Tele marks its position on Keneally. Former New South Wales premier Kristina Keneally’s announcement she would contest the byelection in Bennelong has given The Daily Telegraph a chance to go back to an old campaign. Its front page today doesn’t leave any question as to the paper’s position on her, despite her very recent role as a presenter at Sky News — both outlets are owned by News Corp.
The front page has echoes of this, from 2009, when Keneally was first named premier.
The revolving door. The head of Fairfax’s community newspaper arm is leaving just a week after announcing cuts to the division. John Angilley has been director of Australian Community Media, and oversaw a restructure (and dozens of redundancies) at the papers. Last week, he announced to staff that six north-west Sydney local papers would close, to be replaced by a magazine.
‘ABC will continue to adapt’: chair. The ABC’s chairman Justin Milne has flagged that yesterday’s restructure announcement is just the beginning of more change for the broadcaster. Milne was giving the Hector Crawford Oration, and indicated that the ABC would be “developing systems and tools that make it easier for audiences to find our content”. He said they would be using technology to track how audiences use the ABC’s content, and would make an announcement about this in February at the ABC’s first Annual Public Meeting. Milne also used the speech to note that more than 80% of Australians trust the ABC more than other media outlets.
SBS holds on to The Handmaid’s Tale. SBS has announced it will screen the second season of cult hit The Handmaid’s Tale in its line-up for next year. It will also screen the third and final season of Benjamin Law’s series The Family Law. Managing director Michael Ebeid said the line-up would be the broadcaster’s “strongest year yet”.
ABC abandons marriage poll coverage. The ABC abandoned all pretension to be the national broadcaster this morning at 9.58am. After broadcasting the lead-up to ABC News’ coverage of the same-sex marriage poll with reporters Greg Jennett and Andrew Probyn in a studio in Canberra, the ABC’s main channel just bailed out of that without an apology and went to two minutes of program promos before, at 10am, broadcasting a repeat of Antiques Roadshow. So much for managing director Michelle Guthrie’s big re-organisation. If she and her executives can’t get right something as simple extending a broadcast on the main channel for an hour on a Wednesday morning for a historic event in Australian history, how will they nail down what appears to be a very complicated revamp? There’s no explanation at all for abandoning coverage of the historic poll result on the ABC’s most-watched channel. — Glenn Dyer
Fox bribery claims. 21st Century Fox didn’t need bribery claims to emerge right now. It’s up to its neck in sexual and racist abuse and harassment claims at Fox News Channel involving multi-million dollar settlements that the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly signed; cases involving former Fox News boss, the late Roger Ailes and other executives, including claims of rape. Now there’s a report from The Wall Street Journal of a New York court case that reveals claims that a Fox Network executive “signed a phony contract in January 2008 with an Argentine media company to facilitate $3.7 million in bribes to Latin American soccer executives” in a FIFA corruption trial. Other companies are also swept up in the testimony from US government witness Alejandro Burzaco, include TV Globo, Televisa and MediaPro, but Fox is most prominent. — Glenn Dyer
Glenn Dyer’s TV ratings. Seven’s night again thanks to The Good Doctor — but once again viewers flocked to the digital channels and their collective share last night of free-to-air viewing was 31.1%, up from the 30% for Monday night. The Good Doctor averaged 1.73 million viewers, not much different to the previous Tuesday night peak of 1.79 million viewers. That made it the most watched program on the night and it was also in the same slot in the metros (1.131 million) and 597,000 in the regions. Seven’s Instant Hotel did well with 1.156 million viewers across the country and Seven News easily won the hour from 6pm to 7pm. The end result was Seven winning metros, regions and nationally. In fact After the 597,000 for The Good Doctor in regional markets, Seven News attracted 564,000 people, Seven News/TT, 474,000, Instant Hotel, 439,000 and Home and Away, 428,000 in fifth spot. — Read the rest of TV ratings on the website
“Puppets” really? Sally Zou pulls a couple of strings and up pops Lady Penelope – as “Julie Bishop Glorious” – for kids birthday parties?
But wait, there’s more …. A couple of passes of Mr Buzz (her magic wand) and Presto!, there’s an important meeting in the same city as her Eagles are playing – and it only costs us a couple of grand each time?
….. Which reminds me, I think it’s my turn to open a can of baked beans on Aug 25(?) next year – so she can “be here for that”?
Glad someone else was as pissed off as me Glen, when “our ABC” went to Antiques Roadshow, instead of the biggest game in town. Major fail right there.
ABC24 delivered the survey result live but then a reporter did an unnecessary to-camera piece depriving the audience of the background visuals of celebration. Unfortunately some TV news services are under the impression they are broadcasting on radio & judge that a journo’s head is more informative than action visuals.
However, in Queensland the commercial channels outdid themselves – they were all running on a one hour delay (due to no daylight saving up north) hence, after the results had been announced on ABC24, commercial viewers were subjected to sixty minutes of lead-up & conjecture about what the result might be. I think the Nine Network went ‘live’ with the result briefly but then reverted to the hour’s delay.
Hmmm, a repeat of Antiques Roadshow?
Seems, somehow, appropriate.
The ABC cant win. A lot of their coverage on the result this morning necessarily focussed on the celebrations from Yes supporters. I’d struggle to imagine how they could comprehensively cover this without infuriating the critics who are ready to pounce at any suggestion of bias.