Miriki Performing Arts has gracefully accepted an apology from News Corp outlets for publishing pictures of their young performers next to a story about child sexual abuse – but questioned why the apology was issued at taking-out-the-trash o’clock on Friday 7 June.
A Sky News article on the sexual abuse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children which appeared on the Australian and the Daily Telegraph websites carried pictures of kids from Miriki at the Cairns children’s festival, in body paint art designed by David Mundraby.
“We did not have the consent of the children and the parents, Miriki or Mundraby to use the image and we unreservedly apologise to them for the hurt and harm that using the image in this way has caused,” the apology read.
Miriki’s chief executive officer, Pauline Lampton, said she felt sick, angry and upset when she heard about the photo. She said the families were angry and distraught and that Mundraby, a Mandingalbay elder, was “deeply saddened”.
“That photo was taken for a children’s festival and should never have even been considered for use for anything else, let alone in this disgusting way.
“This was another insult to the many insults we as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience regularly and have experienced for over 200 years … [W]hen something like this happens we feel that we are not valued or respected at all and that the attitudes towards us have not really changed.
“We were ultimately happy with how the matter settled and were initially grateful for the public apologies. However, we were upset to find out that the apologies were published at a time that is apparently referred to by the media as ‘taking out the trash’ – a time [7pm on Friday] when fewer people are likely to see it. That was disappointing and made us question the genuineness of the apologies.”
Lampton said they would like to see legislation to stop images of people being used without written permission.
Guardian Australia has asked the outlets about the timing of the apology.
Speculation unleashed
There was some gloating from Sky News After Darkers when Media Watch’s host, Paul Barry, announced he was “hanging up the mic”.
Yup. I'm hanging up the mic at the end of this year. But lots of fun to be had before then. https://t.co/dTzST7Wgwh
— Paul Barry (@TheRealPBarry) June 13, 2024
Host Chris Kenny – whose loathing of the ABC as a whole has displaced any gratitude he might feel for that time Media Watch was on his side over the whole dog incident – said it was “great news”.
The speculation about Barry’s replacement began immediately, with a fervour rivalled only by the imminent announcement of the next Doctor Who.
“They’ll be casting the net far and wide now for an old, pommy lefty to start bashing News Corp every Monday night,” Kenny said. The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair suggested recycling old hosts. “Just keep going round the old white guys,” he said, in apparent jest that leaves one wondering if it was a veiled call for more diversity at the ABC.
There has been a preponderance of middle-aged white men in the role since Stuart Littlemore first grabbed the gig in 1989 – no real surprise considering the preponderance of middle-aged white men in senior journalism positions. Liz Jackson, Monica Attard, Jeremy Fernandez and Janine Perrett have been notable exceptions.
On X (formerly Twitter), journalist Antoinette Lattouf (who has been enmeshed in something of a stoush with the national broadcaster) ran a poll:
There’s only one sensible way of doing this.
— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) June 13, 2024
Who should replace Paul Barry as Media Watch host?
Responses to her tweet ranged from the ludicrous to the sublime, and included Geraldine Doogue, Bananas in Pyjamas, Andrew Bolt, Kerry O’Brien, and Mr Squiggle.
Barry will stay until the end of the year.
They grow up so fast
It’s been a decade since the Daily Mail landed in Australia and started giving “readers what they want, not what we think they should want”, as editor Felicity Hetherington told Mediaweek. From which we can understand that readers want an infinitely scrolling, cluttered page peppered with clickbait headlines (UFO encounters! Millions shocked at something unshocking! The surprising reason you should always carry a spaetzle maker!) alongside a sidebar of shame featuring the likes of Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, Kyle and Jackie O and someone from MAFS.
It’s less the red top flavour of the Daily Mail that earns the ire of other media outlets, though, than the tendency to purloin copy.
Mediaweek reports a party is planned for staff, but otherwise the celebrations have been quite muted – not quite up there with the Australian’s ongoing 60th birthday celebrations.
Breaking records and spirits
There was some depressing reading in this year’s Women in Media Industry Insight Report, released this week. “Women at breaking point: 2024 research reveals record-high career dissatisfaction,” was the headline. Anxiety and financial pressures are the predictable culprits. Author Petra Buchanan wrote that “inadequate remuneration” topped the list of grievances. “Increasingly, senior and mid-career women are considering quitting their jobs driven by worry about the availability of senior roles and increased fear of redundancies,” she wrote.
Forty-three per cent of respondents saw the media industry’s commitment to gender equality as somewhat weak, and 13% as very weak. Comments from the women surveyed included wanting to see “less narcissism”, “less egos from senior men” and “having an editor who doesn’t play favourites”.
One in three said not having their voices heard was a daily challenge.
Nine culture shock
The former Nine boss Peter Meakin popped up on Radio National this week to talk about inappropriate behaviour and abuse allegations at Nine (and of course, the fallout after the former chair Peter Costello stepped down after he apparently stepped into journalist Liam Mendes).
Meakin conceded Nine was “blokey” when he was there (at the turn of the century) but that there wasn’t a massive problem. “Just the occasional offence,” he said. Women who came to him often didn’t want to lodge official complaints, he said, and he agreed that the reluctance might be because they didn’t want their careers affected. But “resilient” women were OK, he reckons, name checking Liz Hayes and Tracy Grimshaw as people who had “prospered” during “allegedly bad times”.
Channel Nine has been “far too slow to acknowledge and take seriously the concerns raised by editorial staff about the failings of management in providing safe workplaces,” the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance said this week.
Catherine West, taking over as chair of Nine Entertainment, said the board knew recent events had been “extremely difficult and de-stabilising” and would be addressed through a cultural review and other actions.
“The board and management are united in focusing on the well-being of our people in all parts of our business … We want to ensure our people can feel proud of our company and colleagues and the work they do,” she said.
Numbers game
Have some sympathy for News Corp Australia staff, who often read about planned redundancies in rival media publications before they have the full picture themselves. There’s a pattern to these things.
First, an ominous visit from management, then rampant speculation about how many will go.
On Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story online that 40% of sales staff were set to get tapped in the latest restructure.
That was changed to “up to 80 roles” after a News Corp spokesperson said the 40% claim was “wildly inaccurate”, the SMH reported.
Guardian Australia asked News Corp what the real figure or percentage was.
“Like most companies we do not provide commentary on employment matters but the story that first appeared in the Nine Entertainment tabloids, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, contained multiple errors, including the egregiously false claim 40% of sales staff were to lose their jobs,” a spokesperson said (note the pointed barb about the “tabloids”).
A whack over baccy
Channel Seven’s Spotlight program has had another spot of bother. An Australian Communications and Media Authority investigation found it “inaccurately portrayed a participant as a representative of the tobacco industry” in promos for its November 2023 Killers in the Mist episode on the dangers of vaping.
Acma’s report said a voiceover referring to big tobacco was played over vision of the (unnamed) participant and that an ordinary, reasonable viewer would make an association. The unnamed person then says “nicotine is relatively benign”.
“Acma’s view is that the ordinary reasonable viewer would have understood that the participant was a representative of the tobacco industry,” the report said, adding that the promo also conveyed that the tobacco industry wanted the public to “turn a blind eye” to the dangers of vaping.
The participant is a “medical doctor with a special interest in smoking cessation”.
Seven disagreed, saying the nature of the participant’s work was not included in the promotion because “it was not material to the program promotion” and that the promo did not convey to an ordinary reasonable viewer that the participant represented the views of big tobacco, and that the participant had previously seemed supportive of the tobacco industry’s position.
Seven agreed to delete the promos and remind its team of accuracy obligations, Acma said.
Info FoI-bles
The desiccated-sounding Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s third five-yearly review of the Information Publication Scheme (IPS) had some nuggets that, while juicy, will not surprise the nation’s journalists.
In effect, the IPS requires that bureaucrats, who often have a phobia-level reluctance to release information that should be public, get over themselves and get it out there.
Only 29% of government agencies have a strategy for increasing access to their information, down from 35% in 2018.
And only 73% of agencies publish information that they routinely release under freedom of information (FoI) requests, down from 79% in 2018. Meaning they have the information, they release it when the FoI Act requires it, but don’t proactively do so.
In fairness, it can be tricky to work out what to publish without breaching privacy laws, and how to publish it. In unfairness, processes such as FoI and senate estimates routinely show that it’s often not that tricky at all.
