What was
Ita Buttrose AO OBE
thinking ?. Was it a carefully planned statement or a throwaway line ?. Certainly three of Sydney's top society gossip snoops believe the former.
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| Ita Buttrose and Prof. Ross Steele |
Ros Reines (
Sunday Telegraph),
Andrew Hornery (
Sydney Morning Herald) and
Annette Sharp (
Daily Telegraph) were speaking yesterday at the
Secret Women's Business charity lunch at Quay restaurant and basically inferred that Ita had known exactly what she was doing when she made the claim about
Rupert Murdoch.
It's already had a run on the top US political website
Raw Story and from there it is just a matter of time before it hits the British tabloids.
Ita was talking during the second part of her
Australian Story interview-
Ita Tells Me So.
Near the end of the program Buttrose- former editor-in-chief of Sydney’s
The Daily Telegraph, said that Rupert Murdoch instructed her to have a subject tailed because legitimate
reporting techniques were not producing the desired results.
“I assigned a reporter to do it but [Murdoch] wasn’t happy with the
result and said, ‘No, that wasn’t good enough. Have you followed this
person?’” she recalled.
“I can’t give this instruction,” Buttrose later told then-News
Limited chief executive Ken Cowley.
“I’m not having anybody that works
for me, for whom I’m responsible, follow anybody. I don’t want to be a
part of it.”
During the credits of the show the following statements appeared :
“Mr. Murdoch has never asked any journalist to do anything improper,”
a ( News Corp) spokesman said.
“Mr. Cowley has never been asked by Mr. Murdoch to have a reporter
conduct surveillance of any kind on any individual and nor would he have
agreed to it had he been asked by Mr Murdoch or anyone else,”
Buttrose has been one of Australia's most successful female publishers having worked for both Murdoch and
Kerry Packer. In 1972 she was hired by Packer to launch the Australian edition of
Cosmopolitan but when the deal fell through, she and Kerry devised
Cleo, one of Packer's most successful publications of all time. The story was told in the recent two part telemovie
Paper Giants.The Birth of Cleo.
And even odder was her brother Julian Buttrose's friendly exhortation to spare fellers to give Ita a call and ask her out on a date.
The last few times we've seen Ita out and about ( as our picture shows) she has been on the arm of the French tutor
Professor Ross Steele. In fact the two sat front row at the
Myer parade just ten days ago.
The ABC program
Australian Story can be watched
here.
Says Milson : ‘"I’ve known Charlie indirectly and directly since birth. I was born in Albury around the corner from the Waterstreet
Hotel, owned and managed by his parents. On Friday afternoons, my father
used to sell them freshly caught Murray cod to earn extra money for
materials he needed to complete a boat he was building at home, which
later sank to the bottom of the Murray River during its maiden voyage
one freezing afternoon."
