ABC journalists' climate crisis group survives political heat

Last year Justin Milne got into trouble for acting like he ran the ABC, giving directions for staff to be sacked or telling management what they should do. But no one seems to mind the current ABC chair’s forthright style. Ita Buttrose is in demand and she grants interviews and makes statements that occasionally sound like she, and not David Anderson, is the managing director. Or at least that’s how certain media outlets interpret her comments, to be fair to Buttrose.

Headlines such as “Ita Buttrose urged to scrap MeToo documentary” and “Ita Buttrose pulls ABC’s Q&A show over ‘call to violence’” add to this perception.

In the last few weeks she has “pulled Q&A”, made comments about bias and political correctness, and now has appeared to veto a staff-led climate emergency group to develop ways to report on the climate crisis.

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The Australian reported that Buttrose had “ruled out” the creation of a staff advisory group after the paper revealed ABC staff had suggested to colleagues they form an “ABC-staff climate crisis advisory group” and some staff welcomed the idea enthusiastically in a leaked email chain.

Buttrose was asked about the initiative, which the Oz saw as something sinister, on ABC Adelaide’s Mornings with David Bevan.

She told Bevan, “it was one of those ideas that is not going to happen”, perhaps meaning it was not going to form official policy.

“Policy is decided by the leadership, not by members of the staff,” Buttrose said, adding that it was not her call but that of the leadership team. “I haven’t had anything to do with it,” she said.

But Weekly Beast can reveal the staff move has not been stymied at all. Staff are free to discuss climate change coverage among themselves and are still planning to go ahead with the advisory group, with 77 people expressing an interest already. There has been no edict from above to stop the email chain.

Meanwhile over at News Corp, executive chairman Rupert Murdoch’s claim that “there are no climate change deniers around I can assure you” has left people wondering whether the Oz will get an edict from above that it needs to stop publishing climate deniers.

Clearly editor-in-chief Chris Dore doesn’t have the memo yet because on Friday the paper published denier-in-chief Ian Plimer declaring “We are not living in a period of catastrophic climate change”.

ABC holds its nerve on Spicer doco

The Tracey Spicer-fronted documentary Silent No More is being furiously re-edited and thoroughly legalled by the ABC ahead of its scheduled broadcast on Monday, in the Four Corners timeslot.

Related: ABC apologises after sex abuse survivors' names shown in Tracey Spicer #MeToo documentary

The ABC was forced to apologise last week for failing to blur out the names of three survivors of sexual abuse or harassment before releasing the #MeToo film to a handful of reviewers last month.

With just a few days to broadcast the three x 42-minute documentary was not available for preview, and on-air promos were conspicuously absent from ABC TV because of the last-minute checks. This fuelled rumours it was going to be pulled from the schedule at the last minute.

But the ABC says it is going ahead as planned.

“The ABC again reiterates that no names, images, emails, stories or any other details – identifying or otherwise – of anyone who has suffered sexual abuse or harassment will be broadcast in Silent No More without their explicit consent,” a spokesman said. “We refer you to our full statement.”

The problems arose when Spicer agreed to be filmed reading out survivor stories from her computer screen and some details of the confidential messages were shown in the documentary.

The debacle has exposed how vulnerable the ABC is when it outsources its programs to the independent sector. This film may air in the prestigious Four Corners spot but it has not been produced by ABC news and current affairs journalists.

There is a lot riding on the three-parter, which cost an estimated $200,000 to $250,000 per hour, funded in part by Screen Australia.

SBS saves the sizzle

After a month of razzle-dazzle and sizzle reels, Australia’s five free-to-air networks’ 2020 program launches came to an end on Wednesday with SBS’s multicultural feast for 500 media and advertisers at Sydney’s The Cutout at Barangaroo.

They saved the best for last. With a budget a fraction that of Ten, Nine and Seven, and significantly smaller than its bigger public service sibling, the ABC, SBS delivered a slate rich in original, diverse and surprising content.

Starting off with Ten unveiling its new MasterChef judges last month, the other networks offered several crass reality shows packed with advertorials, with drama and documentary an afterthought. The ABC’s offering was more interesting, with a raft of local dramas – Stateless, Fallout, Mystery Road, Harrow and The Heights – but it lacked the spark of the SBS schedule.

Highlights include Rachel Perkins’ First Wars, a polemic documentary series about the 100-year history of the frontier conflict between the Indigenous population and the settlers; SBS’s first period drama, New Gold Mountain, and topical documentaries, Who Gets to Stay in Australia?, Addicted, Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do and Come Fly with Me.

With the proliferation of streaming services now available, don’t forget SBS on Demand, which is free.

AFR’s corporate crush

The Australian Financial Review really loves the Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella.

Nadella has been the subject of no fewer than 10 articles over four days, starting on 18 November. They have been, in the main, fawning and very lengthy running to thousands of words.

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“Nadella charmed the pants off the audience” at the AFR’s Chanticleer lunch this week, where he was interviewed by AFR journalist Tony Boyd, readers were told.

“Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has successfully positioned itself as the world’s “good tech” company,” another piece said.

A Microsoft employee was even quoted saying she loved listening to her boss.

“Microsoft sales director Tiffany Wright said she liked hearing Nadella respond to the Financial Review’s Chanticleer columnist Tony Boyd’s questions on Microsoft’s company culture, and the idea of gravitating towards the good parts of company culture and ditching the bad during his rise to the top.”

“Nadella cracked guests up with his easy sense of humour, regaled tales of his childhood growing up in India, and talked about his path to the top of Microsoft with likeable humility,” readers were told, in case they hadn’t worked out what a great man he was.

The Chanticleer lunch in Sydney is a nice little earner for the Fin, but even that doesn’t explain the overkill.

Boyd had a disclosure at the end of his articles – “The author’s self-managed super fund owns shares in Microsoft” – but that wouldn’t explain the enthusiasm for the CEO either.

Editor Michael Stutchbury says there was no commercial objective for the lunch “other than showcasing the power of the Australian Financial Review’s brand and delivering high value content to our paying subscribers”.

“Our lunch attracted the cream of Australian business,” Stutch said. “The Financial Review’s coverage of the event was driven solely by the capacity of Australia’s biggest business and finance newsroom and Australia’s leading business technology news masthead to meet the demands of our paying subscribers. The Nadella stories were among our most read stories of the week.

“I’d be surprised if, within its lesser means, the Guardian Australia didn’t give blanket coverage to any similar lunch it managed to organise with Satya Nadella – or the likes of Jeremy Corbyn!”

Weak effort

Worst front page story of the week has to go to the Courier-Mail for this shocker. The story is not just distasteful, it’s plain wrong. Weekly Beast understands the man wasn’t medevacced to Australia because of a “botched penis enlargement”, but for an entirely unrelated medical condition. He did attempt a backyard penis enlargement, but it did not lead to his evacuation.

Corrections corner

The ABC has had a couple of interesting corrections recently.

The first was for a report from the ABC in Pilbara which claimed that Elijah Doherty was “run over in 2016 by 56-year-old Wayne Martin”.

The Indigenous teenager was run over by a 56-year-old man, but it wasn’t Martin, and the offender’s identity is still suppressed by the court.

“On November 11 ABC Pilbara reported that Wayne Martin ran over Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie in 2016,” the correction said. “This was not the case. Wayne Martin was the Western Australia chief justice at the WA supreme court where the case was held. The 56-year-old man responsible cannot be identified.”

The second one was a correction which it says it didn’t need to make but did so “in good faith”. A reader was concerned that an ABC Eyre Peninsula article stated that teenagers had walked through an “untouched” landscape in 1843 when Indigenous people had been in Australia for many thousands of years. The ABC said the article did say they were “the first western people” to walk south of Streaky Bay and included a picture caption which clearly stated that they “walked on beaches no westerners had ever stepped on”.

“Nevertheless, in good faith, the ABC amended the article to state: ‘In 1843 two teenagers fled the brutal life of a whaling station at Fowlers Bay on the far west coast of South Australia and walked more than 500 kilometres through a pristine landscape to be rescued’.”

Step forward for online

Journalists who work for digital media startups or digital-only publications – like Daily Mail Australia – will be treated equally to their print colleagues under a landmark Fair Work ruling handed down on Thursday.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance welcomed the decision, which they said “removes the award’s outdated focus solely on print journalists which placed digital workers at a disadvantage”. Digital journalists will now have access to minimum standards for wages, penalty rates, overtime and other conditions of employment such as hours of work and breaks just as their print colleagues do, the media union said.

The MEAA media federal president, Marcus Strom, said: “Digital is the reality of all newsrooms today. It’s about time the award caught up with the working lives of our members.”

Guardian Australia’s journalists have access to penalty and overtime rates under their enterprise agreement, which came into effect in July 2019.