That Sharri Markson ‘pit bull’ insult and other excruciating hot mic moments

There are certain phrases that carry with them a powerful dread for anyone with an even slightly public- facing job — “texts read in court”, “zoom incident”, “leaked emails” and “caught on a hot mic”.

ABC journalist Stephen Dziedzic, Nine’s Matthew Knott and The Australian‘s Ben Packham have been caught having a chinwag about the industry in the lead-up to a press conference featuring Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The headline item, splashed across News Corp outlets this morning, is Dziedzic referring to News Corp star Sharri Markson as “a pit bull” and “so unhinged”, while conceding her reporting on the origin of COVID-19 may have something to it. “You can be unhinged and still be right,” he laughs. (Dziedzic uses the word “unhinged” quite a bit during the conversation.)

ABC figure makes a berk of himself while reluctantly praising News Corp’s reporting? It must have been like Christmas at Holt Street.

Talking about the internal issues at the ABC after the redundancy of political editor Andrew Probyn, Dziedzic gives a more or less textbook example of dramatic irony.

“It was the worst thing like, whoever the fuck leaked to our dear friends at The Australian,” he laughs. “I would be hypocritical to complain about leaks …” he goes on, blissfully unaware that he is in the process of leaking to every newsroom in the country in real time.

What’s surprising about hot mic incidents is just how frequently they happen. Here are some of our favourite people with years of media experience forgetting that microphones still work when you’re not looking at them.

Attacking foes

The mildest and most common hot mic scandal is to be caught slagging off your opponents in terms somewhat stronger than you might use publicly. Think former WA premier Mark McGowan telling members of the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce that Liberal MP Andrew Hastie had scarfed a bunch of “cold war pills” at birth and couldn’t look at the world any other way, or former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern taking a break from her generally sunny approach to rhetoric by muttering that right-wing opposition member David Seymour was “such an arrogant prick” after a barrage of questions in Parliament.

Attacking friends

What really gets cut-through is invective aimed at apparent allies. Then-attorney-general George Brandis was caught on camera calling his state LNP colleagues “very, very mediocre”, telling Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger “they’re not very good”. One would love to know what those colleagues had said about Brandis around the time of his award-winningly disastrous chat with David Speers about the definition of “metadata”.

These moments represent the real gold available via hot mics — finding out that politicians don’t like their opponents, or certain journalists, or a “bigoted woman” who bails them up on the campaign trail is entertaining but hardly revelatory.

But compare that with the insight of the 1993 footage of then-UK prime minister John Major talking to ITV’s Michael Brunson after a TV interview about the difficulty he was facing from the “Eurosceptics” in his cabinet. The pair make several references to three unnamed troublemakers (widely understood to be Michael Portillo, Michael Howard and Peter Lilley):

Brunson: Three of them — perhaps we had better not mention open names in this room — perhaps the three of them would have — if you’d done certain things, they would have come along and said, ‘Prime minister, we resign’. So you say ‘Fine, you resign.’
Major: We all know which three that is. Now think that through. Think it through from my perspective. You are prime minister. You have got a majority of 18. You have got a party still harking back to a golden age that never was but is now invented. And you have three right-wing members of the cabinet actually resigned. What happens in the parliamentary party?
Brunson: They create a lot of fuss but you have probably got three damn good ministers in the cabinet to replace them.
Major: Oh, I can bring in other people into the cabinet, that is right, but where do you think most of this poison has come from? It is coming from the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You and I can both think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. Would you like three more of the bastards out there?

Meanwhile, at a Pacific Islands Forum in Papua New Guinea in 2015, then-PM and gaffe-a-tron 3000 Tony Abbott was heard commenting on meetings running behind schedule. In answer, then-immigration minister Peter Dutton undermined the future humanising profiles he was to receive by joking about our allies’ likely inundation at the hands of the climate change we’ve done so much to accelerate: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.” The prime minister has a chuckle, only for the merriment to immediately drain out of the conversation after Scott Morrison, at the time social service minister, said: “There’s a boom up there.”

Straight-up confessing to crimes

Whatever embarrassment they undoubtedly feel, perhaps those above will console themselves with the knowledge that it could have been much worse. There was of course Donald Trump bragging of his ability to sexually assault women thanks to his fame, a moment which should have disqualified him from the 2016 presidency but ended up serving as a sobering indication of what he was able to get away with.

And then there’s real estate heir Robert Durst. Suspected for years of several murders when he sat down with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki for a 2015 documentary, Durst goes into a bathroom, still wearing a microphone, and mumbles to himself in the mirror: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

He was arrested the day after the documentary aired.