The ABC managing director, Hugh Marks, has confirmed he secretly engaged a recruitment company to look for a replacement for news director Justin Stevens after the two disagreed over the direction of ABC News.<\/p>\n
Marks said Stevens \u201cdid not know\u201d he had begun an international search for a new head of news but it was a necessary move because they \u201ccouldn\u2019t get agreement on the way forward\u201d.<\/p>\n
A 19-year veteran of ABC News, Stevens was forced to resign<\/a> last month after Marks told him he had hired a top news executive from Reuters, Simon Robinson, to replace him.<\/p>\n Marks also signalled sweeping change across the organisation, saying all the ABC\u2019s leadership roles were under review and it was not unusual to \u201cundertake extensive succession planning for all of our key executive roles, all the time\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got to go through some changes, and I guess we can have different views on what those changes should be, and how we go about implementing them,\u201d he said in an interview with Sally Sara on Radio National Breakfast on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Marks said there were \u201ckey problems\u201d the ABC had to fix and resources were too stretched across live news. He again indicated some legacy programming or services may have to go.<\/p>\n Now well into his second year in the ABC\u2019s top job, Marks appears ready to start making big changes as he signalled last month on Alan Kohler\u2019s That\u2019s Business podcast<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019ll give you an example: a legacy television show that has been around for 40 years,\u201d he told the ABC business editor about his plans to axe some longstanding programs.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n During the interview on RN, Sara played him those comments, which he said were \u201chypothetical\u201d. Earlier, he ruled out that 7.30, a 40-year-old program, was facing the axe.<\/p>\n \u201cA better term would have been: what got us to where we are today is not necessarily the things [that] are going to be successful in the future,\u201d Marks said.<\/p>\n Marks also addressed the controversy that arose last week when the ABC\u2019s hiring of the former Australian of the Year Grace Tame<\/a> to host a podcast about autism prompted Melbourne radio host Charlie Pickering to call the move \u201cproblematic\u201d.<\/p>\n Speaking to the rightwing live streamer Avi Yemini, Pickering said: \u201cI do actually think it\u2019s problematic, that\u2019s my personal opinion. I think, as a Jewish Australian, there\u2019s a complete misunderstanding of a lot of the words that are said and what [the] true meanings of them are.\u201d<\/p>\n Pickering later apologised for the comments about Tame and also for speaking to Yemini, saying he was \u201cambushed by a known provocateur\u201d.<\/p>\n Marks said Pickering\u2019s public comments were not a breach of the ABC\u2019s editorial code, and indicated Tame was hired before she made controversial comments about Israel and Gaza.<\/a><\/p>\n During an interview on ABC Radio Sydney, Tame referred to the rape of Israeli women by Hamas on 7 October 2023 as \u201cpropaganda\u201d and \u201cdebunked\u201d.<\/p>\n She was previously criticised for leading a chant<\/a> of \u201cfrom Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada<\/a>\u201d at a Sydney protest against the visiting Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, in February.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, I understand why people feel Grace shouldn\u2019t have a program on the ABC, given you know the controversy that\u2019s reported and associated with many of her comments,\u201d Marks said.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve spoken to Grace, and what she really abhors is violence of any kind, particularly violence against women and children, and I think everybody can relate to what she really believes in \u2026 The podcast that she\u2019s done is great, and I encourage people to listen to it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ABC managing director, Hugh Marks, has confirmed he secretly engaged a recruitment company to look for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":724689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-724688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/724689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}