Erin Molan rejects Daily Mail’s charge of racism, alleging ‘royal commission’ into her radio show | The Weekly Beast | Media

Channel Nine sports presenter Erin Molan has gone from being hailed as brave for speaking out about internet trolls on 60 Minutes to being accused in court documents by the Daily Mail of “objectively racist” conduct in a matter of days.

Molan, who is suing the Daily Mail for defamation over a report that she says portrayed her as “racist” and an “arrogant white woman of privilege” when she said “hooka looka mooka hooka fooka” on air, is sick of being attacked online and in the media and gave a teary interview on Nine on Sunday night calling for action on trolls.

She broke down as she recalled years of online abuse, particularly on rugby league sites.

“Every single one was either that I was a woman, that I was ugly, that I looked like a slut, that I’d never played the game, that I belong in the kitchen,” Molan told 60 Minutes. “About different footballers that I’ve had dalliances with, about bosses at Channel Nine that I must have slept with. It’s just vile.”

But on Monday morning the Daily Mail filed its defence in the federal court case and the co-host of Nine’s Friday Night Footy, the Sunday Footy Show and the Continuous Call on radio 2GB and 4BC found herself accused of making a series of “objectively racist” comments on the radio show.

Sources told Weekly Beast that Daily Mail Australia often settled defamation cases but this time decided to aggressively defend its reporting. Lawyers trawled through hours of recordings of Molan and her co-hosts on the Continuous Call and produced a 61-page defence document.

“From 2017 to 2020 the Continuous Call team frequently engaged in discussions containing racist content,” the document alleges. “On occasions this including the mocking of ethnic, particularly Pacific Islander and Maori names. On other occasions it included crude accents (frequently Chinese and Indian) and references to stereotypes connected to particular races or cultures.”

Phrases the Daily Mail’s defence alleges Molan used include “You like raw feesh?”, “Pick up your chopsticks”; “I wuv you wery long tiyme” and “Herro, I wery goo lookin”.

Molan’s barrister, Sandy Dawson, told the court on Friday the Daily Mail was waging an “ongoing campaign” to damage his client and had launched a “royal commission” into her radio program. “She doesn’t have a racist bone in her body,” Dawson told Justice Robert Bromwich at the first hearing to set down a date for the trial.

Weekly Beast has contacted Molan for comment.

James and the giant corporation

Kevin Rudd’s petition calling for a royal commission into News Corp’s dominance of Australia media has caught the attention of the international press. The petition, which argues Rupert Murdoch’s media company employs tactics that “chill free speech and undermine public debate”, had garnered more than 265,000 signatures by Thursday evening.

The New York Times reported that the petition “generated so much interest over the weekend that it overwhelmed the website’s cyber defences and shut down access to the document”.

Another story in the Times lent some credence to the sentiment behind the petition.

Speaking to the Times’ Maureen Dowd, James Murdoch explained for the first time why he had “pulled the rip cord” and quit the firm.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important. But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas,” James told the Times, in his first major interview since his exit.

“A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimise disinformation, and I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organisations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.”

Q: why are ratings falling?

Since 2008 the ABC has hosted a strong Monday night line-up of news and current affairs, starting at 7pm with the news bulletin and scrolling through 7.30 with Leigh Sales, Australian Story, Four Corners and Media Watch, finishing the night with Q+A starting at 9.30pm. But more than three hours of news is proving a tough ask for many viewers and Q+A is frequently dipping below 300,000 in metro viewers, from a high of 700,000 in its heyday under Tony Jones, the founding host. There is a big drop-off of viewers after Media Watch.

It’s a high-profile show that generates news stories and recaps, but it’s also expensive to mount a big live audience show every week and the ABC is looking for a better return on audience numbers. A refreshed format and a new host (Hamish Macdonald) and executive producer (Erin Vincent) have not stemmed the flow.

Weekly Beast understands Q+A is likely to be moved to Thursdays next year, in an earlier timeslot.

Last year Q+A had a relatively small metro audience of between 350,000 and 400,000. This week a special with the opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, attracted just 296,000 metro viewers, and last week was even lower, on 264,000.

Not a keeper

Another program which has already undergone a significant shakeup is 7.30, which lost its supervising producer of two years, Jo Townsend, last week.

Townsend’s short-lived secondment to Australian Story in September was followed by a surprise announcement from 7.30’s executive producer, Justin Stevens, that she had left.

“Jo joined us as 7.30’s commissioning editor and has played an important role in the program’s success over the past couple of years, overseeing a number of our multi-part specials (most notably the Kohler specials on economy, housing specials and solar specials),” Stevens told staff.

“Jo concentrated her efforts on improving package style and injecting ‘real people’ into budget, election, bushfire and Covid coverage, as well as spearheading stylised final-item series, such as the recent young Indigenous leaders series.”

Townsend joined 7.30 from Nine’s 60 Minutes with a brief to brighten up the coverage, using her skills from producing commercial television.

Townsend said she “loved being Justin’s wicket keeper in the team of the century” and she leaves “really happy”.

Walkleys for all

Should sources get Walkley nominations alongside the journalists who write the stories? The prospect was raised by industrial relations lawyer and Australia Institute director Josh Bornstein in a curious tweet after the this year’s nominations were announced on Thursday.

Which stories did this “someone” generate and does he really think he deserves a Walkley? Bornstein wasn’t saying.

‘A very ABC thing’

The Spectator, edited by Rowan Dean when he’s not hosting Outsiders on Sky News, is often the source of some strange articles. But this week one struck us as exceedingly bizarre: “Their ABC and ‘secret lovers’”, by Tina Faulk.

The writer took issue with the ABC using the term “secret lover” in relation to Gladys Berejiklian and her relationship with Daryl Maguire and used the phrase to segue into a personal anecdote from decades ago about ABC staff who were lovers.

“Some years ago, working on contract in a federal department in Canberra, my next-desk colleague was a young woman who had had a baby, a gorgeous little chickadee, to a senior, married, ABC journalist,” Faulk wrote. “Married – and this is a very ABC thing, to another ABC employee – and if you think Tindr is a great dating tool, it has nothing on the ABC.

“Far from being discreet, my colleague seemed to relish the fact that her child’s father worked for the national broadcaster. Such is the cachet of Their ABC in Canberra.

“That cute baby must be old enough for high school formals by now but with their lineage, they probably won’t have to worry too much about finding a job in the future. There’s one waiting at Their ABC.”

The usual suspects

Andrew Bolt has made another vile attack on multiculturalism, this time in relation to the community’s response to Covid-19.

Two years ago the Herald Sun columnist prompted an Australian Press Council complaint with an article that argued a “tidal wave” of migrants was swamping Australia, forming enclaves and “changing our culture”.

This week he wrote that immigration was to blame for the Covid-19 second wave in Victoria. Pauline Hanson loved it.

“So the Victorian catastrophe is not just a failure of a government,” Bolt said. “It is also a failure of an immigration intake, plus multicultural policies, that produced a fractured people that cannot be trusted to voluntarily do their basic civic duty in a pandemic – keep a social distance, wash hands and don’t work or socialise when sick.”