Channel Nine Have Confirmed Mark Latham Will Be On Karl Stefanovic’s New Panel Show, For Some Terrible Reason

Over the last couple of months, Q&A and the ABC more generally have gone through a great deal of scrutiny. A few misguided words from Zaky Mallah catapulted the show onto the government’s official naughty list and resulted in both a petty ban on the involvement of frontbenchers, and a shift of the show into the ABC news and current affairs division. Following on from that, last week’s now-obligatory furore was caused by an on-screen tweet with an offensive handle, and this morning a prominent Coalition minister alleged the ABC were essentially in cahoots with Fairfax on a mission to bring down the government.

I’m sure you know all this already; with the blanket coverage it received in the News Corp press especially, there’s no way you couldn’t. But I’m bringing it up now, so it can act as some kind of context to the following words: Channel Nine have this morning confirmed they’re filming a pilot for their own Q&A-style panel show featuring the nation’s bumbling, gaffe-prone dad Karl Stefanovic and the nation’s openly incendiary drunk uncle Mark Latham — a man who last weekend stood in front of hundreds of paying audience members at the Melbourne Writers Festival and yelled the words “fuck, cunt, poo, bum”.

While Channel Nine has been planning a late-night panel show hosted by Stefanovic for some time now, it was this morning confirmed to The Australian that Latham would be involved in the pilot, which is to be filmed next week. Though no one has committed to a contract with the show, media reporter Sharri Markson (one of the many people abused by Latham on stage at MWF last week, and the daughter of his rumoured agent Max Markson) has confirmed the other panel members as Liberal minister Amanda Vanstone, actress Pallavi Sharda, founder of MyBudget Tammy May and Sebastian Robertson, the head of Batyr: a not-for-profit focussing on young people’s mental health which we profiled earlier this month. She also reports the slated discussion topics as “gay marriage, whether Australia is a racist country, the Adam Goodes controversy and whether baby-boomers are a selfish generation”.

Of course, if you squint a little bit, this looks great. To see a commercial network committing to discuss topics worthy of public debate and incorporating a diverse range of viewpoints is both laudable and smart — it’s a formula Channel Ten has had great success with at The Project. But there’s one important difference here: Mark Latham is not Steve Price. He’s not the token old crank to cart out when you need a dash of crazed boomer to spice things up; he’s a privileged, middle-aged man facing serious accusations of gleefully abusing women online — accusations which very recently caused him to give up his position as columnist at the Australian Financial Review. Though his unique experiences in the political sphere do make him suited to make comment on a number of issues, this scandal and the fallout thereafter has proven him completely unable or unwilling to do so.

The sad thing about it is that Channel Nine producers likely know all this. The Australian public are loving watching Latham maniacally unravel, and the decision to include him was almost definitely guided by the juicy ratings he’ll bring in when doing so beside a bewildered Stefanovic. I don’t even need to see an episode to know it’ll be picked up immediately. I’ll be begrudgingly writing about it within a week.

But that doesn’t mean it’s okay. If the public broadcaster is going to get berated night after night for things like accidental tweets and comments, we should at least stop and ask questions when commercial networks purposefully do something like this.

*checks data* producer: if this tells us anything it’s that everyone loves latham. they want more latham thats what this data says, yes.

— Mark Di Stefano (@MarkDiStef) September 1, 2015