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A year into his role as managing director of the ABC, Hugh Marks has made one thing clear. The Australian newspaper, a notable chronicler of the ABC’s perceived sins, is his “new friend”.

Since December, the former Nine Entertainment chief has granted the Murdoch broadsheet three exclusive interviews. Last week, a day after the national broadcaster’s first strike in 20 years, Marks was reported by the Oz to be “unpicking the ABC’s union-driven culture”.

“It was a fractious environment at the ABC, generally, over the week leading up to the strike,” Marks told the paper’s media editor, James Madden.

After nine months of negotiations failed to reach an agreement on pay and conditions, 2,000 unionised staff walked off the job on Wednesday for 24 hours.

“It would be unreasonable to ask the taxpayer to stump up for us having to increase the offer to staff,” Marks said.

The question of whether the ABC could work within its $1bn budget and pay executives less and staff more was never raised. (According to the annual report, the base salary for the MD is $1m, his chief financial officer, Melanie Kleyn, receives $650,000 and the news boss, Justin Stevens, is on $529,000.)

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Earlier in March, Marks sat down for “an hour-long interview with the Australian to mark his first year anniversary in the role”. Some news staff told Weekly Beast the interview was “unhelpful” as it played into News Corp’s constant attacks on ABC journalists, including the Americas editor, John Lyons.

While praising Lyons’ coverage, Marks said “in hindsight” he may have chosen his words more carefully. The comment undermined the ABC ombudsman’s finding that Lyons’ analysis of the latest war on Iran did not breach the ABC’s impartiality standards or harm and offence standards.

In another feature-length interview in December, Marks similarly gave ground to the Australian by conceding the ABC could improve its coverage of transgender issues. In a companion comment piece, Madden declared the news division’s “lurch to the left” was to blame for “Australia [falling] out of love” with the ABC and urged the MD to rail against “in-house activism”.

With the Australian regularly calling the ABC incompetent and blaming it for rising antisemitism, we can confidently predict that no amount of cosy chats with the MD is going to change the Murdoch approach.

Radio giant v its biggest stars

With both Jackie “O” Henderson and Kyle Sandilands now suing the licensee of their former radio station Kiis FM in the federal court, ARN Media is facing financial devastation.

Henderson is asking to be awarded $82.5m for wrongful termination and Sandilands $85m, but the company only has a market value of $87m.

Almost every day, there is a new example of the toxic relationship between the radio station and its two biggest stars.

In a letter to Sandilands, revealed by the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, ARN said his comments to Henderson when they were last on air “were not said in jest” and were “calculated to offend and distress her”.

But Sandilands’ lawyer Kevin Lynch wrote back: “It cannot be ‘misconduct’ (let alone, ‘serious misconduct’) for the presenter to present material of a ‘robust character’ that [ARN] ‘desired’ and promised to pay [Sandilands] handsomely for,” according to the AFR.

Henderson’s claim has not yet been released by the court.

The Tele’s rare apology

The Daily Telegraph made a rare public apology this week. Not for anything the Murdoch tabloid has published, mind you, but for commissioning a story coded internally as “undercover Jew” which led to the distress of both supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine who were caught in its net.

When we say a rare apology, we are not kidding. News Corp’s media strategy is to ignore almost all requests for comment, despite running the country’s biggest media operation. For example, last month, the Courier Mail did not explain its digital disappearing trick, which saw the Labor minister Tony Burke erased from a front-page photo of the Iranian women’s football team.

But going back to the apology. You may remember in February last year, Crikey revealed that the “undercover Jew” story was a planned sting at a cafe in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown which went horribly wrong.

The apology was an agreed joint statement to resolve a now settled legal dispute between Cairo Takeaway, an Egyptian cafe which is pro-Palestinian and the pro-Israel activist Ofir Birenbaum.

“The Daily Telegraph acknowledges that entering the Cairo Takeaway without notice, to see if Mr Birenbaum would be treated differently for the purpose of a news article, caused distress to the staff and owner of the Cairo Takeaway,” the statement published in Tuesday’s paper said.

“The Daily Telegraph unreservedly apologises to Cairo Takeaway and their staff for causing that distress. All parties are pleased that these issues have now been resolved in a constructive and satisfactory manner.”

The restaurant and Birenbaum also published the joint statement on their social media accounts, with Cairo also apologising unreservedly to Birenbaum.

Unfortunately, the peace was short-lived, and Birenbaum’s lawyer, Rebekah Giles, claimed her client had “an important win” and the Tele’s journalism was “legitimate public interest journalism”.

O’Brien Criminal and Civil Lawyers, acting for the cafe, returned fire: “It is hard to believe that the Daily Telegraph would apologise for the distress it caused to the staff and owner of the Cairo Takeaway if it currently viewed the story ‘as legitimate public interest journalism’.”

Four Corners to rural idyll

Mahmood Fazal is still listed on the ABC website as a Walkley award-winning journalist working at Four Corners, but he has been on leave while the ABC investigates his involvement in an external podcast about underworld crime with the Melbourne producer Ryan Naumenko.

“Mahmood’s immediate manager endorsed him taking part in a podcast interview, based on the information provided to him,” an ABC spokesperson said late last year. There has been no update on the investigation since.

While the relationship between Aunty and the former serjeant at arms of the outlaw bikie gang the Mongols remains a mystery, we can report that Fazal has not been idle.

He is a feature writer for a free magazine called Lost, based in Daylesford, central Victoria. His lyrical pieces are a stark contrast to his content for the ABC, which focused on crime, violence, imprisonment and terrorism, not to mention his previous life in a bikie gang.

For Lost, he penned a profile of the president of the ChillOut festival, Matt Clarke, who spoke about “the most beautiful little queer festival we have in Australia”.

In another piece, Fazal wrote about local Daylesford artist Michael Parker. “In that space, time seems to slow. The wide skies, shifting light, and the gentle footsteps of kangaroos, deer, ducks, and rabbits outside his studio windows create a rhythm very different from city urgency.”