades.

The government pretends that the content of the budget is a kind of important secret, which even requires journalists to be locked in a room for hours so that this incendiary news doesn’t get out before its time and wreak havoc.

At the same time, governments hand out budget stories to selected media outlets, with the sole aim of ensuring that bad news is dispensed with early, so good news is highlighted on actual budget day.

The media’s role in this charade is to accept the government hand-outs without analysing the obvious media strategy behind them.

It happened this week in relation to the State Government increase in the Emergency Services Levy.

Textbook pre-budget strategy.

Expect more over the coming weeks.

How Murdoch wields “soft” power

Media veteran Eric Beecher has published a fascinating series this week about how Rupert Murdoch exercises power.

The series in Crikey is locked for subscribers, but here’s a small taste.

Writing on the “myth” of Murdoch’s power, Beecher points that that the media baron doesn’t need to provide implicit instructions to his editors to have his agenda played out in his Australian daily newspapers.

“Instead, they operate within a culture of constant awareness of expected behavior. Phone-hacking and police bribery were able to flourish in News Corp’s UK newspapers because everyone knew they worked in an organisation where the boss measured success by results and where the ends justified the means.

“As Murdoch biographer and admirer William Shawcross explained it, the mogul’s wishes and views ‘merely emanated from him, rather like ectoplasm’. His editors ‘knew his opinions, and they knew his financial interests also. Many of them were constantly anxious to please him, and there is no doubt that one way of doing so was to anticipate his views’.

“By radiating authority rather than issuing instructions, Australia’s dominant media owner has been able to influence the tone, politics and direction of his native country for six decades using a technique calculated to make it look like he has no directive power at all.”

Beecher is the executive chairman of Private Media, which publishes Crikey, and chairman of Solstice Media, which publishes InDaily.

Crowdfunding independent journalism

A group of journalists in Hong Kong are crowdfunding a new online newspaper to provide an independent voice.

The journalists behind the Hong Kong Free Press say they raised their target to get operations up and running in two days.

Read more here.

Naughty corner

It is tempting to award the dunce hat this week to a combination of Foxtel and the Daily Mail for this juxtaposition of advertising for a comedy show about priests with an article about sexual abuse by priests (via Mumbrella).

However, it’s impossible to go past this “story” about actor Rebel Wilson allegedly lying about her age and obfuscating details about her background. It shows how stultifying celebrity obsession and the constant need for “clickworthy” content” is combining to produce journalism which is neither informative, nor necessary, nor even interesting. Wilson’s family details, including her birth date, could have been confirmed at a few clicks of a mouse. Naturally, the story became whether the story was a story, therefore generating more “content”. And yes – irony noted.

Top of the class

FIVEaa breakfast presenter David Penberthy and Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis went toe-to-toe in a revealing interview this week about the increase to the Emergency Services Levy.

Penberthy used an entertaining combination of pithy questions, occasional silence, and world-weary scepticism to represent his audience’s interests.

He let Koutsantonis speak freely, which, on this occasion probably wasn’t in the Treasurer’s favour.

“You fundamentally misunderstand how the ESL works,” Koutsantonis lectured. “The ESL is a hypothecated fund.”

Got that?

Relive the magic here.

Media Week is published on Fridays.

 

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