Readers of The Australian seemed as surprised as we were to read Nikki Gemmell\u2019s review of the new Wuthering Heights movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy first five-star review: I inhaled Wuthering Heights with my groin,\u201d screamed the headline<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, there\u2019s a phrase I never thought I would read in a film review,\u201d one reader commented. \u201cGlad you enjoyed it, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be having what you are having.\u201d<\/p>\n Another reader said: \u201cI hope you kept the noise down Nikki. No doubt very distracting for the other movie goers who are probably still \u2026 recovering. Hopefully this doesn\u2019t set the tone for future movie reviews.\u201d<\/p>\n Nikki Gemmell\u2019s five-star review of Wuthering Heights. Photograph: The Australian<\/p>\n Gemmell didn\u2019t hold back: \u201cBe still, my churning 14-year-old heart. After the clit-tease of a muscular marketing campaign we now get the actual product, ripe for Valentine\u2019s Day. A film of such gleeful power it may well liquify your innards just watching it.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone agrees. The Guardian\u2019s Peter Bradshaw gave the movie two stars<\/a>, writing: \u201cIt\u2019s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion\u201d.<\/p>\n Perhaps Gemmell wanted to make a splash after landing the role of chief film critic for the rebranded Culture section<\/a> at the Oz. Both Gemmell and the former ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams have been dropped as weekly columnists, as has the former literary editor and chief film critic Stephen Romei.<\/p>\n The cuts at the Oz are starting to show. When David Stratton and Romei were writing for the old Review section, the paper would publish between five and seven film reviews. Now they are down to a couple. But the real cuts have been to the once fine literary section, where the book reviews have shrunk from seven pages to between two and four under the literary editor, Caroline Overington.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for The Australian said the masthead was \u201cmodernising and expanding its culture, arts, and entertainment coverage through a new multi-platform Culture vertical led by Milanda Rout, investing in video, newsletters, and fresh voices\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cNew columnists include Charlotte Ree, who has joined The Australian Weekend Magazine as a columnist under editor Elizabeth Colman. Results have been very strong, with audience growth and subscriber engagement accelerating.\u201d<\/p>\n Missing MarksThe ABC\u2019s managing director, Hugh Marks, said Asio wrote to him about claims aired by Four Corners, but: \u2018They did get my email address wrong.\u2019 Photograph: Lukas Coch\/AAP<\/p>\n The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) took aim at the ABC<\/a> this week, threatening \u201cto take further action\u201d if it was not happy with the claims aired by Four Corners about intelligence failures before the Bondi massacre. Asio failed to specify if it meant legal action or something else, but no \u201caction\u201d eventuated<\/a>.<\/p>\n What did emerge from Senate estimates the next day was slightly awkward for a security agency that prides itself on having top notch investigative skills.<\/p>\n The ABC\u2019s managing director, Hugh Marks, revealed that Asio tried to send him an email about Four Corners but got the address wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cAsio released a very strong statement about that particular program,\u201d Marks said. \u201cThey wrote to me. They didn\u2019t seek to call me or contact me. They did get my email address wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Asio\u2019s message, published online on Sunday, did however manage to get through to the Australian\u2019s political analyst, Simon Benson, who published an article later that day.<\/p>\n Benson had his own spin on why Asio had acted \u201cso aggressively and publicly\u201d \u2013 the Four Corners program was \u201ca stitch-up\u201d<\/a>. \u201c[It] would be far more convenient for the government, parts of the bureaucracy and even parts of the media if Bondi were seen as an intelligence failure rather than a failure to address antisemitism\u201d, he wrote.<\/p>\n Can the centre hold?<\/p>\n David Armstrong, who was the editor (1990-1992) and then editor-in-chief (1996-2002) of The Australian, has accepted a new gig as editor-in-chief of John Menadue\u2019s public policy journal, Pearls & Irritations<\/a>. We asked him how one pivots from editing the Oz to leading a progressive publication described by its founder as coming from a \u201cliberal perspective, with an emphasis on peace and justice\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Oz in my time was centre-right (not flat out right<\/a>) and the general approach was to be conservative on economic policy and more liberal on social policy,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cThe Oz, for instance, was the strongest media advocate of the republican cause and firmly favoured closer engagement with Asia. My personal views would be regarded as progressive and I am happy and proud to be appointed to my new role at P&I. From 1975 onwards the Oz had been a right-wing paper. My aim when I took over as editor in 1990 was to move it back towards the centre, making it more open to the discussion of a range of ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n No more \u2018marking own homework\u2019<\/p>\n The extraordinary practice of allowing corporations like Sportsbet and the Commonwealth Bank to inspect and change a regulator\u2019s draft media release announcing they had been penalised appears to be on the way out.<\/p>\n The chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma), Nerida O\u2019Loughlin, admitted at Senate estimates this week: \u201cWe do, from time to time, provide media releases in advance to the companies that we\u2019re dealing with, to make sure that we have our facts accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n In one case, the Commonwealth Bank asked Acma to delay the release of a negative announcement until after its AGM, and in another Acma changed O\u2019Loughlin\u2019s own quotes after Sportsbet objected.<\/p>\n The independent ACT senator David Pocock, a strong voice against the influence of the gambling industry, was aghast, telling estimates: \u201cI am so concerned that the regulator of this predatory industry, after slapping them with a fine \u2014 a pretty small fine, it seems to me \u2014 then says, \u2018Hey, this is our media release; what are your thoughts?\u2019 And then you change the chair\u2019s quotes. Chair, do you regret this? Do you think this is a good look?\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Loughlin repeatedly said the corporations were only checking for accuracy.<\/p>\n The ABC revealed in December that Acma went further than that, allowing the gambling giant Sportsbet <\/a>to water down a media release that announced it was being fined for breaching anti-spam laws.<\/p>\n Thanks to a Freedom of Information request from ABC reporters Michael Atkin and Alison Branley and persistent questioning from Pocock, Acma conceded it would stop allowing companies to \u201cmark their own homework\u201d, as suggested by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we\u2019ve taken on board the criticism that has been put to us by this committee and we will amend those processes, and in future we will not be consulting on media releases before they go public,\u201d O\u2019Loughlin told estimates.<\/p>\n \u201cI accept the criticism from the committee, and we will change our processes accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n False climate ads banned<\/p>\n A Climate Study Group<\/a> advertisement that was published 16 times across News Corp Australia publications since November has been found in breach of advertising standards.<\/p>\n Members of the Climate Study Group have links to the Institute of Public Affairs.<\/p>\n The print ad was headed \u201cCarbon dioxide and plant nutrition\u201d and the online ad was \u201cThe science of fossil fuel CO2 for plant nutrition\u201d. Both contained claims that were neither truthful nor factual and have been banned.<\/p>\n A Climate Study Group advertisement which ran 16 times across News Corp, breached Ad Standards for not being \u2018truthful and factual\u2019. Illustration: Climate Study Group<\/p>\n The regulator found<\/a> the ad \u2013 which rejects the science of human-caused climate change \u2013 \u201cappeared to be expressing a view that the fossil fuel industry is not as harmful as generally accepted and could benefit the environment\u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n The dubious claims were accepted by advertising departments and ran across seven News Corp mastheads despite a similar breach in 2024<\/a> when the ad was \u201cdiscontinued\u201d after Ad Standards found it contained misleading or deceptive environmental information.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, a Senate inquiry into the prevalence and impacts of climate misinformation<\/a> and disinformation, which will sit in Canberra next week, has received almost 200 submissions<\/a>. Several groups, including the Climate Council, WWF-Australia and Climate Action Against Disinformation, are pointing to a long list of claims promoted recently by conservative politicians, thinktanks and conservative media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Readers of The Australian seemed as surprised as we were to read Nikki Gemmell\u2019s review of the new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-295410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}