Reaction is a double standard
TWENTY years of good work can disappear in the blink of an iPhone thanks to 20 characters on Twitter. Well-regarded professionals have had their public standing and good name disappear overnight as a result of just one errant tweet.
No doubt Sunrise presenter Edwina Bartholomew is sweating on a tweet she sent about Channel 9 reporter Seb Costello.
The tweet, which can’t be reproduced here for legal reasons, is the kind of offhand bitchy dig that one drunk person says to another on the couch. And yet, Bartholomew — who’s pregnant and a DrinkWise ambassador — was unlikely to be drunk.
The tweet was sent in response to a fairly mundane story by Costello about a security scare at the Victorian state parliament.
She replied: “Surprisingly articulate for a (censored)”.
Bartholomew apologised soon afterwards, saying she was “half asleep and on the other side of the world”.
“My apologies to Seb and all involved. No offence was intended and hopefully none was taken. It was clearly a mistake and the errant tweet has been deleted.”
In response, Channel 9 and Costello put out a statement saying they are “devastated and shocked at the damaging and false nature of this personal attack on a public platform”. Costello, the son of former Liberal Treasurer Peter, has been in the news himself from time to time, apologising for a clash with another reporter outside court earlier this year and taking sudden leave in 2017.
Meanwhile, Bartholomew’s news clippings are gushingly positive and don’t include even a vague whiff of scandal. Writing about her pregnancy “bingo wings” and laughing about her “uterus dress” is about as contentious as it gets. Her recent wedding to digital media strategist Neil Varcoe was widely covered in glowing terms.
That is why Bartholomew’s tweet presents some interesting conundrums. For a start, she’s widely regarded as one of the nicest women in a snarky industry. Does that matter? Yes. It’s probably why there haven’t been any calls for her to be sacked.
But it’s also true that many of her 58,000 Twitter followers are not happy, with many clearly dissatisfied with her apology.
To her credit, Bartholomew has also admitted to sending the tweet instead of opting to argue her account had been hacked, which is the go-to defence of many public figures.
She’s also a woman taking a nasty pot-shot at a man. Many people are asking if it would be different if Costello had said something similar about her. Yes, it probably would. I think he would be held up to a higher scrutiny.
Yet she wrote and sent it. It sat there for 50 minutes before it was deleted. So it’s fascinating to ruminate on the provenance of this “errant tweet”. Perhaps she wrote it and meant to send it as a private message, not a tweet to everyone. Perhaps she wrote it but didn’t mean to send it. Perhaps she was so tired and off her head with pregnancy hormones that she didn’t realise she was writing it (Is that even possible?). There’s a lesson for all of us. Thanks to social media, bitchy comments can become career-ending moments. Swimmer Stephanie Rice took years to recover from a late-night homophobic tweet in 2010 after watching a rugby game.
SBS presenter Scott McIntyre was also sacked for posting “inappropriate and disrespectful” comments about Anzac Day. He went much further than ABC presenter Yassmin AbdelMagied, who was attacked for suggesting there are other groups in the community we should remember on Anzac Day. Her career also hasn’t recovered.
That is why I teach my children to subject every word they put on social media to the front page test. How would you feel if the comment was put on the front page of the paper in a banner headline?
As I write, there’s talk of legal action between Channel 9 and Channel 7 over Bartholomew’s tweet.
It doesn’t help that Peter Costello is Nine Entertainment’s chairman. It’s likely that Bartholomew and Channel 7 will have to issue a longer, more formal apology and perhaps make a donation to a charity of Costello’s choice for this to go away.
As always, it pays not to tweet under the influence — whether it’s stupidity, tiredness, drugs or alcohol. If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t use Twitter to say it.