After 21 years on breakfast television David “Kochie” Koch said goodbye to Seven’s Sunrise on Friday with none other than Anthony Albanese coming in to the studio to wish him well.
Congratulations on your retirement @kochie_online. After 21 years on @sunriseon7 you’ve definitely earned a sleep-in! pic.twitter.com/KYkLShW3Vy
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) June 8, 2023
In a farewell extravaganza that saw the show run well over time, tributes were paid to the self-confessed “daggy dad” and obscure finance journo who became an unlikely TV star, outlasting his co-hosts Melissa Doyle and Samantha Armytage in a competitive game.
'I cringe': Kochie makes fun of his very first morning hosting Sunrise.
— Sunrise (@sunriseon7) June 8, 2023
Tune in for Kochie's final show now on @Channel7 and @7plus. pic.twitter.com/661RQQPkAF
Everyone from the Beaconsfield mine disaster survivors to the former prime minister Kevin Rudd and the former Liberal minister Joe Hockey turned up to say goodbye. Kochie had famously been invited into the ambulance after Brant Webb and Todd Russell were rescued. Rudd and Hockey, who were a key double act on Sunrise in the early days, appeared from Washington, where they are both based. “We had some intimate moments,” Hockey said. “I am the only person who has slept with you apart from [your wife] Libby, on 14 occasions. We looked at each other in the most intimate way.” Hockey was referring to the time the three men walked the Kokoda Trail together.
Koch was unpolished and corny but viewers responded to the homespun style of Kochie and Mel, making Sunrise one of commercial television’s most successful disrupters. “You showed us that looks aren’t everything,” the comedian Hans said after performing on the final show, as Koch’s co-host, Natalie Barr, wept openly.
Gender furore
The relationship between the Age and one of its columnists, Julie Szego, has imploded over a freelance article which was commissioned by the former Age editor Gay Alcorn over a year ago.
Szego, who also wrote a regular opinion column for the Melbourne newspaper, went public with her disappointment when the piece she submitted when Alcorn was still at the helm was not published. The lengthy piece is about youth gender transition, a topic Szego has been interested in for some time now.
If you want to know why this piece was rejected, you’ll have to ask the editor. https://t.co/Trc8pdJD2z
— Julie Szego (@JulieSzego) June 6, 2023
I envisaged the piece as the first in a series; I’ll be rolling out more.
We followed Szego’s suggestion and asked the editor, Patrick Elligett, why her feature had been rejected.
“I have explained to Julie in detail why I believe the piece she submitted, commissioned by the former editor more than a year ago, was unsuitable for publication in The Age,” Elligett told Weekly Beast.
“We continue to cover the issue of gender policy with balance, nuance and accuracy. We have published several stories on the topic in the past week. It is an issue many of our competitors will not touch.”
The Weekly Beast understands the Age was not impressed with Szego when she wrote on social media that her copy had been “rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary, such as ‘male’.”
Szego, who has since published the article on substack, declined to comment.
Gleeson’s 4BC lifeline
Seven months after the Sky News presenter and Courier-Mail columnist Peter Gleeson left News Corp when multiple instances of plagiarism were uncovered, Nine Radio has given handed him a lifeline.
Gleeson will take over from Neil Breen as Drive presenter on Queensland’s 4BC on 26 June. As a member of the Nine family “Gleeso” will be a colleague of the Nine News reporter Josh Bavas, whose political analysis he was caught lifting.
Why does today's Courier Mail analysis on Premier Palaszczuk by Peter Gleeson contain word for word chunks from my analysis for ABC News on Jackie Trad's departure more than two years ago? pic.twitter.com/FwsCnOnUwP
— Josh Bavas (@JoshBavas) October 28, 2022
Bavas saw his work in a 12-page “Special Investigation by Peter Gleeson” headlined “Power and Palaszczuk”, a hit job on the Queensland premier.
Then the Weekly Beast revealed Gleeson had filled 62% of an article with copy from a Queensland parliament factsheet. The ABC’s Media Watch uncovered more plagiarism.
Gleeson said at the time: “‘I apologise for breaching News Corp’s Code of Conduct and instances where I have not met the standards required.”
On Thursday Breen said Gleeson would “fill-in” before a permanent host was announced later in the year. “He’s a passionate journalist, he’s going to do a great job here on 4BC on Brisbane Live once I depart in a couple of weeks,” Breen told listeners.
“Gleeso, mate, I’ll ring you after the show … well done, brother.”
An article about Gleeson’s appointment in the Courier-Mail made no mention of plagiarism.
Smithy remembered
One of the greats of sports reporting, Wayne Smith, died suddenly aged 69 this week. Smith had a stellar 50-year career reporting on Queensland rugby, Australian swimming and Test cricket before retiring from News Corp in 2021.
Writing in the Australian, Peter Lalor said the news had hit the sporting community hard: “Journalists paused at The Oval in London before the World Test Championship to process the loss. English rugby reporters, Olympic veterans and the swimming fraternity all expressing their sadness at the passing of a legendary colleague and competitor.”
There is one non-sporting incident for which “Smithy” will also be remembered and it came when he was an assistant editor of the Courier-Mail in the 1990s under the editorship of the culture warrior Chris Mitchell.
“One of the quirkier tasks in which Smithy was conscripted, in fact, was that antediluvian culture war crusade about Manning Clark’s Order of Lenin,” the cricket writer Gideon Haigh wrote in the Australian. “One night on tour in Hobart, Peter Lalor, Andrew Faulkner and I cajoled Smithy into narrating it, and the tale could not have been outdone by Robert Harris; we laughed until we were sore.”
Haigh is referring to a notorious incident in 1999 when the Courier-Mail, under Smith’s byline, claimed Clark was a “Soviet agent of influence” who had been awarded the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union. It soon emerged there was no evidence for the claim and an investigation by the Australian Press Council found the allegation to be false, but Mitchell never retracted the story or apologised.
Army flaks keep their heads down
Now that Ben Roberts-Smith has lost his defamation case and been found by a federal court judge on the balance of probabilities to have murdered unarmed civilians while serving in the military in Afghanistan, even Army PR is feeling vulnerable as some members of the armed forces push back against the media. The Australian Army Public Relations Service Association has warned its members that they may feel that pressure.
“There is a perception in army that we are ‘media’,” the association told members in a post seen by the Weekly Beast. “There may be a slight blowback internally in you doing your job.”
“The damage to army has been great and potential damage from criminal proceedings even greater,” the post said. “In the light of these current and future problems, the focus will be on army reputation and minimising harm our corp has a huge role in this moving forward. I would ask you to all be aware of this in everything you do.”
Credlin credulous
For News Corp’s Peta Credlin, the reporting of Justice Anthony Besanko’s finding that, on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff has been a “media pile-on” and many of the public still see him as a hero.
“To large sections of the public, though, he’s still a tough “soldier’s soldier”; a hero, even if very possibly a flawed one, whose excesses, if any, are understandable in the cauldron of war,” Credlin wrote in the Australian under the headline “Soldier’s undoubted valour still counts”.
Credlin said she had been to the military base in Afghanistan four times and “if there was a hell on earth, that hell was Afghanistan”.
She added: “I [will] not join the media pile-on against Roberts-Smith … the lawyer in me was very careful to note that the legal circumstances of his defamation case were not a ‘war crimes’ trial as headlines might have implied.”
Delayed finding
The Australian Press Council has found that the Daily Telegraph breached standards with a March 2020 article headlined “Rian Ross Toyer in court accused of killing Mhelody Polan Bruno”.
“A Wagga man accused of choking a transgender woman to death one week before she was reportedly set to fly home has fronted court,” the story began.
“Emergency services were called to a Tarcutta Street unit where they found the 25-year-old transgender woman from the Philippines unresponsive.”
The council said that given the victim’s transgender status was not raised in court as a contributing factor to her manslaughter, the “repeated references to that status could lead some readers to conclude that this characteristic motivated her accused to take her life and was therefore either a cause of, or a factor in, her death”.
Given that the article was published three years ago we asked the press council why it had taken so long to resolve.
“The Australian Press Council recognises that the length of time between the publication date of the article and the publication date of the Adjudication was in this instance longer than usual,” a spokesperson said.
“As complaints are considered on a case-by-case basis, there is no definitive timeframe for a complaint’s resolution.”
