BotW: What we learned at the Lattouf hearing; Here comes ADH; ARN drops below $200m
Welcome to Best of Week, written this morning in mild Evandale, where the Tasmanian heatwave has thankfully broken, for today at least.
Today: Antoinette Lattouf gets her day in court; the noise around ADH gets louder; and ARN Media slips back below $200m.
Happy National Pizza Day for tomorrow.
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Lobbying, Lattouf and litigation
This week it was back to Court TV for the first week of Antoinette Lattouf’s unlawful termination claim against the ABC.
While the Federal Court YouTube stream may not have attracted the extraordinary audiences of Bruce Lehrmann’s failed defamation case against Network Ten, there were usually a couple of thousand viewers online.
For a civil case centred on relatively arcane points of employment law around a five-day contract, that’s remarkable. However, the issues and principles being aired have been bigger.
The job of Justice Darryl Rangiah is simply(!) to decide whether the ABC followed the law in dropping Lattouf halfway through her five-day, fill-in contract for ABC Sydney the December before last. We established this week that it didn’t follow its own procedures, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to breaking employment law.
The case was always going to be about wider issues.
The litigation has been framed by some as a question of whether journalists - even when employed as on-air talent - should be free to exercise their rights to participate in civic life by sharing views, even on controversial topics like the situation in Gaza.
However, Lattouf hasn’t actually been arguing for that right in court. Her case has been focused on what went on during the handful of days when she was working for the ABC, where the trigger for her exit was her Instagram repost of content from Human Rights Watch.
Part of her case is that there is a double standard where other ABC talent has got away with far more. Outgoing managing director David Anderson was challenged about the activities of the likes of Laura Tingle and Paul Barry. He was backed into the corner of arguing that the proposition “Australia is a racist country” - as said by Tingle at a public event - is an impartial statement.
Meanwhile the ABC got into even more of an uncomfortable mess around race thanks to one of its legal arguments. It made the narrow legal point that Lattouf needs to provide evidence of the existence of a Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern race in order to win her claim of race being a factor in her termination. The ABC’s proposition that although it doesn’t deny the existence of the race, the onus is on Lattouf to prove it in court, landed badly with staff. “Prove it” is easily taken as a denial.
In the dying minutes of yesterday afternoon’s hearing another fascinating side issue came up. How was The Australian newspaper so well informed, within minutes of the decision to drop Lattouf, outgoing head of content Chris Oliver-Taylor was asked. Only a handful of very senior people within the ABC knew at that point. One had the feeling that at the end of what must have been a gruelling day on the stand, COT was almost - almost - tempted to speculate.
There are a lot of outgoing (and already outgone) ABC executives in this messy story. Former ABC chair Ita Buttrose is another.
Buttrose is due to give evidence next week. It’s fair to wait until she does that before forming a view on her role. COT told the court that Buttrose had started passing complaints about Lattouf’s appointment on to him. The identity of those people or organisations has been suppressed by the court, incidentally.
One of the key roles of the chair of the ABC is to be a buffer so outside pressure doesn’t affect how staff do their job. There’s already been some evidence that the lobbying of Buttrose made a difference to the outcome. Could Lattouf have otherwise finished her week?
Whether the decision to get rid of her was to correct a mistake because she should not have been appointed in the first place, or to bow to external pressure, will become clearer after we hear from Buttrose.
Her predecessor Justin Milne had to resign after staff learned of the way he had been swayed by pressure from the Coalition government. How Buttrose will be remembered as ABC chair will be heavily influenced by what we learn next week.
ADH on the radar
The buzz around Australian Digital Holdings picked up this week.
ADH is in the running to acquire some of Southern Cross Austereo’s remaining regional TV licences, the Australian Financial Review reported on Wednesday. That comes after SCA agreed to offload its Ten-affiliated licences in Queensland, southern NSW and Victoria to Paramount.
The (very) conservative ADH TV initially had a bumpy start, kicking off in 2021 with a show fronted by Alan Jones after he finished at 2GB and Sky News. Jones was barely on air though, thanks to health and then legal issues.
ADH has since aligned with the rightwing US TV network Newsmax, and says it will launch a local version.
I’m not sure, incidentally, that ADH will end up owning the remaining SCA licences, which cover Tasmania, regional South Australia and Darwin. Seven West Media would be insane to let the Tasmanian licence slip through its fingers in particular. Seven’s signal, on the SCA licence in Tassie, dominates the local, AFL-mad market.
But I do think we’ll hear more about ADH. If it can raise $25m or so, then it would be a logical owner of Nine Radio, which includes 2GB and 3AW. All we need is for the former owner of 2GB John Singleton to pop up, to complete the picture.
ARN falls back below $200m on Unmade Index
ARN Media slipped back below the milestone of a $200m market capitalisation yesterday after a 2.3% drop in share price. The dip is the lowest point for ARN since last September.
Meanwhile, rival audio player Southern Cross Austereo moved in the other direction, with a 1.63% improvement taking its market cap back towards $150m.
The Unmade Index, which tracks the movements of locally listed media and marketing stocks, moved into negative territory yesterday, losing 0.32% to land on 448.1 points.
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you’d like to hear more, last night’s edition of MediaLand is now available in all the usual podcasting places.
With Antoinette Lattouf’s court case against the ABC still under way, journalism academic Denis Muller joined Vivienne Kelly and me on the ABC Radio National show to discuss the dysfunctional relationship between journalists and social media. We also discussed the coming launch of streaming service Max, and PR comedy Optics.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade and Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
