Politicians and big companies alike are always hunting for the best way to drop bad news when we’re not paying attention.
With the release of Taylor Swift’s latest (and, I’m reliably informed, mediocre) album and the ensuing attention, your correspondent wondered what kinds of media releases were being cooked up by bureaucrats under the cover of relative darkness.
This practice of “taking out the trash” — known in popular culture likely thanks to The West Wing — has been a long-standing practice of governments and corporations, which often drop undesirable news late on a Friday afternoon to avoid scrutiny as the public’s attention turns to the weekend. In the modern news cycle, this can sometimes include major world events.
In a particularly brazen recent example, minutes into Justice Michael Lee’s verdict of Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson, Channel Seven dropped the news that the man responsible for Lehrmann’s bombshell Spotlight interview, executive producer Mark Llewellyn, no longer worked for the Seven Network.
Earlier this year, as the world watched the Kansas City Chiefs, Swift’s new favourite football team, win Super Bowl LVIII in the most-watched US television broadcast since the moon landing, the Israeli government launched a bombardment of Rafah in southern Gaza, previously designated by Israel as a safe zone for civilians and refugees.
Back in 2020, the Morrison government dropped two bombshell reports late on consecutive Fridays, following the $60 billion JobKeeper accounting bungle with the announcement that it would repay $721 million to welfare recipients and scrap the robodebt scheme.
And just this week gone, at 5:45pm on Friday night, the Victorian government declared that the parliamentary secretary for education, Barwon South MP Darren Cheeseman, had been asked to resign from his role “as a result of allegations of persistent, inappropriate behaviour in the workplace towards staff”. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan joined a rally on Sunday marching to demand action on violence against women.
So, does ‘taking the trash out’ still work?
While the practice continues, the nature of media cycles has changed drastically over the years. Gone are the days of daily newspapers being more agile than weekend publications, or the primary method of news consumption being physical print media.
Crikey spoke to Toby Ralph, a marketer and political strategist whose former clients include tobacco companies, nuclear waste companies and former prime minister John Howard.
“Shit happens, and when you’re a politician or corporation, it happens publicly,” Ralph said.
“If your carbon reporting doesn’t meet the mark, if your profit is under budget or your policy turns out to be another idiotic mistake that has to be dumped, the question becomes, ‘How can we minimise the reputational damage?’”
“So when something big happens — be it a Taylor Swift scandal, a war — PR hacks scurry to release the most boring possible account of their bad news, knowing it will be largely ignored.
“It’s the propagandist’s equivalent of dumping the body in the dead of night. This tactic diffuses the risk of future scandal because it becomes old news.”
While Ralph says the advent of social media has complicated the use of the tactic, our news channels are “still dominated by the big themes”.
However, Guardian Australia politics reporter Amy Remeikis told Crikey she believes bin drops are “old tricks” that are just “hangovers from a bygone era”.
“It doesn’t matter when the information is released — if it’s a big deal, it’ll become a big deal.”
Asked whether politicians had become savvy in their use of the bin drop — timing their bad news drops for major cultural moments rather than Friday afternoons — Remeikis said they might be tricky, but political reporters were trickier.
“It’s such an old trick it almost becomes a cliche. Political bureaus will make sure there is someone rostered on late on a Friday when some trash is expected, particularly around a long weekend.
“It makes you more determined to run it and return to it — and make clear when the information was released and why.”
Remember any other outrageous bin drops? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
