Best of the Week: Outsiders outrage; Barry Hall’s brain snap; The end of The Checkout; Instagram blackmail

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off in the Qantas business lounge ahead of a Thursday night trip to Adelaide. This week’s soundtrack, by a delicious coincidence, is Outsiders, on Sky News. Sunday strife And I reckon it will be a while before we know for sure whether presenters Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron get silver or gold for the title of most disastrous piece of blokey broadcasting of the week. That one will largely depend on how much the legal case costs their employer. They’re of course doing battle for the medal with Big Bad Barry Hall, the former (as of last Friday night) Triple M broadcaster. But let’s start with Outsiders. The show is by no means the best thing that Sky News does, and it’s possibly the worst. I’m a fan of the channel, by the way - Sky News is pretty much the only reason I still subscribe to Foxtel. But Outsiders is a show which attracts a disproportionate quantity of media coverage compared to its tiny Sunday morning audience. And its existence is not entirely a bad thing. The right-wing fringe audience it caters for doesn’t actually get much service on other media or at other times. However, there is also a hollowness to it, or pantomime, if you prefer. I’m not so sure about the former Liberal MP Cameron, but I’m pretty sure that while Dean may be right-leaning, he isn’t half as rabid as he makes out. I suspect that at times it’s a tongue-in-cheek performance. My dealings with him in his previous addend career suggest he’s a far nicer person than he pretends to be on screen. But Outsiders certainly provides a sympathetic platform for politicians who would be deemed too extreme - or irrelevant - for more mainstream shows. And most weeks, they do their thing without incident or audience. I amused myself one week recently watching a long, lingering two-shot as Cameron talked and Dean listened politely. It went on and on and on. But every now and then something goes wrong. And suddenly a producer is suspended, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young is threatening a libel case which she’d probably win, and Senator David Leyonhjelm is everybody’s poster boy sexist pig. There was more than one mistake that led to the disaster. The seeds were sown by inviting Leyonhjelm onto the show. Earlier in the week, the libertarian (main policies: small government; lower taxes) had heckled Hanson-Young in Parliament. He’d been annoyed by a generality Hanson-Young had used about violence towards women. He’s since been unable to provided the quote, but he decided it was along the lines of “all men are rapists”. So he taunted her with “In that case, stop shagging men.” Tacky, and it got a bit of media coverage - particularly when Hanson-Young confronted him - but not legally dangerous. Comment - and the reporting of it - in Parliament is legally privileged. So you can’t be sued for saying it, or reporting it. But this is where it became risky. As an idealogic Greens senator, Hanson-Young is high on the list of Outsiders’ favourite villains. So somebody had the bright idea of inviting Leyonhjelm onto the show. And it’s worth bearing in mind, Sky News is done on a shoestring. Presenters mostly have to line up their own guests. On the rare occasions I appear to talk about media stuff, the whole thing is arranged by texting with the presenter of the show. No producer gets involved. It’s not like a free-to-air channel. There aren’t large production teams. Presenters do their own makeup. And it’s not the same free speech environment occupied by sister network Fox News in the US. The law in Australia is far tougher. Yet all that many Sky News presenters get in the way of production support is somebody in the control room while the show is on their air, putting captions on the screen and suchlike. And these producers aren’t grizzled executives with years of live broadcasting decision making under their belts. They’re mostly in their first or second journalism jobs of their career and working some pretty odd shifts. Instead, the main safety net comes in the experience of those on screen. The likes of the onscreen daytime talent like David Speers and Kieran Gilbert, or evening host Paul Murray, are experienced journalists. They know libel territory when they come upon it, and how to avoid it. Dean and Cameron are different. Dean was an adman at Euro RSCG (or Havas, as it is now). He then reinvented himself as a right-wing commentator, via editorship of The Spectator Australia and a column in the AFR. Cameron was a politician. Neither of them learned the fundamentals of media law that trained journos are taught before they get let loose in newsrooms. Indeed, Dean’s Spectator Australia recently blew half a million bucks on another defamation case. He’s not had much luck on the legal front. Which brings us to Sunday morning, where it would seem that it had not occurred to anybody that if Leyonhjelm started talking about Hanson-Young outside Parliament, legal privilege would not apply. So if you say something which might diminish their reputation in the eyes of a "right thinking" person in society (as the definition of libel goes) then there’s no legal protection. From that point onwards, it’s about damage limitation: can you do enough, fast enough to mitigate the damage and (pragmatically) persuade the defamed person not to sue? And on Sunday morning, nobody on the program noticed the territory they were straying into. Leyonhjelm made his outrageous - and libellous - comment suggesting there were rumours about Hanson-Young shagging her way around Parliament. At the moment where a more experienced journalist might have stepped in and shut it down, Dean laughed. Egged on by the body language, Leyonhjelm continued. Even so, the disaster required an additional slice of bad luck: Somebody was watching. Shannon Molloy, a former News Corp journo, now working for Amazon, appears to have been killing time watching the show in the Qantas lounge. [He tweeted about it and Sky News management woke up to the fact that they had a problem](. They apologised within hours, and tried to distance themselves from the comments. (I have also heard from one source that the show actually tried to do so in a later segment, but have been unable to track down footage to confirm that.) The next day, Sky News made Dean and Cameron go on camera and do another apology. But Leyonhjelm is another case. If nothing else, he’s independent minded. He spent the following days doubling down, going on TV wherever he could, defiantly not sorry. Sky News will now be praying that if Hanson-Young does sue Leyonhjelm, she doesn’t sue the network too. If she did, she’d almost certainly win. It also created a side issue for Qantas, which I suspect will blow over. I don’t think the petition calling for Sky News to be dropped from Qantas lounges will have much affect - this time round, anyway. It seems to have lost steam at 25,000 or so signatures. And I doubt many of them are Qantas lounge visitors anyway. But pragmatically, I’m not sure that element matters in the real world. I was amused to walk into the Qantas business lounge on Thursday night ahead of my Adelaide flight to speak at an event, and see that Outsiders was on. Indeed, it was the first time I’d even realised they had a midweek as well as Sunday slot. But in the entire time I was there, nobody was watching. The TV played to itself. So I’m not sure it’s a great use of protestor’s energy either way. And then again, the row is merely history repeating itself: Originally there were three presenters, until co-host Mark Latham was sacked for questioning a schoolboy’s sexuality. And Latho went through the same process in the build up to his sacking. The original broadcast passed without comment and only become controversial when somebody noticed. Neverless, Sky News has a problem. If you put right wing mavericks on TV, they do and say the sort of things that right wing mavericks do. Which is a time bomb whenever somebody happens to be watching. Bad Barry Hall Mind you, by the time Outsiders went on air on Sunday morning, [the weekend had already seen a sacking](. The blokey pre-match banter of Triple M’s AFL coverage spilled over into Leigh Montagna and Barry Hall egging each other on in to some crass commentary. Montagna volunteering that he had watched the gynaecologist “stick a couple of fingers” in his wife. And Hall topping that by suggesting that the doctor licked his fingers. Crass, and too far even for Triple M listeners, who hit the phones, and social media. The management moved fast. Hall was sacked within minutes, which was the only option. But it still leaves the network open to the question of what creates the circumstances for somebody to make such a comment. The uncomfortable question for Triple M is whether it says something about the internal culture. Sometimes organisations get the benefit of the doubt. A disaster can happen. But when it’s the same station that Eddie McGuire suggested drowning one of AFL’s few prominent female journalists, the doubt bank is already in deficit. Particularly when it’s the same station that more recently blundered into the Australia Day date controversy with its ill-judged Ozzest 100 back in January. But it’s also got a market position as a blokey station, for blokes. And there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to champion blokiness. It’s a strong market position, and it’s the station DNA. But only those inside the station can actually know whether culture was a factor in the broadcast. Over the last couple of days, I had a fascinating conversation with an ex AFL footballer (and occasional TV commentator), who had yet another point of view. He argued that Hall - already perhaps on his last chance as a broadcaster after the end of his Fox Sports TV gig - deserves a degree of sympathy, or at the very least understanding. For starters, ex footballers, as Hall and Montagna both are, came to the microphone through a very different route than other on air talent. And that also means far less live experience. There’s also a pressure to make an impression every time you open your mouth, this footballer told me “The problem with radio is that you’ve got a bunch of big dogs in the room and you’ve got to try and make an impact, so you’ll go big,” he told me. “It’s not like TV, where when the camera’s on you, it’s on you. In radio you’ve got to fight for it which is why I prefer TV. “Barry’s been off TV, so this show would have been a big deal for him. He went for it and got it completely wrong.” And until you’ve been in Hall’s shoes, you shouldn’t judge him too harshly, argued this ex-AFL player. “When he realised what he said, they should’ve given him the chance to apologise, even if it was just for two minutes, once he knew he was being sacked.” They should have given him a chance to try to make it right.” Satisfying as the mob mentality is, I doubt Hall is as big and bad as the circumstances made it seem. Live broadcasting can be horribly unforgiving, and the machine has now spat him out. It was the sort of nuance on display from former radio presenter Meshel Laurie, in an open letter she penned to Hall explaining the sort of impact such jokes can have. And it was also contained in the lengthy on-air conversation she then had on the station on Monday morning. As Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier pointed out in a guest post for us, [it was perhaps the best thing to come out of the week’s gender wars](. Instagram extortion A few weeks into the return of the Mumbrellacast, and on Thursday I did my most enjoyable interview to date. Shortly after Kyle Bunch gave the keynote at our Sports Marketing Summit in Sydney, we recorded a backstage chat. The US-based MD of social for digital powerhouse R/GA, Bunch had a lot to say. Two things leapt out, which I urge you to listen to. First, he’s the most senior industry person I’ve yet heard suggest that Facebook’s management team of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should resign over the company’s continuing scandals. And second, he told an extraordinary story of being extorted by a blackmailer attempting to seize his @bunch Instagram and Twitter handle. It’s a helluva yarn. [Give it a listen](. The Checkout checks out It emerged on Friday that [the ABC is not renewing The Checkout](. That’s great news for big business. And bad news for consumers. The Checkout was Australia’s only credible consumer affairs show. It exposed the sort of skullduggery that ad-dependent networks never could. It also found a way to be accessible and funny about serious stuff. And while the ABC should not be defined as a market failure organisation, that is part of the role. And now, apparently because of budget issues, The Checkout is not likely to come back. It of course comes after the announcement of the government’s funding freeze for the ABC. On the one hand, ratings had dropped. But on the other hand, The ABC argues that it’s not defined by ratings. And I find myself something of a hypocrite here. On the one hand I thoroughly approve of The Checkout, and on the other I can't remember the last time I actually watched it. It will be an interesting exercise to ask all of those criticising the decision, the same question about when they last watched. But at a time where the public is only now fully learning of the activities of the banking sector thanks to the Royal Commission, the public interest in scrutinising big brand behaviour is greater than ever before. For me, The Checkout was a show that helped define the ABC at its best. Barossa bound Meanwhile, I have the joyful (for me) news that a long weekend in the Barossa now awaits. In the unlikely event somebody can suggest a place to watch England versus Sweden in the World Cup at 11.30 tonight, I’ll be pathetically grateful. As ever, I welcome your emails to tim@mumbrella.com.au. And my colleague Josie - josie@mumbrella.com.au - is on the news desk across the weekend. For now though, have a splendid weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](