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Bridget Griffen-Foley
Bridget Griffen-Foley is a Professor of Media at Macquarie University, where she founded the Centre for Media History. She is the author of The House of Packer (1999), Sir Frank Packer: A biography (2000, 2014), Party Games: Australian politicians and the media from war to Dismissal (2003), Changing Stations: The story of Australian commercial radio (2009) and Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical perspectives (2020). She edited A Companion to the Australian Media (2014), now available on AustLit.
‘The public are starting to say why don’t they just leave Laws and Jones alone? Why are they highlighting these two?’ said John Laws on 3 August 2000, at the height of ‘cash for comment 1’. He hasn’t been complaining about too much publicity in the current cash for comment controversy. Indeed, Laws has been courting it since 28 April 2004, two days after Media Watch revealed a glowing ... (read more)
Media owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even anti-media mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.
Seventy-three-year-old Eric Beecher has been a journalist, editor, and media p ... (read more)
The Sabi sands reserve borders South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park. I spent a memorable few days in one of Sabi Sands’s private game reserves in January 2002, tracking the ‘big five’ at dawn and dusk, eating fine food, and curling up under my bed’s mosquito net to read J.M. Coetzee. While I was rather discomfited by the obsequiousness of some of the black employees, I knew that tou ... (read more)
I can’t believe that you look back and say “I was unkind to people” … you’re not an envious person, you’re not a hateful person, you’ve got – one assumes – plenty of money. So why do you sit there and beat yourself up thinking that you’ve hurt people?’
Poor John Mangos. There he was on Sky News Australia presenting the interview programme Viewpoint last November. His intervi ... (read more)
Disclosure: I am a humanities academic. It is, therefore, entirely inappropriate for me to be reviewing this book. After all, the author maintains that most academics in humanities departments are post-modernists or post-structuralists, prescribing as dogma ‘the bizarre and outdated theories of a handful of French philosophes’; worse, much of academic thought in the last two centuries has been ... (read more)
Most people, at least in Sydney, have a story to tell about ‘Singo’. As Gerald Stone comments towards the end of this independent but enthusiastic biography: ‘Anecdotes about John Singleton, even the most affectionate, tend to swing between total admiration and head-wagging disbelief. He leaves no one feeling neutral.’
It would be impossible to write a boring biography of John Singleton, ... (read more)
On Saturday, 3 December 2005, the day after Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore, David Marr contributed a major article, ‘Death of compassion’, to the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review section. A year earlier, Marr had made a welcome return to the SMH following his spell as host of Media Watch. He is always worth reading: informed by broad interests in the arts, politics and religion, ... (read more)
Australian historians admire Robert Menzies. Pardon? Aren’t historians, like the rest of the Australian academy, left-wing propagandists? Don’t they all loathe the prime minister’s political role model? Regardless of how historians view Menzies’ attitudes to the monarchy, appeasement, the middle class and the Communist Party, they have reached a consensus on one point: Menzies played a sig ... (read more)
On-air banter. It’s a staple of radio and television shows seeking to project a friendly, accessible image. Think of the chats between Steve and Tracy on Today, and Mel and Kochie (and, increasingly, their viewers) on Sunrise. Chats between news, sports and weather presenters are routine. It helps if the weather presenter is gorgeous, zany or eccentric, such as Tim Bailey on Channel Ten’s 5 p. ... (read more)