For the last six months the Daily Telegraph has had a string of “exclusives” on tap and the Murdoch tabloid sends out regular emails to subscribers hyping up the stories, many of which are “taking aim”, “lashing” and “raging” over something the Labor government has done.
The man responsible for all the hype is not a news reporter. He is one Ray Hadley, the 70-year-old former shock jock who retired from 2UE late last year, walking away two years earlier than he planned after a 43-year broadcasting career and a record run of 20 years without losing a ratings survey.
Hadley was picked up by the Tele’s editor, Ben English, during the federal election and given a soapbox to provide his opinions each Monday and Friday.
But rather than treat Hadley like any other columnist, English has chosen to make everything the oracle says both “news” and “exclusive”, neither of which is strictly accurate.
And Ray isn’t even a columnist because he doesn’t write anything. He just delivers his views on a short video uploaded to the Tele website and app.
His insights which made headlines include:
‘Grow a set Anthony’: Hadley takes aim at Albo over Iran
Hadley’s rage over pedophile teacher’s sentence
‘It’s not rocket science’: Hadley lashes delayed fix to keep kids safe
‘Sunroof on a submarine’: Hadley lashes failing child safety system
‘A bail-athon’: Ray Hadley unleashes on youth crime scourge
Ray Hadley lashes out at Labor’s super tax
Bishop scrutinised
The Canberra Times chose to focus on Julie Bishop’s appearance in a report about her vow to stay on as chancellor of the Australian National University after the vice-chancellor tendered her resignation.
The piece was headlined Heels off, gloves on: a steely Bishop faces the music.
“On Thursday afternoon, standing on a large, near-empty stage, she was a diminutive figure with her signature blond, Princess Diana-esque hair, but for this day, she opted for a belted, pin-striped suit, and bright pink fingernails,” the report said.
The writer did add the disclaimer: “A person’s outfit shouldn’t be worth commenting on in such fraught times, but Ms Bishop has never been one to shy away from the power of fashion.”
Then she went on to write about little else.
“The shoes – plain flat loafers – also seemed like a deliberate choice.”
Bargain bins
A claim by Victorian Liberals that the Labor government spent $13m on 40 machete disposal bins at the cost of $325,000 a bin was demolished by not one but two factcheckers this week. The Liberal MP Nicole Werner first made the claim in parliament, likening the cost to a luxury sports car when she said “you could buy a Ferrari with that”. But mere factchecking was not going to stop some Liberals from repeating the claim.
ABC’s Media Watch and AAP Fact Check said the cost of the bins had been drastically overestimated and was about $2,500.
But at a press conference outside parliament on Thursday, the Victorian opposition police spokesperson, David Southwick, repeated the figure, saying: “The government wastes $13 million on 45 machete bins.”
The upper house Liberal MP Nick McGowan warmed to the issue: “You know what Media Watch and the AAP did for their fact check? They simply asked the government. No documentation to prove their counter position, not a single shred of evidence. I put in an FOI to this government to ask them to provide that evidence. So they’re not fact checks. The fact checks and the fact checkers need to check themselves, because that is not a fact.”
McGowan’s intervention got a run on Melbourne radio station 3AW later in the day with a new claim that a simple $9 tool from Bunnings could be used to break into the machete bins. “It just illustrates the silliness of the entire program,” he said.
Rival tomes
With the sentencing of Erin Patterson behind us, we are about to be hit by an onslaught of books and documentaries about the mushroom case, starting with the publication next month of Greg Haddrick’s The Mushroom Murders. Originally slated for an 11 November publication date, the book has been brought forward to 14 October so as not to be outdone by a rival book slated for that day.
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Duncan McNab’s Recipe for Murder: The poisonous truth behind Erin Patterson the mushroom murderer of Leongatha has always had a publication date of 14 October.
Sentencing Patterson on Monday Justice Christopher Beale said he took the “incessant” media coverage into consideration because it meant the prisoner had to be kept in isolation.
“I infer that, given the unprecedented media coverage of your case, and the books, documentaries and TV series about you which are all in the pipeline, you are likely to remain a notorious prisoner for many years to come, and, as such, remain at significant risk from other prisoners,” he said.
AI and a Patterson podcast
When legal restrictions dictate you can’t record audio from a trial podcasters have traditionally turned to actors to voice the evidence heard in a courtroom. In the case of the Erin Patterson trial the use of actors would have caused too much of a delay for the Daily Mail’s Patterson podcast because it would have had to wait for the transcript to be released by the court.
To overcome this hurdle the Mail, which produced the podcast in the UK, used AI tools to read Patterson’s evidence for its popular true crime podcast The Trial of Erin Patterson, hosted by Caroline Cheetham and the reporter Wayne Flower.
Daily Mail Group’s head of podcasts, Jamie East, said the court transcript was fed into an AI tool and gender, age and geographical location was added to approximate Patterson’s voice.
“The transcript that comes through is pretty accurate in terms of pauses and hesitations and stuff like that,” East said.
Not a fan of copyright
The Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar has doubled down on his view that Australia should adopt US-style copyright law to allow artificial intelligence to suck up all creative content, telling a Sydney tech conference the issue is a “showstopper”.
“There is [a black mark] around copyright, which is something that Australia has a different regime to much of the rest of the world,” he told the Stripe conference. “So that’s something they have to navigate as a bit of a showstopper at the moment for many of the people putting all of their workloads in Australia.”
Companies developing AI, including Atlassian, Google and Meta, want a text and data mining exemption put into copyright law to make AI able to train on all human works in perpetuity without paying for them.
His remarks came after a startup billing itself as an “ethics driven” AI venture promised to set aside $10m for copyright holders whose data was used to train its large-language models.
Sovereign Australia AI promised that users would know how its models were built, what they were trained on and “that they reflect Australian values”.
New gigs at Aunty
In the great tradition of print reporters being picked up for TV, the Age’s investigative journalist Charlotte Grieve and the Australian’s chief sports writer Jessica Halloran have been hired by the ABC’s investigative reporting team and will join the broadcaster early next year.
Halloran is the author of Unbreakable, Jelena Dokic’s biography.
Grieve wrote the stories about the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Munjed Al Muderis, who last month lost his defamation case against the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and 60 Minutes.
“Charlotte emerged victorious from a high stakes legal battle with disgraced celebrity surgeon Munjed Al Muderis, who sued Nine for defamation over her investigation exposing his malpractice and unethical conduct,” the editor of ABC investigations, Sean Nicholls, told staff in an email seen by Weekly Beast.
“The strength and accuracy of Charlotte’s journalism saw the court decide in favour of Nine, in a landmark win for the new public interest defence.”
Adele Ferguson, Louise Milligan and Nicholls himself all joined the ABC after distinguished careers in newspapers.