Wankley of the week: Geoffrey Barker and The Age. “The hair, usually blonde, tumbles artfully onto the shoulders. The eyes, usually blue, sparkle brightly. The complexions are perfect. The teeth are arctic white. The breasts are pert and perky.” And with those words, a social media outrage was born. Retired journalist Geoffrey Barker’s opinion piece yesterday for The Age took aim at the “babes”, as he called them eight times, of commercial TV news. Unsurprisingly, the “babes” bit back.

Here’s ABC veteran Sally Sara (whom Barker singled out for praise):

 And Channel Nine’s Jane Turner:

Sunday Age scribe Jill Stark took a swing at her own publication:

And so it went, all day, as readers joined in the orgy of outrage — usually with a link to Barker’s piece. By the afternoon, the cunning piece of clickbait had soared to be the most read comment piece on Fairfax’s websites:

Fairfax then got even more clicks as former Ten newsreader Tracy Spicer, SMH scribe Jaqueline Maley and Seven News hack Brendan Roberts filed withering takedowns. A job well done by The Age‘s op-ed team — unless their aim was to inform, as well as provoke their readers. Luckily, there weren’t any important issues to discuss this week… — Matthew Knott 

AFR TV buzz. The Australian Financial Review‘s joint venture Sunday morning business program with the Nine Network was launched in Sydney yesterday. Lots of confident talk about how the ads are overbooked and how the program will be on air for 30 weeks (until late November). The host is Deborah Knight and the reporter is former Ten staffer, Eddy Meyer. The program airs at 10am where it will be up against Inside Business hosted by News Limited’s Alan Kohler and The Bolt Report, hosted by News Ltd’s Andrew Bolt on Ten. Last Sunday 175,000 people watched The Bolt Report and 164,000 watched Inside Business across Australia in metro and regional markets.

The new program, called Financial Review Sunday, will have to grab 100,000 viewers on average each week to be a real success. Anything less than that would put it on a par with the weak and undistinguished Meet the Press on Ten at 10.30am for an hour. It’s produced by News Ltd, and that shows. At least Financial Review Sunday has some professional TV people involved. And The Fin isn’t missing a chance to spruik it — as seen in today’s page three puff piece:

— Glenn Dyer

Baranga-coup for Packer’s spinners. More James Packer boosterism from the Daily Telegraph today, the tabloid that famously embraced the multi-billionaire’s run of full-page Crown ads last year. The savvy scribes at the Tele had somehow got their mitts on artists’ impressions of three proposed Crown Barangaroo erections. It quoted Packer, on the front page no less, claiming the site would become the “talk of the world”.

Video of the day. Have you ever wanted to get inside someone’s head and hear their inner monologue? Anthropologist Andrew Irving decided to give it a go by convincing strangers in New York City to say their inner thoughts out loud while being filmed from behind. One woman worries about finding a shop; a man muses about two friends having a baby together.