Neil Mitchell on Robert Doyle. 3AW broadcaster Neil Mitchell has weighed in on the allegations against his friend Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle in an editorial on his program. Doyle is subject to two inquiries into allegations of sexual harassment, and Mitchell said Doyle was “violently ill most days”, and said repeatedly he wasn’t defending Doyle, but said he was attacking the process. “He’s been hung, drawn and quartered in the media and I believe he still hasn’t seen all the allegations against him,” Mitchell said.

Greenwald’s war on the Russia investigation. New York Magazine has published a new profile on journalist Glenn Greenwald after spending some time with him at home in Rio de Janeiro. 

It probably doesn’t matter to Greenwald in the end how many new details emerge about Russia. The big truth — that American society is in dire need of reform and Russia is not to blame for that — can never be dislodged by the little truths. Still, in the weeks following my visit to Rio, Greenwald seemed to grow self-conscious of his alienated stance. On December 8, he emailed me that he’d been asked to appear on the Sean Hannity Show to talk about his criticism of a CNN story about emails between Trump’s team and WikiLeaks that he considered ‘the biggest fuck-up yet in the Trump/Russia story — totally humiliating.’ A few hours later, he reconsidered. ‘Actually I’ve decided to take the opportunity to go on and just spend the whole time bashing the shit out of Fox and Hannity rather than doing what they want me to do: attacking CNN.’

Front page of the day.

 

Netflix takes harassment claims hit. The spate of US sexual harassment claims involving media, film and other personalities saw Netflix take a fourth quarter, US$39 million hit for content it has paid for, but which it does now not plan to release. Netflix didn’t elaborate. That is believed to include Louis CK’s planned comedy specials, which were canned after the comedian was accused of sexual misdeeds, as well as a movie planned with Kevin Spacey that was spiked for similar reasons. Despite this unexpected expense, Netflix said it was able to exceed its own profit and income forecasts, in part, because of stronger subscriber growth, especially internationally, which turned in its first ever profit for a year of US$234 million. Total international subscribers (net) were 63.8 million of total company wide subs at year’s end of $118.5 million. — Glenn Dyer

Glenn Dyer’s TV Ratings.  The tennis, the Big Bash cricket: night over. — Read the rest on the Crikey website