After a passionate outburst on ABC radio on Thursday, veteran broadcaster Jon Faine joked with co-host Corrie Perkin that he might need to look for another job. Faine was characteristically blunt as he told listeners to the Conversation Hour that politicians were “laughing” at the ABC for staying silent while it was “done over” by the Coalition government, which imposed more budget cuts and an efficiency review last month. He took aim at managing director, Michelle Guthrie, and her chairman, Justin Milne, for not standing up to ABC critics and defending the broadcaster.

“I’ve been here since 1989 busting my guts for a vision and a set of values and quite frankly I’m sick of getting it ripped apart because of the failure of our managers,” Faine said.

“[Guthrie] has been remarkably quiet and reluctant to engage in what she herself previously has described as megaphone campaigning,” Faine said. “She says ‘No, the best way to protect the ABC is to work quietly behind the scenes’. And that’s obviously delivered a terrible outcome in the last budget round.”



Guthrie is giving a speech on Tuesday at the Melbourne Press Club, and plans on taking her strongest stand since she took office in May 2016. Faine urged the MD to rethink her “failed” strategy and talk about the importance of the ABC to the nation.



“We are hopeless at telling our own story as an organisation and we have a managing director who has been deliberately and, she says, strategically silent. Well, that’s not worked. We have a chairman of the board who has written one piece for a newspaper that I’m aware of – ever – and has given a handful of interviews. He also thinks it’s strategic to be silent. That hasn’t worked.”



ABC lets its guard down and Chris Kenny pounces | The Weekly Beast Read more

Not #YouToo: do women want men to walk in their shoes?

There was some consternation among women writers on Thursday when they discovered journalist David Leser had been commissioned to write a book about the #MeToo movement for Allen & Unwin. Leser, an experienced features writer for the Daily Telegraph, the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend and the Australian Women’s Weekly, told Brava magazine he was trying to give voice to the story as a man. “As a man I can’t speak for women, just as a woman can’t speak for a man, or a white can’t speak for a black, or a Palestinian can’t speak for an Israeli,” he said. “In conflict zones it’s hard to put yourself in the other’s shoes but you have to try. So what I’m trying to do is find the moral imagination and the empathy and the ability to walk – in the Biblical sense – in someone else’s shoes, and examine my own privileges, examine the ways in which I’ve drunk from the well of patriarchy myself.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Van Badham: ‘This is precisely the structural sexism that #MeToo has illuminated, and we are staring at it, and it’s so very ugly.’ Photograph: Facebook

One of the women he contacted for the book, Guardian columnist Van Badham, was not impressed. “So you have a community of women united by a shared experience of pain, often compromised professionally, personally, financially, by their manipulation ... and their recompense for these humiliating events is that a man will be paid and platformed to tell their story,” Badham told Beast. “Jesus Christ. As if we are such hopeless and emotional children we can’t articulate our own experience with gravitas or clarity. This is precisely the structural sexism that #MeToo has illuminated, and we are staring at it, and it’s so very ugly.”

Allen & Unwin publisher Jane Palfreyman gave us a mixed message. “I can confirm that Allen & Unwin has NOT commissioned David to write a book on the #MeToo movement,” Palfreyman said in an email. It hasn’t? Palfreyman went on. “We were one of many publishers contacted by his agent after this essay by him was published to huge interest in the Good Weekend on Feb 9, 2018. After discussions with several publishers, David decided to work with me and Allen & Unwin on expanding that essay into a book, which will be a snapshot of gender politics at this present moment. We will be publishing that book in August 2019.”

So he’s not writing a book about #MeToo but he’s writing “a snapshot of gender politics at this present moment”. Clear as mud.

Joe Aston takes a blowtorch to Stan Grant

The Australian Financial Review’s most favoured columnist, Joe Aston, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Sydney as his generous pay packet allows, has criticised the ABC for flying three reporters – Washington bureau chief Zoe Daniel, Phil Williams and Stan Grant – to Singapore for the Trump-Kim summit this week. Aston is no fan of Daniel, after she objected to not being invited to an audience with Trump in Washington held by ambassador Joe Hockey, who was once Aston’s boss when he was a media adviser. The handful of media included Aston but not the ABC’s Washington correspondent.

But it is Grant who was given the blowtorch treatment by Aston. Grant is a “human full toss” who had been “sent from the nearest echo chamber wallpapered with mirrors”, he wrote. “With inward-facing expertise of such unshakable assurance, and in times of such muscle hewing, what is Zoe doing there? What can she say? Stan’s a man, sure, but not a white one.” Many colleagues of Grant’s were appalled by the racist and sexist tone of the piece.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Joe Aston wrote that Grant was a “human full toss” who had been “sent from the nearest echo chamber wallpapered with mirrors”.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Saturday Paper nabs Connaughton

At 25, Maddison Connaughton is relatively young to be appointed editor of the Saturday Paper, but then again her soon to be editor-in-chief, Erik Jensen, was just 23 when he became the paper’s founding editor. Four years after the paper was launched by publisher Morry Schwartz, it has a print readership of 242,000, according to industry data, and is a success despite the naysayers who scoffed at the idea of starting up a print newspaper. A finalist in this year’s Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year awards for her reporting from the Syrian border, Connaughton comes to Schwarz Media from a job as features editor at Vice Media. Connaughton: “I see this as an opportunity to find new audiences for the paper and to foster a whole new generation of writers who think deeply, and differently, about the shifts that are reshaping Australia and our region.”



SBS collaborates to drive diversity

SBS has partnered with Film Victoria, Create NSW, Screen Queensland, Screenwest and the South Australian Film Corporation to create opportunities for diverse and underrepresented groups, including those from multicultural, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and LGBTIQ+ communities to make television. Under the new Short-Form Content Initiative the agencies and the broadcaster will collaborate with creative teams to produce shows for SBS On Demand next year. SBS director of TV and online, Marshall Heald, hopes the project will address the imbalance in the diversity of stories being told. And the rules? Each project will need to demonstrate that two of the three key creatives (writer, director, producer) are from backgrounds presently underrepresented in the screen industry.