The Australian, 6 December 2021:
Last Monday, Nine CEO Mike Sneesby made his first trip to Canberra since securing the role last year and, in a packed schedule, elbow-tapped with everyone from Labor’s Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Tony Burke to the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young.
But for sheer entertainment value, we hear it was Sneesby’s audience with Scott Morrison in the Prime Minister’s office that stole the show.
The meeting between the PM and the media boss may have only lasted 20 minutes or so. But it was certainly meaningful.
Diary has learnt Sneesby – joined for the meeting with ScoMo by his publishing boss James Chessell, along with two prime ministerial advisers including the PM’s media chief Andrew Carswell – was offered a full and frank opinion by Morrison about Nine’s columnists at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The PM allegedly told Sneesby his columnists were too “tough” on him. The Nine camp is adamant “no concessions” were made in response.
It is understood the PM has no problem with the political reporting of the Canberra bureaus of Nine’s TV operations, plus The SMH, The Age and The Australian Financial Review. In the meeting, he even singled out A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw for particular praise, after a tough but fair interview in the wake of the Brittany Higgins allegations earlier this year.
But the PM has a different view on how he is treated by the political columnists at the Nine papers, particularly The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – and he wanted to put it on the record in his meeting with the Nine CEO.
Diary is told the PM’s tone was “grumpy, not furious”.
On one version out of the Nine camp, Morrison told Sneesby: “You’re too tough on me.” On another slightly more heightened version of events, the PM told him: “You smash me every single day.” While Morrison didn’t name names, a number of Nine columnists have sharpened the knives for the PM in recent weeks, including Sean Kelly, a former adviser to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Peter Hartcher, the SMH and Age political and international editor, AFR columnist Laura Tingle, and Nine papers’ Thursday political columnist, Niki Savva. …..
[My yellow highlighting]
Later that night, Diary’s spies say Sneesby was seen out at dinner at trendy Asian eatery XO with his big two editorial executives, publishing chief James Chessell and TV news boss Darren Wick, as well as his big three political journos: the SMH and the Age’s David Crowe, the AFR’s Phil Coorey and Nine TV’s Chris Uhlmann.
Given it came in the hours after Sneesby’s meeting with the PM, we’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that one…..
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