Anthony Albanese managed to straddle the media divide on one busy Friday, dropping into Guardian Australia’s newsroom to record a podcast in the morning, before he was due to visit Sydney’s News Corp headquarters to join chair Lachlan Murdoch for the unveiling of Sky News Australia’s new name in the afternoon. Just imagine the whiplash.
The prime minister planned to join the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, and a cavalcade of Sky presenters to mingle over drinks and speeches inside the new home of Sky. The News Corp platform has been forced to rebrand as it loses the rights to the name Sky News in December when a 10-year deal with UK Sky News expires.
Despite Sky offering an almost exclusive roster of on-air guests from the other side of politics, Labor leaders continue to accept News Corp invites. (In 2024 the PM attended Lachlan’s Christmas party, The Australian’s 60th birthday party and the opening of Qtopia Sydney, funded by the Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch Foundation.)
On Thursday, just to take one night as an example, the following were guests on Sky: the Liberal leader, Angus Taylor, the shadow ministers Tim Wilson, Michaelia Cash, Anne Ruston and Jonathon Duniam, the Nationals backbenchers Matt Canavan and Ross Cadell, and the One Nation recruit Barnaby Joyce.
The newly renovated studios are inside the Holt Street headquarters in Surry Hills alongside the newspapers, but that’s where the camaraderie ends. Journalists at the Daily Telegraph and The Australian have been kept at arm’s length from the new digs for fear of the name and logo being revealed ahead of time.
It appears to have worked – the new name has not leaked.
We reported last month that the company had lodged six brand names with IP Australia and was awaiting the regulator’s approval to register them as trademarks.
Bone dry story
The former News Corp journalist turned true crime podcaster Bryan Littlely believed he had “most likely” found the bones of the Beaumont children – three siblings who disappeared from a beach in South Australia in 1966.
“We are closer in the past decade than we were in the first 50 years,” Littlely told the Nightly in an almost 2,000-word “exclusive” on the so-called discovery.
Melenie Ambrose reported that “citizen investigators” had helped Littlely find “new witnesses, evidence of a hidden network around the Beaumont family and even a possible child’s bone now in police hands”.
“Littlely insists the Beaumont children remain ‘very much in play’, citing overlapping suspects and similar age ranges of victims,” she wrote.
Littlely, a former Adelaide Advertiser journalist, is “frustrated” he had to wait so long for the police to test the bone, a process police say took much longer because Littlely decided to cut the bone into smaller pieces before handing it over.
A little over a week after the Nightly piece was published, South Australia police put out an unusually frank statement criticising the citizen sleuths, and announcing that a forensic examination had determined the bone fragments were not human remains.
“If the bone fragment had been human, the way it was handled, cut, and packaged could have significantly hindered the extraction of DNA and may have prevented the identification of a deceased person,” police said.
“Such actions have the potential to cause serious detriment to investigations and undue distress to families of missing persons.”
The police referred to the social media speculation stirred up by Littlely without naming him.
“SA Police is urging the community and media outlets to exercise caution and responsibility when sharing, reporting, or promoting information relating to missing person cases.”
Littlely said he was “disappointed but not distracted” by the police response and would now have the bone “independently tested. To be sure.”
How goes the war?
It’s a little awkward for the Nine newspapers – but a relief for all of us – that an alarming 2023 front page warning about the threat of “war with China within three years” appears not to have eventuated.
On 7 March it will be three years since the Red Alert series was published by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, featuring a panel of five national security experts who warned that Australia faced a potential war with China within three years.
The multimedia series was widely criticised as hysterical and hyperbolic, most colourfully by the former prime minister Paul Keating and comprehensively by Paul Barry on Media Watch.
Margaret Simons, writing in Guardian Australia, spoke to a range of foreign affairs specialists who described the series variously as “pretentious”, “irresponsible” and implicitly racist in its depictions of China.
We await an update from the SMH and the Age in some 15 days on how the series is holding up.
Silence barely broken
The media got overexcited this week when there was a development in the case against the accused Bondi beach terrorist Naveed Akram.
He made his first court appearance in Sydney and the headlines were somewhat overblown. They claimed he had broken his silence, uttered his first words and he had been seen for the first time.
Bondi shooter utters first words in first court showing – MSN
Bondi Beach massacre accused breaks silence in court – Agence France-Presse
Alleged Bondi shooter seen after arrest –news.com.au
The reality was far more prosaic.
The 24-year-old appeared via video link in the Downing Centre local court and said two words: “yeah” and “yep”. The much-promised first sighting was a court sketch by the artist Rocco Fazzari, and of course we had already seen multiple photographs and videos of the alleged terrorist.
Back to Bondi
On Sunday the first Australian interview with one of the Bondi heroes, Ahmed al-Ahmed, will air on Nine’s 60 Minutes.
The Syrian-born father of two helped disarm one of two gunmen during the terror attack and was badly injured by five bullets.
For the premiere of the 48th season of 60 Minutes, the reporter Dimity Clancey takes Ahmed back to Bondi beach, his arm still in a sling.
Ahmed was interviewed by the US broadcaster CBS at the end of December and about the same time he was photographed with the Sky News Australia host Sharri Markson, who said on social media she had secured an interview.
But the interview did not proceed, leading to an extraordinary 1,500 word lament by the Sky News director of programs, Mark Calvert, who was more than a little uncharitable about the man widely hailed as a hero.
Sources close to Ahmed told Weekly Beast he was very unwell at the time and felt pressured and misled by Sky News. He wrote on Instagram: “They didn’t even care about my health condition!” The post was later deleted.
Markson’s Sky documentary on the terrorist attack, Bondi: A Timeline of Terror, will air on Tuesday. She has also teamed up with Alex Ryvchin from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to write a book, Bondi Terror, to be published by HarperCollins in September.
“I’ve such a strong sense that the other media will not do this properly,” Markson told Sky viewers. “You know, just like after the Holocaust, as you say, all of those stories need to be recorded, and we have to do that now.”
Bio engineering
In December the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age stopped disclosing that the conservative columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness is a senior fellow at the rightwing thinktank the Centre for Independent Studies. Her byline referred to her simply as “an independent insights and advocacy strategist”.
After we approached Nine, the publisher said it was a “production error” and the CIS disclosure would be added in future in print, and online articles would be amended.
McGuinness’s online bio is now pretty comprehensive: “Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
McGuinness said: “I’ve always told my editors that they were very welcome to just link to my LinkedIn profile instead of using up column inches publishing my CV each week.”
