Media
ABC defends spend on farewell
According to Lily McCaffrey in The Australian, Aunty has been pressed in Senate Estimates after revealing it spent $45,000 on a farewell for former managing director David Anderson at its Ultimo headquarters.
Chief financial officer Melanie Kleyn said the cost covered catering and travel for colleagues who had worked with Anderson.
Murdochs host annual Christmas party
The Murdoch family’s Christmas cocktail party lit up their eastern suburbs estate this week, drawing a steady flow of media heavyweights.
As The Australian Financial Review’s Sam Buckingham-Jones reports, there was a surprise attendee, with one of Lachlan Murdoch’s closest advisers, Siobhan McKenna, turning up despite announcing she would be departing News Corp at the end of the year.
Four nations quit Eurovision 2025 over Israel
The Australian writes that Eurovision is heading into 2025 with fewer flags on the scoreboard, after Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Slovenia confirmed they’ll sit out in protest at organisers allowing Israel to compete.
The European Broadcasting Union stuck to its position after a general assembly raised concerns about Israel’s role amid the war in Gaza.
Media gets its own 2025 ‘wrapped’
Oh, what a year it’s been in the media industry. Then again, we say that every year.
Crikey’s Daanyal Saeed has crunched the numbers in a follow-up to the publication’s 2024 piece, Just How Cooked Is the Australian Media Industry?, and while the figures are slightly better (not as many job losses), we’ve got a long way to go yet.
Online
Search engines to blur explicit content under new safety rules
Search engines will soon blur pornographic image results by default and redirect self-harm searches to support services, with new child-safety requirements landing on 27 December.
As the ABC’s Clare Armstrong reports, the new rules will apply across Google, Bing, app stores, social media, adult sites and generative AI services.
Social Media
Meta begins shutting down under-16 accounts ahead of Australia’s ban
The BBC’s Lana Lam reports that Meta has quietly started sweeping Australian teens off its platforms, closing Instagram, Facebook and Threads accounts for users under 16 ahead of the country’s new age ban.
Kids aged 13 to 15 began receiving shutdown notices last month, giving them a week’s head start before the rules officially kick in.
Oprah backs Australia’s under-16 social media ban
As Jonathon Moran writes in The Daily Telegraph, Oprah Winfrey has thrown her support behind Australia’s looming social media ban for under-16s, telling a packed Entertainment Centre crowd that the move will change lives.
She’s Down Under for a national speaking tour.
Meanwhile…
While we’re on Oprah, Mediaweek waits with bated breath to see when some of the issues raised in Maureen Callahan’s The Nerve podcast are raised with the media behemoth during her time here.
Admittedly, sycophancy can be a hard habit to break.
Companies
Paramount questions fairness of Warner sale process
According to CNBC, Paramount Skydance has taken aim at Warner Bros Discovery’s asset sale, raising concerns about whether the process is being run at the right level.
In a sharply worded letter obtained by CNBC, Paramount’s lawyers pressed CEO David Zaslav on what they describe as troubling signs around the fairness and adequacy of the bidding round that kicked off in October.
Meanwhile…
Nothing calms humanity’s nerves quite like a celebrity weighing in on a billion-dollar merger, and Jane Fonda has happily obliged.
She’s now waded into the WBD deal discourse, managing to loop in the First Amendment for good measure.
Meta weighs cuts across its metaverse division
The tech giant is gearing up for another round of belt-tightening, with budget reductions and possible job losses on the table for its metaverse arm.
As Jyoti Mann and Pranav Dixit write in Business Insider, the Reality Labs division is staring down cuts of up to 30 per cent.