Talking Point

Barrie told me about Kevin

By Michael Grealy

To rework Channel 9 Melbourne’s famous 6pm News promo of the 1980s ("Brian Told Me"), it was Barrie who told me about Kevin as leader.

Three words will long be remembered from Julia Gillard’s Adelaide media conference: chaotic, paralysis and sabotaged. They described, in order, her leadership rival’s work patterns, the state of the government he led and, by implication, his role in the 2010 election campaign.

Some media took up the ball. The Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr said: ‘No Kevin. This isn’t a breakdown in civility. Your colleagues are at last telling us why you were sacked.”

As pro-Gillard Ministers add fuel to the bushfire, and letter writers draw on Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Perry Gretton, Tumbi Umbi: "Kevin Rudd is not the Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy"), it is true that formerly unnamed sources are finding the courage to be quoted by name.

But the story is not new.

Take Barrie Cassidy’s 2010 book "The Party Thieves, The Real Story of the 2010 Election." The ABC Insiders host and former Hawke press secretary didn’t miss in his account of the coup against Rudd – who had been labelled Captain Chaos by John Lyons as far back as 2008.

Firstly, on chaos and paralysis, Cassidy records Rudd summoning senior public servants for urgent meetings and keeping them waiting for hours, Ministers discovering major decisions in their portfolios only after the PM told the media first, the interfering nature of the PM’s office and a manic emphasis on winning the 24-hour cycle and its impact on governance.

He wrote: “That Kevin Rudd was cut down by Labor factions because of bad opinion polling is the great myth of 2010. The faction leaders took the initiative – that’s all. The support came in an absolute torrent. That’s because Rudd himself drove them (the numbers). His own behaviour had caused deep-seated resentment to take root.”

Cassidy added: “The coup was happening in part because Rudd had hijacked the party, and either ignored or abused key people within it for too long.”

Gary Gray bemoaned the blame lumped on Peter Garrett for the home insulation debacle: “For Rudd and his office to position Garrett as the fall guy was disgraceful, weak, sneaky, unprincipled and just plain wrong.”

Barry Cohen told Cassidy: “If Rudd was a better bloke, he would still be the leader. But he pissed everybody off.”

Take sabotage. Cassidy called the internal campaign against Gillard relentless, vicious and driven by some powerful media support.

Recalling the fallout from Laurie Oakes’ ‘exclusive’ that Julia Gillard had opposed in Cabinet a pension increase and paid maternity leave, Cassidy wrote: “It left few people in the Labor Party in any doubt that the source was either Kevin Rudd or somebody acting on his behalf, with or without his consent. It was now clear Gillard was going to be tested in a way that few leaders had been in the past.

"There was, undeniably, a rat in the ranks, to use a favourite Labor Party term. And that ‘rat’ was determined to bring down the government.

“Rarely before in an election campaign has a leader had such a fight, against an invisible yet real and potentially poisonous insider.”

So as we digest Kevin Rudd’s plea for an end to ‘vicious personal attacks,’ on the grounds they are ‘un-Australian,’ maybe the ABC will introduce Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders next Sunday with an update of Channel 9’s promo for the late Brian Naylor.

Three watershed moments for Julia Gillard's leadership

By Craig Regan

Are you sick of the Prime Ministerial soap opera? Take a holiday overseas or become a hermit. The Press Gallery loves a good leadership stoush - so prepare to hear much, much more.

The most likely scenario is that one of the warring parties will bring on a spill in a week and the loser - most likely Rudd, but a lot can happen in a few days - will zip off to the backbenches to plot some more.

If Gillard goes down, you can bet the media will look for turning points in her leadership. They’ve already being edited into neat TV packages that can be rolled out at a moment’s notice. So what will become these so-called watershed moments?

Putting aside the PM’s pre-election promise about “no carbon tax under a government that I lead” and the stumble over sending asylum seekers to East Timor, these are the contemporary events that stand out:

1. That speech to the ALP National Convention, wiping Rudd’s term as PM from the history books: It looked churlish, not Prime Ministerial, and fed into the image of disunity.
2. The Australia Day melee at The Lobby Restaurant in Canberra: That image of the PM being dragged into a waiting Comcar made her look helpless. That her office had a hand in stirring up an incident that led to pictures going worldwide posed serious questions about who was in charge.
3. The Four Corners interview: If you’re going to do an interview, have a game plan. Why not forcefully make it clear that leadership rumblings were underway before the Rudd coup but the decision to stand was taken at the last minute?

 

 

Whitney funeral will be media- managed to keep the peace

 

By Craig Regan

 

The news that Whitney Houston’s publicist has arranged footage of the late singer’s funeral service to be distributed throws a spotlight on a lesser-known media management practice called “pooling.”

Pooling is where one media outlet is chosen to film an event and shares the footage with competitors. It’s commonly used to limit media attendance where space is at a premium or their presence might be upsetting.

Witht he Houston story, squeezing a herd of American TV crews into a small Newark church wouldn’t have made much sense.

Barring attendance point-blank would have encouraged ultra-competitive reporters to push the envelope and sneak in a camera. The footage will be made available to TV news and sent all over the Internet.

Pooling is usually a good compromise even if it goes against the grain for many reporters.

Back when I was working as a go-between in media-police relations, pooling was sometimes used at funerals or at open-air crime scenes where evidence had to be preserved.

It’s a little-known fact that police find it useful to have access to TV crews’ unedited footage at events like homicide victims’ funerals . The rationale is that killers are often known to their victims - their behaviour might provide evidence to build a case – so cops often do some kind of deal with the media to maintain their distance.

A pool camera closer to the action can quietly provide the better footage that TV needs.

I went to biker funerals where allowing TV crew access would have been like throwing petrol onto a smouldering fire. If access for one crew (on the condition that they shared their footage) kept the peace, that was a good outcome.

PM shows she's not listening or atrociously advised

By Peter Laidlaw

Roll-up, roll-up, roll-up - The great Australian Labor Party circus has hit town and you are sure to be entertained by a wonderful team of entertainers - including a few clowns, a number of knife-throwers, invisible men and tightrope walkers, led by not one but two ring masters who can't tame the lions behind them.

Yes for at least the sixth week in a row (though I must admit I have stopped counting), the "phantom" challenge by the former PM, one K.Rudd, to topple the current PM continues to dominate newspapers and the airwaves.

We have seen media reports about who is backing whom.

We have heard party colleagues claim that it was not possible for Rudd to return as a leader having previously led and failed (despite those same colleagues being around when Kim Beazley was returned as the ALP leader in 2005 after having held the throne four years earlier).

We have listened to carefully crafted words from Rudd and Gillard and their supporters to dismiss the challenge as simply being a media speculation ....and wondered if Mark Latham would introduce his Conga Line of Suckholes descriptor to the current situation.

And then we read that the riot act had been read to the party – Stop Talking - it's only giving oxygen to the story!

With that, I was not holding out much hope for any explosive revelations coming from Four Corners story on the only battle taking place in federal politics - Rudd vs Gillard (Tony who?).

But being a political junkie, I removed myself from the family room - having just lost a debate with one of the kids over whether Kev vs Julz's would be more entertaining than the new Channel 7 US import Revenge - and flicked on the box in the bedroom to hear the old familiar Four Corners theme and Kerry introducing "The Comeback Kid?".

I was interested but not surprised when a line-up - including a former Rudd staffer (who got some good PR for his new book), a right wing union bod, two former ministers (now lobbyists) and another political staffer-turned-lobbyist - gave their views on Rudd and what happened.

In reality it was a bit ho-hum and in my view would not really give much fuel to the leadership fire. Any newsroom would be scratching hard to get much out of the story to give the "challenge" more life.

But then came the PM!

And to much celebration within newsrooms around the country came a very poor response to the question of whether her office had prepared her speech accepting the role two weeks prior to Kevin being shafted. If this was the case and she knew about this, there would be a huge question mark over the credibility, already tainted by her "no carbon tax" pledge and commitments to independent Andrew Wilkie regarding pokies.

The PM had repeatedly stated that she was not behind a planned campaign to dispose of her old boss and that she only made the decision to challenge for the leadership the day before.

After several unsuccessful attempts to get a straight answer to the questions, we heard "I have just given the best answer I can." If that was the best answer that could be given by her, one has to ask the question: Why on earth did Gillard grant the interview in the first place?

As I have long believed and advocated with clients - you don't always have to say yes to a media request. If Julia had taken such a position, we may have been saved at least a day of leadership talk in media and Julia may well have saved some face before the public.

Messy desks are so yesterday? I don't think so

By Craig Regan

Messy desks really are conducive to organised outcomes, according to this study from some Dutch researchers. If you've ever been inside a print newsroom, you'll know that the level of chaos is higher in proportion to the number of pages in the newspaper being produced.

Most of Lighthouse's consultants are from a journalistic background, which covers the gamut of papers, TV and radio. We recall the days when stacks of newspapers used to pile higher than medium density housing and radio announcers used to wade through piles of cassettes or cartridges.

All of us remember typing copy on small sheets of paper, one paragraph to each, and passing them to a sub-editor to finesse before our words of wisdom became type.

My first computerised newsroom used standalone terminals and you walked a floppy disc to the editor to have your yarn entered into the system.

If you were working for AAP, the national wire service, and you were out of the office, your best friend was a headset-wearing lady called a copytaker who took down your every word as you composed sentences from a public phone booth. 

Digitisation has changed the daily workings of media in many ways. Newsrooms still aren't pristine places but the need for hard copy archives has gone the way of hot metal presses. The clippings library now lives on a hard drive. Some TV studios rely on robotic cameras to do the work of people.

From the journalist's perspective, desktop research is a practical and often preferred mode of fact-gathering. There are fewer reporters, doing more with less. More interviews are conducted over a phone than face-to-face.

So the journo's have cleaned up their act and newsrooms look like sterile decontamination zones in a clean freak's version of the Jupiter 2? Not quite as thingsjournalistslike.com shows in this post. 

But back to that Dutch study which have been conducted only after seeing this great Tumblr site that's searching for the world's most chaotic workspace.  

There was something else i was going to write but I'm still looking for my notes...somewhere...