GB News Channel launch
Angelos Frangopoulos-led GB News Channel launches in the UK
GB News launched its opinion-led take on broadcast news and a new website on Sunday, prompting a campaign group to seek to shut it down with an ad boycott, reports Press Gazette.
Google Trends showed a surge in interest for GB News on the search engine with 200,000+ searches yesterday (Sunday) and GB News was also trending on Twitter.
The channel has been widely trailed as Britain’s answer to Fox News.
But interviewed by Press Gazette, GB News director of news John McAndrew said: “My view of our channel, and certainly how it’s going to be, is that it will be a very warm, inclusive channel where disagreements will be had, tough subjects will absolutely be taken on, but they’ll be taken on in a classy and courteous fashion.
“What this won’t be is a hate-filled divisive shout-fest that some people seem to have characterised it as, which is 180 degrees away from where we want to be.”
GB News launch gains more viewers than BBC or Sky news channels
The launch of GB News was watched by more people than both the BBC News channel and Sky News despite several technical glitches on opening night, according to data released on Monday, reports The Guardian’s Kevin Rawlinson and Jim Waterson.
The television news channel, which claims to “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices”, launched at 8pm on Sunday with a mission statement delivered to camera by its chairman, Andrew Neil.
According to the TV industry magazine Broadcast, GB News peaked in its opening minutes with 336,000 viewers, meaning it outperformed the 100,000 who watched BBC News across the hour and the 46,000 who watched Sky News.
Tony Abbott among guests on first full day of GB News channel
No country has had more of a positive impact on the modern world than Britain, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott told GB News.
Abbott, who is advising the UK government on trade deals, said he did not understand why so many people played down Britain’s role in the world, and urged Brits to be proud of their history.
Critics have raised questions about the impact a trade deal with Australia could have on UK farmers, but Abbott said Britain had nothing to fear.
Speaking on the new Brazier and Muroki show, Abbott said: “It baffles me a little that so many people in Britain are always running the country down, always taking Counsel of fears no hopes.
“No country has had more impact on the modern world than Britain. When you think of the mother of Parliament’s, the rule of law, democracy, the Industrial Revolution, emancipation of minorities, written and spoken word.
“And this is a trade deal with one of Britain’s greatest friends, namely Australia.
That’s no threat to the people of Britain. This is going to help the people of Britain because we will stand beside the people of Britain through thick and thin in the future as we have in the past.”
Queens Birthday Honours
Patrick Smith, a legend honoured for relentless campaigns
Patrick Smith was the light on the hill for many of us in journalism. A man of towering reputation, one whose thundering contempt held administrators, codes and participants to account, a relentless campaigner on issues that mattered and a beautiful writer who could throw the lever to vaudeville with equal effect, reports News Corp’s Peter Lalor.
The three-time Walkley Award-winner has been roused from retirement by the news he has been awarded a medal (OAM) in the general division of the Order of Australia for his services to print media.
The award’s citation mentions Smith’s advocacy for restricting the use of whips in racing and for the introduction of a racial vilification code in AFL football as chief among the 69-year-old’s achievements. Smith started in journalism in 1972, worked at The Age from 1976 to 2000 and anchored The Australian’s sports section from 2000 to 2019.
Former Fairfax journalist Lindsay Murdoch honoured with OAM
Former Fairfax Media journalist Lindsay Murdoch has received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to journalism, reports SMH’s Josh Dye.
After a cadetship at the Warragul Guardian in Victoria’s Gippsland region in 1968, Murdoch joined The Age in 1977 as a police reporter. He became the paper’s chief-of-staff in the mid-1980s before spending 25 years on the road as a foreign correspondent throughout Asia for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021: Judi Farr, Angela Bishop
Showbiz actors, presenters, journalists, commentators, producers and crew are amongst those recognised in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours, reports TV Tonight.
They include actors Judi Farr, Chris Hemsworth, Peter Caroll, Leah Purcell, journalists Angela Bishop and Simon Bouda, TV presenters Mark Beretta and Peta Credlin, cinematographer Russell Boyd and the late producer John Caldon of Flame Media.
Business of Media
ABC’s reputation under scrutiny like never before
One of the ABC’s best-known on-air presenters is unusually blunt about the bad publicity the public broadcaster’s flagship current affairs program has attracted in recent months. “It’s incredibly bad for all of us,” the journalist says. “They’re embarrassing the whole organisation,” reports News Corp’s James Madden.
It’s a point of view widely held within the national broadcaster, whether those at the helm of Four Corners or in the upper echelons of management wish to admit it or not.
Of the dozens of ABC journalists The Australian’s reporters have spoken to in recent weeks, two central points of irritation are recurring themes — annoyance that 4C, as it’s known internally, appears exempt from the editorial oversights and management controls demanded of other news programs at the organisation; and deep concern that the lines of journalism and activism have, in recent times, too often been blurred on a program long considered the gold standard for current affairs on television.
How Four Corners became the story in the government’s ABC wars
Conflicts – between journalists, editors and management – are the subatomic particles of journalism without which not much journalism appears. But rarely has an internal editorial process become so public than when the ABC’s managing director David Anderson decided to delay an upcoming Four Corners episode about the Prime Minister and his connections to a QAnon conspiracy theorist, reports SMH‘s Zoe Samios, Lisa Visentin and Stephen Brook.
Once again when ABC journalistic endeavour rubs up against the federal government, the friction throws the national broadcaster into turmoil. The ABC’s elite investigative unit strives to uncover damaging political stories that their colleagues can’t or won’t. As veteran investigative reporter Andrew Fowler, the last person to have a Four Corners episode delayed by ABC management, puts it: “Four Corners is the single most important investigative unit in Australia. Its powerful visual impact has the kind of political clout that really worries governments.”
Yet for its detractors, staff at the program are operating as a journalism vigilante unit whose overzealous reporting and intemperate tweets have plunged the ABC once again into crisis.
Controversial Four Corners episode on PM’s alleged links to QAnon to air on Monday
The much-hyped Four Corners episode about an Australian man’s association with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon – and his alleged links with Prime Minister Scott Morrison – will air on the ABC on Monday night, just days after the boss of the national broadcaster said the story was “not ready”, reports News Corp’s James Madden.
The episode has been the subject of fierce debate since it was revealed last week that the ABC’s managing director David Anderson – after reviewing a draft of the program – had ruled that it did not meet the editorial standards of the national broadcaster.
As News Corp savages its enemies, the ABC must strive for unity. Which makes it the perfect target …
The other day I got angry enough about an editorial in the Australian newspaper – which castigated in vicious terms two of the ABC’s most accomplished journalists – that I wrote a letter to the editor. A waste of time, of course: the letter wasn’t published, writes Guardian Australia‘s Jonathan Holmes.
So I posted it on Twitter, where it got thousands of likes, replies and retweets, almost all of them supportive. But as Ann Braine, a former teacher from Perth, tweeted: “Unfortunately those who should read it, won’t.”
She’s right. And they won’t read this either. The Guardian is not part of the diet of readers of the Australian, and vice versa.
It’s a cliché to say that we all inhabit news silos these days: we are seldom confronted by views that differ from our own. And what’s true of social media is becoming just as true of the so-called mainstream. Advertising no longer pays journalists’ wages. What their employers need are loyal, paying readers and viewers. And in general, people pay to read stories that reflect and reinforce their views.
Shock treatment to tame a taxpayer-funded beast
ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose thinks the ABC should be more like the BBC. That’s a start, writes News Corp’s Janet Albrechtsen.
In her foreword to Aunty’s 2019-20 annual report, she wrote: “It’s worth remembering that the ABC serves a population just over one-third the size of the UK (over a landmass 32 times bigger) and does so with total funding of around one-seventh the size of the BBC’s budget.”
It’s also worth remembering that the BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by all British households, companies and organisations that receive or record live television broadcasts, including iPlayer catch-up.
To make the ABC more like the BBC, the Morrison government should propose a voluntary licence fee for the ABC, providing a direct line of sight between money from our pockets to the coffers of the public broadcaster. That would test Aunty’s impartiality at the next federal election. It also might help relieve taxpayers from more ABC arrogance.
News Corp’s Michael Miller warns of cluttered media market
The Australian media market has become cluttered with too many new entrants, and the industry faces an “uncertain future” as consumers become more circumspect with their subscription choices, News Corp boss Michael Miller has warned, reports News Corp’s James Madden.
The executive chairman of News Corp Australasia (publisher of The Australian) said while the nation’s media landscape had never been more competitive and diverse, the sector was struggling to accommodate the recent rush of fresh entrants, and some players would need to change their business model in order to survive.
“As more players enter the market, there are fewer people to go around. Advertising dollars are decreasing and subscriber dollars are very competitive to earn,” Miller told The Australian.
MasterChef may not air in parts of Australia as Ten toils on affiliate deal
Television programs such as MasterChef Australia and Have You Been Paying Attention? may not be available for viewers in Tasmania or Northern NSW in a matter of weeks because Network 10 has not signed a deal with a single regional affiliate partner, reports SMH‘s Zoe Samios.
10 was informed in early March that its current regional broadcasting partner WIN Corp had struck a seven-year deal with Nine Entertainment Co, owner of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, to broadcast programs such as Married at First Sight and The Weakest Link in regional areas from July. Regional affiliate Southern Cross Media Group, which ends its current deal with Nine on July 1, said it intends to do a deal with Ten but no contract has been signed.
Ten has also not signed deals with other regional affiliates Prime Media Group or WIN in the markets where Southern Cross has no presence, according to industry sources familar with the negotiations.
Streaming giants brace for shakedown in post-pandemic era
In the early days of lockdown, amid the uncertainty and fear that gripped the world, one man helped distract from the pandemic with his ludicrous antics, reports SMH’s James Cook.
Joe Exotic, the gun-toting operator of a big cat park in Oklahoma, left millions of viewers gripped by his stranger-than-fiction tale in the Tiger King when it came out in March last year. The show helped Netflix reach a record 182.9 million subscribers for the first three months of 2020, more than twice the number it had expected to gain.
That trend continued throughout the year, with millions signing up to streaming services at the end of 2020 despite COVID-19 restrictions forcing the amount of new shows and movies to slow to a trickle.
Now, however, the pandemic’s biggest winners are facing the prospect of rapidly shrinking user growth as lockdowns ease – and some are warning the boom time may be over.
Victoria Cross ‘put a target on my back’: Ben Roberts-Smith
Being awarded the Victoria Cross put a target on his back and brought “a lot of misfortune and pain”, Ben Roberts-Smith told a court in Sydney, reports AFR‘s Max Mason.
The former Special Forces soldier also accused a witness set to testify against him of jealousy and a “flair for the dramatic”.
Roberts-Smith said there was a distinct change in attitude after he received the Victoria Cross – the highest award in the honours system – in 2012, following the Battle of Tizak in Afghanistan in 2010.
News Brands
Peta Credlin to join The Australian as a columnist
Sky News host and former prime ministerial chief of staff Peta Credlin is joining The Australian as a columnist, reports News Corp’s James Madden.
“It’s been a privilege to have been a national News Corp Sunday columnist for six years. To now join The Australian as well, with its stable of thinkers, provocateurs and experts, is about as good as it gets, if you’re like me and believe in the battle of ideas,” she says.
Credlin, 50, is a Sky News political contributor and anchor of her own self-titled show; she writes a weekly column in News Corp’s Sunday papers (and will continue to do so) and is a political contributor for Nine Radio, with her on-air slot carried in Queensland, WA, NSW and Victoria.
Radio
Kyle Sandilands celebrates 50th birthday in fine style
It wasn’t so much a case of who was but who wasn’t invited along on Saturday as Kyle Sandilands, Sydney radio’s undisputed king, rang in his 50th birthday with a lavish bash aboard a $3000-per-hour superyacht on Sydney Harbour, reports News Corp’s Amy Harris.
Surprisingly many of Sandilands’ long-times besties — including Sophie Monk and Karl Stefanovic — were nowhere to be seen aboard the swanky seafarer.
Publishing
Is there a market for Harper’s Bazaar 2.0?
It’s the story of glossy magazine publishing, which was once a hugely successful industry in Australia, but is now a shell of its former self. In the heyday of the 1980s and 1990s, Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) was selling more than a million copies each of marquee mastheads such as Woman’s Day and Women’s Weekly, reports AFR‘s Lauren Sams.
Pacific Magazines and News Limited, too, were power players, with their own stables of successful magazines. Fashion bibles Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Mode set the style directive for millions of Australian women.
You know the rest of the story. The internet came along. Publishers did not act quickly enough, or do enough, to quell its effects on readers (free content, shrinking attention spans) or advertisers (a new avenue in which to invest and attract eyeballs).