The inner workings of journalism are again on display in a courtroom, this time in Western Australia where Linda Reynolds is suing Brittany Higgins for defamation over a series of social media posts she says damaged her reputation.
The Liberal senator has been giving evidence about why she chose to leak confidential information to the Australian’s conservative opinion columnist Janet Albrechtsen.
Reynolds said she leaked to Albrechtsen – who has been openly critical of Higgins – because she has “respect for her professionalism and her even-handedness”.
“I believe she was fair and balanced,” Reynolds said. (It was an interesting choice of words, given it was the original slogan adopted by Fox News when it launched in the US in 1996.)
While she is a fan of Albrechtsen, she revealed she is no fan of Samantha Maiden, the news.com.au political editor who broke the original Higgins story and won a Gold Walkley for it.
Reynolds said Maiden had been “harassing my office on a regular basis” and “monstering” her staff.
She told the court her lawyers wrote a cease and desist letter to the journalist, who had been “horrific” to staff.
Under cross-examination Reynolds denied her communications with Albrechtsen were about undermining Higgins’ claims, saying it was instead “about the truth”.
“It wasn’t my truth, it was the truth,” Reynolds said as to why she leaked finance department advice given to her in March 2019 about Higgins to Albrechtsen.
Maiden, along with Lisa Wilkinson who interviewed Higgins for The Project, may be called as a witness.
Boss move
The Australian’s Washington correspondent, Adam Creighton, had an important question to ask when he attended a press conference in Maryland on Tuesday after annual high-level talks between the US and Australia.
Questions from journalists for the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, ranged from the release of Julian Assange and stability in Bangladesh to the progress of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas.
But Creighton had just one burning question for Austin: did he agree with his boss, Rupert Murdoch, on a key foreign policy question.
Just in case Austin was unclear on who “Rupert Murdoch” was, Creighton added the descriptor “the influential media magnate”.
Creighton: “Sir, recently the influential media magnate Rupert Murdoch said that, in his view, he did not think the US would come to the aid of Taiwan if China tried to encroach on the island. So what do you make of that sort of assessment?”
The journalist allowed for the possibility Murdoch’s assessment wasn’t right, adding: “And if Mr Murdoch was wrong, is it the expectation of the US that Australia would come to the assistance of the US militarily in any such confrontation?”
Austin, standing beside Australian ministers Penny Wong and Richard Marles, wasn’t keen to buy in to the hypothetical: “I certainly won’t comment on Mr Murdoch’s analysis or his statement and I won’t speculate on whether or not there will be a conflict.” Creighton left empty-handed.
A former economics editor for the Oz, Creighton drew attention to himself during the pandemic by criticising public health responses to Covid-19; and in particular for an article which argued he caught Covid but it wasn’t that bad.
He characterised strict lockdowns as an affront to personal liberty and called them “health fascism”. Creighton is still on the war path over health policy, writing on X a few weeks ago: “Purely anecdotal but I’m finding the most boosted people tend to get recurring bouts of Covid most often. Biden a reminder, many others.”
Power of one
Speaking of Murdoch, academics Graham Murdock (Loughborough University) and Benedetta Brevini (New York University) have taken a “comprehensive scholarly look at the dominance, power, and influence of News Corp” in a book to be published next month, News Corp: Empire of Influence.
A former ABC executive turned scholar at the University of Sydney, Michael Ward, is a co-author. The book will examine Murdoch’s close relations with successive prime ministers and presidents and the way political reputations are made.
Live and direct
There is nothing quite like live radio to get the heart racing. RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas was interviewing Darwin-based criminal barrister John Lawrence on Tuesday morning about the backlash to the Northern Territory police commissioner’s apology. Lawrence is passionate about the racism he sees in the Top End and, to demonstrate how bad it is, he started to spout examples of racist epithets thrown around by police.
Without a dump button to stop the slurs going to air, Karvelas was left to apologise to listeners for the deeply offensive and triggering words. The recording of the interview has been edited to beep out the relevant words.
More cuts
Online news site the New Daily, set up by industry super fund boss Garry Weaven and former Age and Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie, is making cuts to staff.
Contributors have been cut back, some writers have been let go.
Editor Neil Frankland told Beast: “Unfortunately, along with the rest of the Australian media industry, we’ve been forced to make adjustments to deal with the loss of the Meta funding”.
On News Corp’s quiet shedding of staff, the Australian gave a voluntary redundancy to its higher education editor Tim Dodd at the end of last month.
Gershkovich freed
At the News Corp financial results on Friday morning, Australian time, the News Corp chief executive, Robert Thomson, thanked those who had campaigned to free the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
Gershkovich and two other freed American prisoners were part of the largest prisoner exchange since the cold war.
“His freedom was made possible by the concerted efforts of concerned, principled people who recognised that his incarceration was unjust and immoral,” Thomson told investors on a call.
“Many thanks to our leaders at Dow Jones and News Corp, who campaigned vigorously for Evan, and to the US government and other enlightened governments, whose divine interventions played a pivotal role in his release.”
Seven’s sins
The Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial heard evidence the Seven network reimbursed the former Liberal staffer for money spent on cocaine and sex workers, a claim the media company denied.
Now the network is facing more allegations of an unhealthy corporate culture in a Four Corners program to air on Monday night. Reporter Louise Milligan has spoken to 200 people about “allegations of sexism, exploitation and extreme bullying” at the network in an investigation titled Don’t Speak.
Weekly Beast understands two of the people spoken to by Four Corners were employees of Seven at the time.
The story of what happened to them after they spoke out will soon become clear.
The program will also examine the broader commercial television industry.
The rival Nine network was forced to undertake an independent review after acknowledging “alleged inappropriate behaviour and broader cultural issues” in its television newsrooms.