Business of Media
In Dame Edna Everage, Barry Humphries created a character whose fame would outstrip his own
In Dame Edna Everage, Australian actor and comedian Barry Humphries created a cultural icon whose international fame would rapidly outstrip his own, reports the ABC.
Later in life, Humphries — who has died, aged 89 — would appear on stage as himself, but it was the fictitious Melbourne housewife in a wisteria-pink wig who most often soaked up the limelight.
In interviews, Humphries would refer to Dame Edna as a separate person.
“She’s up there with Judi Dench and Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, of course,” Humphries said in 2009.
“She used to say quite early on her career, ‘The secret of my success is that I’ve put my family last.’
“‘If you put your family first, they’ll never thank you, which is probably why Edna’s family is rather spectacularly dysfunctional.”
Humphries was also well known for his alternate character, Sir Les Patterson, a lecherous drunk and Australia’s “cultural attaché” to the United Kingdom.
In 2018, Humphries toured a solo show, where he performed as himself for the first time in his more than 60-year-long career.
He described it as playing his “last character”, but said he never planned to retire.
Lachlan Murdoch’s stoush with Crikey not over yet
News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch’s battle against small news outlet Crikey is set to continue in a brewing dispute over an almost $600,000 pool of supporter funds after the media scion dropped his defamation litigation, reports Nine Publishing’s Nick Bonyhady.
At issue is the $588,735 Crikey raised from its supporters to defend itself from the claim that Murdoch launched last year about an article branding the Murdoch family as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
The Murdoch camp believes the money should be deducted from its contribution to Crikey’s legal fees – which it will have to pay as the party that withdrew litigation – so that the website is not effectively compensated for the same expenses twice.
But a source close to the litigation, who was not authorised to speak publicly because of legal sensitivities, said Crikey would push for the money to be disregarded by the court as it works out what Murdoch will have to pay.
Crikey promised on its online GoFundMe page that any surplus it receives from the case, including from supporters or a costs order, would go towards the not-for-profit Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. The fundraiser is explicit that the money is to fight Murdoch’s legal claim, not to reduce his expenses.
The source close to the litigation said Crikey’s legal costs totalled more than $1 million. Murdoch’s costs for the case, in which he alleged Crikey’s article contained a host of false and defamatory meanings, are likely similar. Representatives of Crikey and Murdoch declined to comment.
See Also: Lachlan Murdoch drops defamation action against Private Media and Crikey
Jeff Shell, C.E.O. of NBCUniversal, steps down after inquiry
Jeff Shell, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, is leaving the company after an investigation into an inappropriate workplace relationship, the company’s owner, Comcast, said in a statement on Sunday, reports The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin.
In the statement, Shell said that Sunday would be his last day and that he had had “an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.”
“I’m truly sorry I let my Comcast and NBCUniversal colleagues down, they are the most talented people in the business and the opportunity to work with them the last 19 years has been a privilege.”
Comcast’s terse statement did not say who would be replacing Shell at NBCUniversal, which he has led since 2020.
In a note to employees on Sunday, Comcast’s chief executive, Brian Roberts, said that Shell’s senior team would report to Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s president, putting Cavanagh in effective control of NBCUniversal.
“We are disappointed to share this news with you,” Roberts wrote. “We built this company on a culture of integrity. Nothing is more important than how we treat each other.”
AI should pay for news content: Rod Sims
The architect of Australia’s news bargaining code, which has moved more than $200 million from Google and Facebook to publishers of journalism, says artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT should similarly be forced to pay for access to content, reports Nine Publishing’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.
Rod Sims, the former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, says it’s likely large AI models such as Google’s Bard and Microsoft-linked ChatGPT have scraped news publications to generate accurate answers.
That raises major copyright red flags, Sims says, and puts them squarely in line for designation under the bargaining code. “The logic is the same. The media companies cannot successfully bargain with the generative AI companies, just as they couldn’t bargain with Google and Facebook,” he said.
“If media companies are having their content out in the public but not getting compensated for it, you are under-provisioning for journalism and that’s bad for society. We don’t want anything that sees journalism getting unrewarded for what they’re doing.”
Why schools are running ‘fake news’-spotting lessons for primary kids
Almost 1000 primary classrooms have run a Google-backed media literacy training course to teach the “iPad generation” to think critically about information they hear on YouTube, social media and news media, reports Nine Publishing’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.
Known as Newshounds, the program, aimed at 8 to 12-year-old kids, includes eight 10-minute podcast episodes with a workbook and teacher manual. A character called “Squiz-E the detective dog” goes through eight steps on how kids can recognise misinformation when they see it online.
“This current generation, the tech as always been there. The iPad has been around their whole lifetime,” Jayne Aguiar, a year six teacher at Brisbane’s Cannon Hill State School, says. She has been a teacher for more than two decades – well before Facebook, the iPhone or TikTok were invented.
“You can definitely see a change in what children are into, what they’re focused on. The way we can access things now, it’s incredibly easy to click on something. Once upon a time was an encyclopaedia.”
German publisher sacks editor-in-chief over fake interview with Michael Schumacher
German magazine Die Aktuelle has apologised to Michael Schumacher’s family and sacked its editor-in-chief after it published a fake interview with the seven-time Formula One champion, reports The Australian’s Sophie Elsworth.
In a statement on the magazine publisher’s website FUNKE, it said it regretted the “tasteless and misleading article” about the 54-year-old.
Schumacher sustained a brain injury in 2013 in a skiing accident and his family have since gone to great lengths to maintain his strict privacy.
He has not been seen in public, nor conducted any interviews, in the past decade.
But the front page of the April 15 edition of the German magazine ran a smiling photo of Schumacher with the accompanying headline: “World sensation, the first interview.”
It also stated underneath that “it sounds deceptively real”.
Social Media
Twitter restores ‘blue tick’ free of charge to celebrities in U-turn
Twitter has again U-turned over its verification policy, restoring the “blue tick” free of charge to celebrity users of the social network, reports The Guardian’s Alex Hern.
But the site’s decision to reinstate the “verified” status without distinguishing between paid-for and free users has led to criticism for false advertising, since the boilerplate disclaimer for those users inaccurately describes their status as being granted “because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue”.
The social network ended its old verification system on Friday 20 April, a date apparently chosen because of its significance in cannabis culture, and in the process stripped all “legacy” users of the blue checkmark that indicated their account was genuine.
But the move, which left only those users who had paid for Twitter’s subscription service with a checkmark, had unforeseen consequences for Elon Musk, the social network’s owner and chief executive.
Rather than encouraging pre-existing verified users to splash out the subscription fee, which starts at $8 a month, the overwhelming majority simply continued using the site. Public data shows that fewer than 500 of the 400,000 legacy users signed up, and almost as many users cancelled their subscription at the same time, for a net revenue increase of less than $300 a month.
As a result, a blue tick on the social network rapidly came to mark out a user as paying for the privilege, leading to a grassroots campaign to “block the blue”, with users committing to blocking subscribers on sight.
‘Untenable’: Coalition calls for ban on government ads on TikTok
The opposition spokesman for home affairs, James Paterson, wants Commonwealth advertising on TikTok stopped after concerns about national security led to the Chinese-owned social media app being banned from government-issued devices, reports Nine Publishing’s Max Mason.
“The weight of evidence is clear, and a government advertising policy that permits taxpayer dollars to support a platform which presents such significant national risks is untenable,” Paterson said in a letter to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher on Friday.
“I urge you to take immediate action to prevent the use of TikTok for government advertising to address these concerns.”
The letter was prompted by reports in The Australian Financial Review last week, which revealed updated advice from the Department of Finance giving the green light to trials of government advertising campaigns on TikTok, despite the device ban.
The Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, which is chaired by Senator Paterson, is looking closely at Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat as well as US-headquartered Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Google, Snapchat and Twitter.
Radio
Annette Sharp: It’s time to put Triple J out of its misery and off the air
The Labor government would do well to crunch the numbers on its government-funded FM youth radio station Triple J — a station performing so dismally in the radio ratings it’s hard to see any fiscal logic in continuing to broadcast on the FM band, reports News Corp’s Annette Sharp.
According to radio insiders, the sale of the FM station — or the licence alone for the national radio frequency — could net the government somewhere between $300m and $500m.
That’s a lot of money that might instead be redirected to education, where it might more directly benefit the demographic Triple J is mandated to reach, not to mention to health and the green energy sector, about which the 18s to 24s are rightfully so passionate.
It’s not as though the ABC doesn’t already have ample radio frequencies crying out for renewal, chief among which must be its underperforming Sydney station 702.
Selling Triple J’s FM licence — and transferring the platform to internet radio — would also save the government a small fortune each year in staff salaries, infrastructure, music rights, maintenance and marketing.
Television
TV services in remote Australia set for funding upgrade
The decrepit broadcasting network across remote and regional Australia will receive a funding upgrade in next month’s federal budget, with the need to fix the run-down services deemed to be a priority in the lead-up to the referendum on the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament, reports The Australian’s James Madden.
A recent study by RMIT found that up to 80 per cent of Indigenous households across all states and territories (excluding Western Australia) have no working free television service due to damaged cabling, broken satellite dishes and defunct set-top boxes, and cannot access free-to-air TV, including the wholly Aboriginal-owned Imparja Television.
In some areas, broadcasting services have been in a state of disrepair for more than a decade, and the limited government funding provided has not adequately addressed the extent of the problem.
The issue is especially stark in remote Indigenous communities.
Local leaders complain that they are being kept “out of the loop” on the national debate over the voice to parliament, for example.
Nine Network denies rumour about Eddie McGuire’s Millionaire Hot Seat
Channel Nine has denied swirling rumours its long-running game show Millionaire Hot Seat is headed for the axe, reports News Corp’s Lexie Cartwright.
The iconic series, hosted by Eddie McGuire, began airing in 2009 as a spin-off to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which McGuire also helmed from 1999 until 2006.
Airing daily at 5pm, it’s now the longest-unning game show on Australian TV, having this month celebrated its 2500th episode. But its viewership has dwindled in recent years, with Seven’s The Chase Australia often pipping it in the ratings war.
A recent casting call fuelled rumours Hot Seat could be canned to make way for a local version of popular UK game show Tipping Point, which airs on Nine in the 3pm timeslot.
An official call-out from Endemol Shine Australia – the production company that makes Tipping Point – was posted on Twitter last week, revealing the show was filming “Australian episodes” in the UK.
Nine declined to comment on a local version of Tipping Point when approached by news.com.au.
However, a spokesperson claimed Millionaire Hot Seat “is not set to be axed.”