When your interview question is made into a far-right meme, and you become a poster boy for “alt-right” websites, you might need to rethink your approach. But that’s what happened to Triple J’s Hack host, Tom Tilley, this week after he interviewed an organiser of the deadly far-right march in Charlottesville, a chap called Eli Mosley.

Although some critics thought the ABC should not interview anyone with racist views, Tilley’s choice of interviewee is supported by the ABC’s editorial policies in the interests of free speech, and management did back him up.

“Hack believes it is important to hear all viewpoints to fully understand the events that developed in Charlottesville over the weekend,” a spokesman said. “This is in keeping with the ABC’s commitment to fundamental democratic principles including freedom of speech.”

But the program left itself open to criticism because of the way the interview was handled. A management source said it went awry and Tilley didn’t rebut some of Mosley’s arguments. The interview was also news to Triple J management, who had “no idea we were about to put to air a pro-racist interviewee” until after the fact. Sources told the Weekly Beast the ABC was still grappling with where the line is between free speech and hate speech, and this encounter had highlighted the problem.

Alt Right Australia (@altright1788)

Our guy!@TomTilley #auspol #altright #nationaladvocates #realjournalism pic.twitter.com/nWSNgczOy9

August 14, 2017

But Tilley’s pain didn’t end there. One of the callers he spoke to on the program was also a member of the extreme right posing as a Jewish man called Herschel, who said: “Multiculturalism is the end of white people.” On the far-right Politically Incorrect chat board people were encouraging each other to call up Hack and troll it. It appears to have worked.

“It became apparent during the live call on Monday’s Hack program that the caller identifying himself as ‘Herschel’ may have been bogus,” a spokesman told the Weekly Beast.

Eli Mosley (@ThatEliMosley)

I can't stop laughing at this article. @TomTilley I'm sorry you got in trouble mate. Good chat from Hershal too. https://t.co/wghr96rgjF

August 15, 2017

Tilley has since apologised to listeners for airing the bogus call. “We took a live call from a listener who we now believe may have been trolling the program. The caller identified themselves as ‘Herschel’ and as Jewish … and the longer the call went on the stranger it got. The caller essentially made the point that white people would need to accept that multiculturalism would mean the end of them … and their culture. That call was live … and now that I’ve listened back … I believe there’s a good chance the caller wasn’t who they said they were … and was trolling us to help bolster the arguments of the extreme right.”

Returned to sender

The founding editor of Daily Mail Australia, Luke McIlveen, has resigned to return to the News Corp Australia fold as executive editor of Fox Sports. At the Daily Mail, McIlveen has been the target of anger over the way the website lifts stories from other publications without doing any original work. But the angriest complaints have come from News Corp itself. Back in 2014 the company said the Daily Mail journalists were no better than “copy snatchers and parasites”. And earlier McIlveen found himself in the New South Wales supreme court after daring to leave the Murdoch empire for the Daily Mail Group. McIlveen was the editor of news.com.au before joining the Mail after a long career at News, which included editing the Manly Daily and a stint as chief of staff at the Daily Telegraph.

The new job back at the Holt Street headquarters will at least mean he is no longer in direct competition with his wife, Kate de Brito, who is editor-in-chief of news.com.au. There is fierce competition between the news websites: the latest Nielsen rankings show news.com.au is No 1 with a unique audience of 5.3 million.

Culture wars

Fairfax Media announced this week it is back in the black. The publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age reported a net profit of $83.9m, compared with a $772.6m loss for the previous year. This was of course no comfort at all to the 150 journalists who lost their jobs so the company could be more profitable. Meanwhile the downgrading of arts coverage at Fairfax continues to cause ructions. The Sydney Morning Herald and the Age declared this year that arts was a “non-core” activity and offloaded arts, film and books staff writers.

They also slashed budgets for freelance writers and cut the space where reviews and stories can be run. This week the anger boiled over into a fight between writers and editors when the Age’s opera critic, Michael Shmith, resigned in protest and blamed the paper’s new arts editor, Hannah Francis. Shmith is a former arts editor of the Age – from 1985 to 1993 – and opera critic from 2010 to 2017.

“I left because of the sad but inevitable realisation that the Age’s arts page no longer truly represented or upheld the critical standards that were once imperative to its existence and whose values remain of vital concern to me,” he wrote in Australian Book Review. “And when I say ‘me’, I mean, by default, the art form I had the privilege to review.”

But not everyone was sympathetic to Shmith’s plight and the piece was criticised for blaming Francis while ignoring the wider issue of budget cuts.

Alison Croggon (@alisoncroggon)

There are so many things wrong here. No 1: blaming the editor for the Age's drastic cuts of its arts pages. She isn't responsible for that. https://t.co/VYLfsr4OCy

August 15, 2017

Sources say Friday will see the announcement of a new editor for Sydney’s Spectrum section after the resignation of Louise Schwartzkoff, who has been in the position since 2012.

Lyons’ new den

The associate editor of the Australian and its former Middle East correspondent, John Lyons, has been hired by the ABC to run current affairs programming across all platforms. Lyons, who has reported for Four Corners and been executive producer of Nine’s now defunct Sunday program, has had a long career in print, including editing the Sydney Morning Herald. While his title is “head investigative and in-depth journalism”, it would appear Lyons is likely to be somewhat of a “change agent”.

With the ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie’s transformation of the ABC about to be unveiled, there will be plenty of upheaval to come. Programs he will be overseeing such as Foreign Correspondent and Lateline are on rocky ground, having been considered for the axe on several occasions.