Sky News Australia rolls out the red carpet for Piers Morgan, who vows to take on ‘woke world’

Move over Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Peta Credlin – there is a new conservative loudmouth in town.

Piers Morgan, the former editor of the UK tabloid News of the World, has returned to the News Corp fold to anchor a global TV show. It will be shown on a new national television station in the UK called talkTV, on the US streaming service Fox Nation and on Sky News Australia.

He might be British but he swears he “has always loved Australia”.

“I can’t wait for my new show to start airing on Sky News Australia, putting the woke world to rights!” Morgan said in a global press announcement that included a picture of him sitting down with none other than Rupert Murdoch.

“Most Australians share my straight-talking, no-nonsense, common-sense view of life.”

Sky News Australia’s chief executive Paul Whittaker couldn’t hide his excitement, saying Morgan never backs down and takes on everyone from the president to members of the royal family.

“He is a traditionalist imbued with commonsense, intelligence and a knack for getting to the heart of a thorny issue,” Whittaker said. “We are delighted he will be joining the Sky News Australia lineup from early next year.’’

Markson’s story lab

Like other personalities in the global Murdoch stable, the Australian’s investigations writer Sharri Markson has an extensive News Corp network to promote her debut book and TV documentary, What Really Happened in Wuhan.

On Monday the Walkley award-winning journalist will front a “special television investigation” on Sky News Australia which includes “the first sit-down interview for an Australian broadcast media outlet with Donald Trump since he was elected US president in 2016”. (When they say “sit-down interview” they don’t mean in the same room but via a video link, Markson’s team has confirmed.)

On top of Markson’s forward sizzle reports in the Australian, there are stories in the Australian’s media section, ads in the Daily Telegraph, promos on Sky News Australia and even a double-page extract in the UK in the Murdoch-owned the Times.

And Markson has another trick up her sleeve. Her father is of course the famed publicist Max Markson and he is handling the publicity for her book.

Max sent out a release that says Sharri has been at the “forefront of investigating the origins of Covid-19” since March 2020 and her book is the “first international book to investigate the Covid-19 laboratory leak theory”. “Part-thriller, part-exposé, it features never-before-seen primary documents exposing China’s early cover-up of the virus,” Markson’s release says.

Max Markson, whose clients are more likely to be minor celebrities and reality TV personalities than investigative journalists, is the Australian agent for the Duchess of Sussex’s estranged half-brother Thomas Markle Jr. Markson also brokered the deal between Meghan’s estranged father Thomas Markle Sr and the Seven network for an ill-fated interview on breakfast show Sunrise this week.

Sunrise’s Markle interview falls flat

Seven’s Sunrise with David Koch and Natalie Barr, which is under pressure from a resurgent breakfast TV rival Today on Nine, thought they’d landed a big interview that would grab all the attention this week.

Sunrise has confirmed the network got the chequebook out for the chat with Markle Sr, which might explain why they ran it so long, much to the chagrin of viewers who complained on social media they were switching off.

The exclusive interview was hyped by the network as a “major world exclusive”.

But it turned out to be poison for Sunrise.

The interview was so unpopular the Today show beat Sunrise for the first time in over three years.

Karl Stefanovic and former 60 Minutes reporter Allison Langdon have been building Today’s audience steadily after a rocky year with Georgie Gardner and Deborah Knight as co-hosts.

Today had 248,000 metro viewers to Sunrise’s 237,000.

But wait, it gets worse. Koch and Barr had to apologise on air the next day for comments made by Markle Sr.

“On yesterday’s program in a live interview, Thomas Markle Sr, not uncharacteristically, went a bit rogue making some pretty wild and unfounded allegations,” Koch said.

“We did promise an unfiltered interview with Thomas Markle … in retrospect maybe we should have put a filter on him.”

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Barr said: “Seven did not intend for such allegations to be broadcast and has subsequently removed them from all versions of the program.

“We would like to apologise … that the allegations went to air.”

News Corp’s green mirage

If News Corp Australia is ending its “longstanding editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies” it has a funny way of going about it.

Ten days after the Sydney Morning Herald claimed Murdoch was turning over a fresh green leaf and would “advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050”, Andrew Bolt was pushing back, warning his readers to look out for “global warming porn”.

Bolt argued in the Herald Sun that global warming is “good for us” because the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences says farmers are on track to break the record for growing crops and raising animals.

With the Glasgow Cop26 summit on the horizon, Bolt warned: “You’ll hear a million stories about how it’s all death and disaster.

“How often will you let the fear mongers mislead you before you realise that much of what media tells you about global warming might not be true?”

On Friday the executive chairman of News Corp Australia, Michael Miller, said the company’s mastheads will cover “all views” and “not just the popular ones”, indicating the Murdoch empire may continue its pattern of climate science denial and ridicule towards climate action.

Kenny not warming to change

The Australian’s Chris Kenny appeared equally skeptical, mocking the Greens for naming a portfolio “climate emergency”.

“One of the shadow portfolios for the [Greens] leader himself is not called global warming, or climate change, it’s climate emergency,” Kenny said on his Sky News Australia show. “These people.”

This terminology is not new. More than two years ago the Guardian announced it was changing the language it uses to talk about the environment, eschewing terms like “climate change” for the more appropriately urgent “climate emergency”.

‘Bulging what?!’

ABC News Breakfast sports presenter Tony Armstrong has had an epic live TV slip of the tongue and his reaction to it has only served to grow his fanbase.

The former AFL player’s charisma and natural aptitude for broadcasting were on display this week when he accidentally said an injured player had a “bulging dick” rather than a “bulging disc”, and he just corrected himself and moved on.

“To cricket news, and Tim Paine is set to undergo neck surgery but medical staff remain confident he will be fit for the Ashes,” he said.

“Paine has a bulging dick that has been, bulging disc that has been – that’s a funny one – causing him pain in his neck and left arm and the injury hasn’t responded to treatment.”

Co-host Michael Rowland: “Bulging what?!”

Armstrong: “Disc, disc. I said disc.”

Rowland: “That’s what I thought you said.”

Triple J’s rising talent

The young reporter who exposed a $50m Ponzi scheme, chronicled the impact of lockdown on teenagers and revealed the poor treatment of transgender women in men’s prisons has been named the 2022 Andrew Olle Scholar.

Meghna Bali is a digital reporter with Triple J’s Hack. “I was raised in multicultural, working-class neighbourhoods – the kinds of communities that don’t have access to and aren’t often reflected in nuanced ways across Australian media,” Bali said. “I’m passionate about changing that and based on the resourcing and hiring decisions of the past few years, so is the ABC.”