Sharri Markson spent the week in Israel for her eponymous Sky News Australia program reporting, in her signature way, on the Israel-Gaza war.
The highlight of her trip was a meeting with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, complete with selfies, which she posted on social media gushing about it being the “meeting of a lifetime”.
“Imagine having the chance to sit down with Winston Churchill during his fight against the Nazis,” she said. “That’s what this was like.”
If her viewers were expecting a sit-down interview with the Israeli leader they were to be disappointed because Markson’s meeting was “confidential”.
“Sitting on brown leather armchairs, and over coffee, I had the honour of a briefing about Israel’s war on terror from the Prime Minister himself,” she wrote.
But Markson did reveal what she told Netanyahu: which was that the Labor government had “hostile policies towards Israel” while Peter Dutton was “standing firm with Israel”.
“I also explained how the Albanese government had fast-tracked visas for nearly 3,000 Gazans without adequate security checks – and that this was a big political issue on the front page of the papers.”
I had the privilege of sitting down for an in-depth meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while in Israel. Story here: https://t.co/j5qzJ9uubz
— Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) October 10, 2024
But Guardian Australia’s Daniel Hurst confirmed last week that the Department of Home Affairs’ median processing time for Palestinian visitor visas was not 24 hours but four months.
“I was only half-joking when I told him that I would probably be safer wearing my Magen David, Star of David necklace on the border with Lebanon than in parts of Sydney where Jew hatred is open and unabated,” she said.
AFR calls cut on film critic
Veteran film critic John McDonald has been dumped by the Australian Financial Review, weeks after his regular art column was dropped by the Sydney Morning Herald.
He has continued to badmouth SMH editor Bevan Shields as “imbecilic” and went on to denigrate the writers who replaced him. He wrote in his blog that staff writer Linda Morris’ piece on a show at the Art Gallery of NSW was “a supremely bland bit of PR” and freelancer Michaela Boland had offered up a “painful piece of writing” in a “transparent attempt to charm the disgruntled commercial galleries”.
The AFR editor-in-chief, James Chessell, took the axe to McDonald, ending his second regular column in Nine’s newspapers. McDonald’s final column will appear this weekend and he has a magazine piece in the pipeline.
McDonald won no friends by calling on his readers to write to Nine publishing executives and board members and complain about the direction of the Herald.
In his latest blog, McDonald thanked his readers for sending “cranky letters” to Shields and the board, and announced he wouldn’t list all their email addresses again because he is “moving on”.
At the time of writing, he had no idea he truly would be moving on.
News Corp mocks press council finding
News Corp Australia has demonstrated again how much respect it has for its own self-regulatory complaints system, the Australian Press Council, by mocking its latest adverse finding.
The press council, which is largely funded by the Murdoch empire, found that a Herald Sun cartoon by Mark Knight depicting immigrants as “mostly brown skinned, with prominent facial features and attire that reflects a stereotypical portrayal of people from the Middle East and Africa, including Muslims” was “offensive and prejudicial”.
The adjudication, which the Herald Sun was obliged to publish, said the cartoon implied that such immigrants are undesirable.
Accompanying the adjudication on page four, Knight was given space to rail against the finding and, in a provocative move, the offending cartoon was re-published.
In his article Knight said he agreed with a Melbourne comedian who said, “Geez it’s hard to crack a joke these days” and decried the “rise of the woke sensibilities” and the “perpetually outraged”.
“The Herald Sun and I stood behind the cartoon, so it went to an APC adjudication panel where I would stand before my unknown accuser and answer to a star chamber five-member panel over a phone hook-up,” he wrote.
Knight said “a nice man named Mohammed” cross-examined him and it was like an episode of ABC satire Utopia.
“I was asked about the size of noses and lips; we went over each nose forensically and I tried to show how we all have our own ethnic facial characteristics,” he wrote.
“I was asked why I didn’t just draw blank balloon heads to avoid any racial stereotypes or offence. I tried to explain the art of political satire, caricature and the political term ‘hairy chested’.”
In 2018 Knight drew global condemnation for what many saw as a racist, sexist cartoon of tennis great Serena Williams. At the time, he said the cartoon was “misinterpreted” and that he was “upset that people are offended” but refused to take it down.
Rick rolled
The former secretary of the Department of Human Services, Renée Leon, has had a victory of sorts in her war with robodebt reporter Rick Morton. The unedifying war has played out on the pages of the Saturday Paper, on social media and on Morton’s blog on Substack.
After the award-winning writer publicly condemned his editor, Erik Jensen, for publishing a defence of Leon by her friend, columnist Christine Wallace, the Saturday Paper amended Wallace’s article and Morton was happy to take it as a win.
But now some of Morton’s own reporting has been corrected, and not one but two apologies to Leon have been published by the Saturday Paper.
Without going into too much detail, the dispute has centred on when Leon knew robodebt was unlawful and what advice she received.
“The Saturday Paper apologises to Ms Leon for the error,” one correction said, adding that some modifications had been made to the copy.
Another correction said a 2023 article “wrongly gave the impression that Ms Leon knew robodebt was unlawful at a much earlier stage”.
“The Saturday Paper sincerely apologises to Ms Leon for these errors and for the implication of improper conduct these errors conveyed, which was not reflected in the findings of the royal commission.”
London calling
The Australian’s media reporter Sophie Elsworth has become a favourite guest on Sky News and has now been rewarded with an overseas posting.
Elsworth began to climb the Murdoch career ladder during the lockdown in Victoria, when she was one of the harshest critics of the then premier, Daniel Andrews, on Twitter.
One of her earlier stories was based on an anonymous complaint from an “Anglo female journalist aged in her 30s” who was “disappointed” when a job at the ABC she was interested in was “open only to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander applicants”.
The former Herald Sun personal finance writer was promoted to a position in the Oz media section in 2021.
For the past three years Elsworth has regularly shared her thoughts on all matters she deems “woke” with Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt on Sky After Dark.
During one of these appearances Elsworth said the ABC’s Mardi Gras coverage didn’t look “impartial” to her because the ABC presenters were “really getting into it”.
“They’re meant to be newsreaders who are impartial, I thought,” Elsworth said, mistaking an entertainment broadcast for a news program.
Elsworth was given the highly coveted position of London correspondent for the News Corp group of publications after standing out from a “competitive first-class field”, management said.
It was her “record as a tenacious newshound” which gave her the edge.
