Best of the Week: How The Tele didn’t have it on Rush; What happened when I reported a Facebook scam

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, written in sunny Sydney. On the radio is Triple M Classic Rock, where you’re never more than ten minutes from AC/DC. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This week: The Geoffrey Rush libel verdict, and what went wrong when I reported fake news to Facebook. They hadn’t got it I was sitting at this desk 24 hours earlier as I watched the live video stream of [Geoffrey Rush’s defamation victory over The Daily Telegraph]( come through on Thursday afternoon. I squirmed watching Justice Michael Wigney tear apart the newspaper and order what looks likely to be a record breaking libel payment to the actor. For anyone who has to deal with libel law, there’s no schadenfreude. You might remember that scene midway through in All The President’s Men when Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee is reading Woodward and Bernstein’s copy. “You haven’t got it,” he tells the crestfallen journos. When they try to argue, he adds: “Get some harder information next time.” Eventually, of course, they got it. As a result President Nixon had to resign. That’s the correct dynamic. The journos go out and find out what they can and bring it back to the editor. The editor makes a call on whether it’s enough. And sends them back to look harder if they haven’t got it. In my small world, I’ve had a few days as an editor where I had to make a call on whether we really had it. They’re among the most memorable, but also most stressful days. When you’re not writing a story with the cooperation of the subject, there’s never an absolute, 100%, definite moment where somebody rings a bell and tells the editor that you’ve got it. But you have to make a call, and quickly. Mediacom’s mass axing of staff over forged campaign reports; the Atomic 212 awards scandal; 303’s sale to Interpublic; the threat of an injunction to stop us revealing the Kiis rebrand. Every one was a big call for me at the time. On one occasion in a previous job in the UK, we obtained a letter from a newspaper sales boss to a media agency owner promising to make him “a wealthy man” if he steered client spend in the right direction. Before I published, the legal pressure was intense. Each time, we had to make a call on whether we’d got it. And be clear headed when we didn’t. There were also of course times we made the wrong call. So there’s really no schadenfreude about The Tele. Two years ago we blew it on the infamous media agency cash-for-client-access “menu” - by rushing it out as a Dr Mumbo item before we had the full facts locked down. As a result, the agency group in question circled the wagons and got away with it. The first really stressful day I remember at Mumbrella where I had to ask myself if we’d really got it was on February 4, 2010. We’d only been going for a year and a bit, and I was still the only full time journalist on staff. I was tipped off about what sounded like a cracking yarn about one of WPP’s PR agencies Telstra had apparently fired the agency. The GM of the agency’s Sydney office had taken it upon himself to conduct a one-man social media campaign calling for the White Pages and Yellow Pages directories to be delivered only on request, rather than automatically to every home. So far, so right-on. He industriously tweeted photos of piles of uncollected directories, and posting links to the number to call to opt out. At the time, mass distribution of directories, while environmentally unfriendly, was very much the White Pages and Yellow Pages business model. Unfortunately for him and his agency, Sensis owned White Pages. And Telstra owned Sensis. In his woke Twitter zeal, he seemed to have forgotten that Telstra was one of his biggest clients. And Sensis had just launched a PR campaign to persuade the public of its environmentally friendly credentials. So it wasn’t ideal to have the boss of your PR agency publicly calling you out for dumping directories. Hence the alleged agency firing. But could I stand up the story before it was time to send the daily news email? My problem was that although I was confident in my source, I didn’t have it at first hand. My source, although 100% certain, was not from within the agency. I wasn’t sure I had it. By the time I started chasing the story, the agency boss had deleted the contentious tweets and locked his Twitter profile. But I managed to track down versions that Google had cached, which meant I could prove what he had been tweeting. But could I prove the agency had been fired? I can still see from the article’s edit history in our archive. It shows that I’d worked on drafts of the story until 10.21pm the night before. The next morning, needing to get our daily email out, I went back to chasing the story. Most of my eggs were in that one basket. By putting all my time into it, I didn’t have much else for the newsletter. But I just couldn’t prove to my own satisfaction that the agency had already been dropped altogether from the Telstra roster. I knew it, but I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t quite have it. Could I risk publishing that they had been fired? The usual time for sending the day’s email came and went while I tried to decide. I continued to ring every person I could think of for comment, including various people in the agency management team, and Telstra themselves. Nobody would go on the record. The person answering the phone at the agency had been instructed to claim that every single member of its Telstra team had gone out for the day and could not be reached. As it got later, I ran out of further calls to make. I had to decide. I was still certain it was true they had been fired, but I still wasn’t certain I could prove it. I didn’t have it. And time was getting on. It was now past lunchtime. If I didn’t end the day’s email soon we’d get no traffic at all. But could I publish? I did one final round of fruitless calls. By now, it was after 2pm. The newsletter was incredibly late. The potential massive fail of not sending out a newsletter was hanging over me. But I had to resist that pressure as the deciding factor in whether to publish. I eventually reluctantly decided I could not say they had been fired, but I could prove the deleted social media activity. And the non-denials and avoidance of the agency was at least an indication that it was not business as usual with their client. But I decided I hadn’t got it. I toned down the story and went only with what I could prove I fudged the language. I worded the story as the agency “fighting to keep its place” on the roster. I didn’t use the word fired, although I just knew it. Finally, at 2.33pm, I took a metaphorical (and probably real; I don’t remember) deep breath and published, before sending out what may still be our latest daily newsletter of all time. The story captured readers’ attention, and the comment thread went off like a rocket as readers debated issues around the environmental impact of phone books, freedom of speech, and whether brands would want to work with people who were publicly attacking them. I waited nervously over the next few days, in case I’d made a tremendous error and the agency was still with the client. That angry email never came. Many years later, I got chatting at an event to somebody who’d been working there at the time. My facts had been correct. But… I didn’t have it at the time. Which takes me to November 29, 2017, and The Sydney Daily Telegraph’s poor decision to publish its defamatory article about the actor Geoffrey Rush. The Tele’s editor at the time was Chris Dore, who is now editing News Corp’s national broadsheet The Australian The decision to publish may lead to one of News Corp’s record libel payouts. That title was previously held by The Sun’s editor Kelvin McKenzie for his million pound damages to Elton John after the British tabloid published untrue allegations about underage rent boys. And even more bizarrely, the paper had claimed the singer had his dogs’ voiceboxes removed because their barking was keeping him awake. And that was back in 1987, when a million quid was a lot of money. The night before The Tele’s Geoffrey Rush story in November 2017, I was in Brisbane with some of the Mumbrella team for the Walkley Awards. It’s news media’s big awards night of the year. To add to the frisson, it was the height of the #MeToo scandal. Harvey Weinstein had been found out in the US a month before. And earlier that week, the joint investigation by the ABC and Fairfax into TV presenter Don Burke had been published. I suspect the News Corp editors were itching to get back into the game. There was a rumour going round on Walkleys night that one of the News Corp metro titles had something big. It was The Tele. But as the night wore on the mood seemed to change from anticipation to concern among the News Corp contingent. Was there a legal problem with the story? Would it be pulled, and what on earth would go on the front page instead? What did they actually have? I didn’t notice at the time, but I’ve just been back into my email inbox for that night. It was the only time since I’ve had a subscription to The Tele that I didn’t receive a “Tomorrow’s Front Page Tonight” email at about 11pm. Normal routines were not being followed on Level 3 of News Corp’s Holt Street headquarters that night. We now know that The Tele knew too little. They didn’t have it. It seems the only thing they had confirmed was that there had been some sort of complaint made to Sydney Theatre Company about Rush’s behaviour during the production of King Lear. They didn’t have the complainant, or anybody else, on the record. It seems they did not even know the nature of the complaint, or the identity of the woman who had made it. Another curious decision had been made. The story was given to the newspaper’s entertainment writer Jonathon Moran to chase. J Mo may be a great, well connected showbiz writer, but when it comes to investigative journalism, he’s no Kate McClymont. By contrast, Fairfax’s Don Burke investigation had been done by the actual Kate McClymont, who later won awards for it. Compared to the detailed legwork done on the Don Burke story, the reporting on Rush looked thin, certainly not enough to prove anything of substance. J Mo hadn’t got it. He needed Dore to make that call. Yet for some reason, perhaps driven by having been beaten by the Burke story already that week, they published anyway, with the punny headline “King Leer”. Elsewhere in the News Corp family, there was grave concern. Those who were further removed from the story were aware of its risks. As the ABC’s Media Watch later revealed, in Melbourne, the Herald Sun’s staff were warned by text: “Please under no circumstances retweet/share/like/repost any stories about Geoffrey Rush on social media etc until further notice. The Tele are running with a yarn which is highly libellous.” It was the type of story that would usually be franchised across the company. But not this time for the Herald Sun. That message may turn out to have saved the organisation a couple of million dollars in Victoria The conundrum is that in order to succeed as a tabloid editor, you do need to be brave on the lineball calls. And if you’re going to be brave, you also need to be lucky. And on this occasion, the luck went the other way. The allegation could not be substantiated. And even when the Telegraph later persuaded the reluctant complainant to speak in court, the judge decided she was not to be believed. They hadn’t got the story. There are some consequences. Not so much commercially for the company. Globally, News Corp made a profit of $370m in the last quarter alone. Even if it ends up as $10m in damages and costs (and I suspect it will be less than that), it won’t materially hurt the company. The company share price actually went up slightly yesterday. so the markets aren’t bothered. Even reputationally for The Tele, life moves on. That day, the election was called, Israel Folau got fired and Julian Assane got arrested The worst consequence is that it’s done a disservice to the #MeToo movement. In Australia, reporting has virtually stalled since the court case began. And it adds a further chill to the direction of travel of libel law in Australia. There’s now yet another precedent in which a powerful person has been able to use the court to challenge media reporting. If there was a story to be told it’s now unlikely to ever see the light of day. Dore would have known he couldn’t prove misbehaviour by Rush because the paper did not know the nature of the alleged misbehaviour. And to defend a defamation case the publisher has to prove the truth. If you can’t prove it, you lose. But for Dore, this may not be as much of a career setback as you might think. News Corp supports its editors, even when they make a bad call. Dore’s stock will probably rise and fall internally more by what sort of election The Australian has under his leadership. Plenty of editors have bounced back. Even after the Elton John payout, The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie remained a Murdoch favourite. And remember The Sunday Telegraph’s disaster ten years ago when it published nude pictures it thought were of a young Pauline Hanson? I bet you didn’t, until I reminded you. A couple of years later, [I got the chance to interview the then editor Neil Breen](, so I asked him about the blunder, which was a similar case of a high pressure decision, made under time pressure. He said the disaster (if you can call it a disaster when circulation actually went up) made him a better editor. But it’s striking that the lessons he learned would have been useful in The Tele newsroom on the night the Rush story was going to press. “Mistake are okay to make as long as you learn by them. It’s made me a lot better editor. “It’s made me a bit less gung-ho. “I didn’t do the proper basics of journalism on that story. I just went ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’” Breen was able at the time to lean on the advice of (and receive a bollocking from) then local News Corp boss John Hartigan, a lifelong journo. “The one thing that Harto told me was ‘If anyone’s going to prove those pictures were a fake, it’s going to be you.’ So I said that’s what we’ll do.” By the next Sunday, the Sunday Tele had belatedly nailed the story. The pictures were indeed fake. This time they’d got it. They apologised to Hanson and moved on. But fact checking after publishing did not work this time. There was an attempt after the event to get more information. News Corp eventually persuaded the complainant Eryn Jean Norvill to go on the record. And after Rush sued, The Tele belatedly dug up more information about his conduct from another source, but it wasn’t enough. Some of that information went into the legal defence and reached the public domain. The judge viewed that as an aggravating factor. Meanwhile, the young actress who made that original complaint, who sincerely considered herself the victim of unwanted behaviour, had seen her reputation trashed because the judge didn’t believe her. Her career is derailed, if not ruined. Feel sorry for her, not the Tele. They hadn’t got it. Facebook and scam ads This week I got to see Facebook's policies on scam advertising at first hand. It didn’t do a great job. My Facebook feed showed me one of those dodgy money making ads. It was a sponsored post from a brand calling itself Getit and featured an image of mining billionaire Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forest. “Twiggy Says - He’s Done! The Secret is Revealed and Aussies all over the Country Want a Fraction,” said the overly-capitalised teaser. I didn’t need artificial intelligence to know it was scammy. Fake news, if you will. So I clicked on the link. The page I landed on - [you can see it via this link if you like]( - is designed to look like an ABC News article. It features manufactured screenshots of Twiggy apparently being interviewed on The Project and ABC News 24. The article is so clearly fake, you’d need to be quite gullible to think otherwise. It’s the fakiest of fake news. “The Project co-host Waleed Aly invited Forrest on the show to share any tips he had on building wealth and the Australian entrepreneur and philanthropist dropped a bomb: “"What's made me successful is jumping into new opportunities quickly- without any hesitation. And right now, my number one money-maker is a new cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Bitcoin Aussie System . It's the single biggest opportunity I've seen in my entire lifetime to build a small fortune fast. I urge everyone to check this out before the banks shut it down." “The Project co-host Waleed Aly was left in disbelief as Forrest pulled out his phone and showed viewers how much money he's making through this new money-making program that now has everyone in Australia whispering.” Laughable isn’t it? But of course the scammers - in this case bitcoin scammers - are seeking gullible Australians in order to relieve them of their money. So as an experiment, I decided to give Facebook’s official process a whirl. I used Facebook’s tools to report the dodgy ad, choosing the dropdown option identifying it as scam. Seven minutes later I got a cheerful message from Facebook. Promisingly, it started: “You did the right thing by letting us know about this.” Thanks, Facebook. You approval is important to me. However, it then continued: “We looked at the ad you reported, and though it does not go against our Ad Policies we understand that you may not want to see ads like it. We will not show you this ad in the future.” I suspect that the problem with this (with a turnaround of seven minutes, clearly automated) Facebook system is that the algorithm only scans the on-platform ad. And although that looked dodgy to a human, it didn’t include keywords like “bitcoin” that might have alerted the machine. I suspect that it did not review the crooked website it was sending its users to though. Just as concerning though, is the second half of that message, suggesting the platform will no longer show me ads like this. I didn’t actually request that. And if Facebook automatically stops showing dodgy ads to people most likely to report them as scam, then the practice is more likely to continue unchallenged. And Facebook might continue to make money from them. There is a postscript though. In a classic case of the observer effect, by going to Facebook as a journalist to ask about the ad, they quickly removed it. When I approached them for comment, they replied to me: “We’ve removed the ads that were sharing this third-party link and also blocked the link from being about to be shared on our services. “We do not allow adverts that are misleading or false on Facebook, and we removed several adverts that violated our Advertising Policies. Recently, we’ve also made several improvements to combat misleading activity through a combination of technology and human review, including automation to detect scams and improved reporting abilities.” It should not have taken my report to trigger this action. Forrest and the ABC had both already published their own warnings. And I suspect the words in that statement have been chosen carefully. Facebook did not say it was blocking all links to the site, just the link I gave them. That link was lengthy and specific to me. I remain of the view that Facebook’s overall contribution to the world is a positive one. But like lots of its friends, I do find myself increasingly wishing it would do better. Where’s your head at? Meanwhile, the weekend is upon us, which means Basement Jaxx at the Opera House tomorrow night. Want more? Do give [this week's Mumbrellacast]( a listen. We've more than 5,000 subscribers to the Mumbrellacast now. This week: What does the TV landscape look like now that Married at First Sight is finally over? Can Ten win back some audience share? Can Pedestrian maintain its voice with the founders exiting? Will WPP be able to reach gender parity by 2021? What’s going on at Domain? And we chat to the IAB too. Our editor Vivienne Kelly - [vivienne@mumbrella.com.au](mailto:vivieene@mumbrella.com.au) is on the weekend newsdesk. And I welcome your emails, as always, to tim@mumbrella.com.au. Have a terrific weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](