NEWS 18

Bolt Report: News Corp refuses to confirm reports show has been dropped

SUMMARY:

News Corp has refused to confirm reports that Andrew Bolt’s Sunday morning TV program, which it finances to the tune of $2m a year, will not be broadcast on Ten this year. Guardian Australia understands the decision on the future of the the Bolt Report has been delayed ahead of a News Corp board meeting next month.Sources said Ten was charging News about $2m a year for using its facilities to produce and broadcast the one-hour weekly program. When Lachlan Murdoch was chairman at Ten he arranged for News to pay for the now defunct Meet the Press and the Bolt Report, which were proving too expensive for the ailing network. The program has never enjoyed high ratings or attracted lucrative advertising revenue. It is consistently beaten in the ratings by Insiders on the ABC.

FACTS:

• A spokesman for Bolt said there would be no comment on the future of the Bolt Report.
•  Bolt also said he was going to be very busy filming his 2017 ABC TV show, I Can Change Your Mind About Recognition, this year and no longer wanted to work seven days a week.

National newspapers blast Jeremy Corbyn's 'third way' over Trident

SUMMARY:

Most national newspapers scorned Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion that there is a “third way” between maintaining the Trident programme and scrapping it. The building of new submarines should go ahead, he said, but they need not be armed with nuclear warheads. The proposal may overcome union concern about the loss of jobs in Scotland and Cumbria. It does not overcome press hostility towards Labour’s leader. The Sun devoted its whole front page to the compromise, headlined “Off his war head”, plus a couple of pages inside in which the paper argued that Corbyn had destroyed Labour’s credibility.The bombshell came in a mind-blowing 15 minutes where Mr Corbyn also called for talks with Argentina over the future of the Falklands.

FACTS:

• The paper viewed Corbyn’s argument, that nuclear weapons are now irrelevant, as “blinkered”.
• The Indy accepted that Trident replacement would be “expensive and difficult to justify in a world where our most immediate threats come not from Russia or North Korea but from Isis and al-Qaeda.”