Traded in
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has reportedly been booted from his role as an adviser to the UK Board of Trade. According to Desmog and (picked up by UK leftie tabloid The Mirror but weirdly nowhere else that we could see), “all existing advisers to the Board of Trade have been stood down by the Labour government”.
The news gave us a good chance to remember the various flavours of horror his initial appointment created across the pond: figures as various as Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, Dr Who and Queer as Folk showrunner Russel T. Davies and legendary actor Sir Ian McKellen all took a look at the history of Abbottonian rhetoric on climate change, women, homosexuality and Indigenous affairs and concluded our former PM was a simply “awful” choice. Embarrassing, yes. But hey, Australia mentioned!
We asked Abbott to confirm whether this was true (in happier news, we also tried to congratulate him about a rumour we’d heard that he’d recently gotten his boat licence). We didn’t hear back on either point.
Murdoch-torate
A tipster got in contact to point out this item in the local Oxford paper: “Oxford University has explained why media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been removed from the name of a professorship he endowed.” Yep, it turns out that since the early ’90s the grandiose “Rupert Murdoch Professor in Language and Communication” has been available. The change, to “Professor of Language and Communication, endowed by News UK”, apparently isn’t the institution catching up on the news and trying to distance itself from its former pupil, but to clarify that it’s not Rupes who is personally shelling out for the position.
“This change rationalises and clarifies that the post, currently vacant, has always been funded by News UK (formerly News International) and follows University policy that donors are recognised in professorship titles,” a spokesman from the university told the paper.
Way back in 1999, British playwright Alan Bennett turned down an honorary Oxford degree on account of the Murdoch’s association, writing in the London Review of Books: “I’m aware of the arguments about bad money being put to good uses, but I still think that Murdoch is not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself.”
Last year, dozens of academics at Stanford University wrote an open letter to protest Murdoch’s association with the institution via his membership of the Hoover Institutes Board of Overseers.
Hangin’ on the telephone
We’re not shy here in the bunker about poking other media organisations where a bit of poking is warranted. Naturally then, there is a close, if sometimes tense working relationship between the media reporters of the world and the media managers of media outlets — those who speak to us at all, that is.
So imagine our surprise when we got a phone call from Mathew Charles, News Corp Australia’s head of communications. As you may have figured out from our regular use of the phrase “News Corp did not respond in time for publication,” he’s been a difficult man to get a hold of.
Charles asked if we were happy to do him a favour if we had a moment — of course, we said. Always happy to help. However, that’s where things started to get a bit confusing. Charles asked whether we had endorsed a political party at the 2022 federal election, noting that a number of News Corp outlets endorsed the Coalition, and with another election coming up, the company was looking to provide information to its global overlords as to what was happening Down Under.
Your correspondent wasn’t at Crikey in 2022 — a mere university student — but dutifully committed to finding out. For the record, Crikey didn’t endorse anyone.
“Thanks, Kerry!”, came the cheerful reply. Kerry? Who’s Kerry, we wondered?
On further interrogation, it turned out that Charles had somehow mistaken us for Kerry Warren, editor of news.com.au. Apart from anything else, what a compliment!
Meet’n potato
Shout out to Twitter user Angry Goddess who spotted a meeting for which the “eyes” emoji was created. Ahead of the Queensland state election, it appears federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was chowing down with Today host Karl Stefanovic.
Gong for Harrison
“We are happy to announce that Harrison.ai has been recognized as the winner of the NSW Development Impact Award at the Export Council of Australia annual event,” the AI tech company brightly announced this week on LinkedIn. “This honour reflects our ongoing commitment to driving impactful change through AI innovation, particularly in healthcare”.
We’d say “impactful” is just about right.
Harrison.ai has been at the centre of the I-MED Radiology Network controversy assiduously reported by our very own Cam Wilson. Harrison’s flagship product — a tool that can read chest X-rays and help clinicians detect issues — was trained on 800,000 chest x-rays sourced from a “hefty and valuable dataset” which includes scans handed over by I-MED, Australia’s largest medical imaging provider. It appears this sensitive and private patient information — including scans sourced from emergency room patients — was shared without the knowledge or express consent of the patients concerned.
Following Crikey‘s reporting, Harrison apportioned the blame to I-MED: “Questions posed by the article in relation to I-MED data collection and consent are not matters for Harrison to respond to,” chief operating officer Peter Huynh said in a leaked email to investors.
This appears to be good enough for the Premiers Department in NSW, which runs the awards. We’ll be interested to know whether the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, currently investigating the Harrison.ai/I-MED matter, reaches the same conclusion.
