Karl Stefanovic crashes out | Media Watch

This morning we wanted to inform you that Carl will not be returning to the Today Show or Tonight.He is our mate and he is our colleague and it goes without saying that Carl's presence will be missed.Two decades is a long time.

Hello, I'm Lynton Besser.Welcome to Media Watch.And first tonight, the departure from Channel 9 of its most high -profile news personality, Karl Stefanovic, whose stellar journalism career, the 20 -year face of morning television, was brought to a close on a park bench.So I'm free.

Truly independent.The public deserve to hear perspectives.

Since the early 2000s, Karl Stefanovic has been a stalwart of the Nine Network.His star rising with stints as a 60 Minutes reporter and steady hand when events shook the world.

This is how quickly things can turn on the streets of Paris right now.

But with commercial television in crisis, Channel 9 has been sacking staff and slashing salaries.An uncomfortable reality for someone accustomed to multi -million dollar pay packets.

No matter how big a personality or paid employee I am, there's less money to circle around.Less money for production.Less money for talent.

Last year, Nyan reportedly proposed to cut more than $500 ,000 from Stefanovic's $2 .8 million a year contract and extend it only for 12 months, not the usual three years.He agreed on the condition that he'd be free to launch his own podcast.I am free and independent to talk to the people that I'm curious about.From early on, however, it was clear the podcast would feature a Carl that Nine's audience might not recognise, inviting onto his new show a string of increasingly controversial guests who sometimes doclaims would be untroubled by any acts of journalism.Even the notorious anti -vaxxer Pete Evans, to whom Carl apologised for having campaigned for the COVID -19 vaccines which saved millions of lives.

I'm genuinely sorry and I got it wrong.and airing themes, it's clear to me, selected to be flagrantly provocative.Aussie diggers being treated worse than pedophiles, refugees receiving priority over Australians, and climate change being bullshit.Stefanovic last week took the podcast to London, where he pulled the trigger on the interview which would appal his colleagues and put the Frighteners on Nine Entertainment's top brass.This chummy reception for far -right figurehead Tommy Robinson, obvious to us and probably you too, as a come -on to Robinson's fanbase, extended to giving the man free licence to promote not just his hateful views.And they want us to believe that we live in a free and democratic society.

Well, we don't.We live under tyranny.

But his documentaries too.

This is the best documentary you'll ever see, yeah.I'm not just saying it, alright?It's mine, so I would be saying it, but I'm not just saying it.It's...

God, I love you.It's unbelievable.Why the outrage?Because Tommy Robinson is far from lovable.A violent criminal with multiple stretches behind bars and an anti -Islam, anti -migrant zealot.Convicted of using a false passport in 2013 and shortly afterwards defrauding a bank.

Interfering with a criminal trial in 2019, given a five -year anti -stalking order in 2021 for harassing a female journalist.He's also fond of assault, done for bashings in 2005 and in 2011.His aggression sometimes captured by cameras, like in Ascot in 2017, in Italy a year later, and in Portugal the year after that.Once a member of the infamous British National Party, long associated with neo -Nazis and skinheads, Tommy Robinson, who uses a nom de guerre borrowed from a notorious football hooligan, also founded the far -right English Defence League in 2009, a rabid anti -Islam movement.In 2018, in response to this video of the schoolyard bullying of Jamal Hijazi, a cruel attempt to waterboard the 15 -year -old Syrian refugee, Robinson posted this online.The false claim, which garnered nearly a million views online, saw the high schooler sue him for libel, winning £100 ,000 in damages.

The judge finding Robinson had woefully insufficient evidence to defend remarks calculated to inflame, and likely to leave scars that would last for many years, if not a lifetime.When, in 2023, Robinson repeated his false allegations against the teenager in a film using hidden camera footage called Silenced, Robinson was found to be in contempt of court and was jailed again.So how did Karl Stefanovic tackle Robinson's treatment of the teenager?naught but a big smile?

I have to be very careful here because I'll go straight back to prison.There was a story in the north of England where a child got a bottle of water poured over him.I don't know if you saw this.

And apparent endorsement of Robinson's hidden camera effort dismissed by the judge as hearsay that proved diddly squat and further defamed the teenager.

But the judge gives me an injunction.says, you ever show anything from this court case, you get two years in jail.Now what I should have done, and where I failed myself as a journalist and activist and Englishman, I should have just played it.Yeah, yeah, yeah.I should have just played it.

The happy exchange excoriated by Sky News' Andrew Bolt.

Robinson's so -called witnesses didn't say what he claimed, other than a couple who have proved to have lied or at best misremembered.This is not a brave man.This is not a good man.This is a thug.And Channel Nine is right to be horrified that one of his biggest stars treats this cur as a hero.

Within hours of publishing, Karl Stefanovic lost his nerve and pulled the podcast.But not before One Nation leader and regular Stefanovic guest Pauline Hanson snatched it up and reposted it, calling Channel 9 weak for good measure.By then the horse had bolted and within 48 hours Karl Stefanovic's stellar 30 -year television career had become but an item on his own network's bulletin.The man himself emerging from the fray to tell hundreds of thousands of new online viewers.Freedom of speech here and around the world is what this show is about.A claim properly derided as preposterous.

Which is bullshit.I don't care who he interviews.This is not a freedom of speech issue.This is a zero journalism issue.

transformation, his cries of newfound freedom, his cultivation of the angry and suspicious, is that until his bank balance was threatened, Karl Stefanovic, as far as we can see, expressed none of these internet popular culture war credos.But now he's lit upon a persona he's seen work elsewhere, harvesting ignorance and outrage in a bid for ads.This freedom he espouses?It's freedom from integrity.Now to the Federal Court and a landmark loss six weeks ago by a businesswoman, Sal Grover, seeking to exclude trans woman Roxanne Tickle from her female -only networking app.

For Sal Grover, it's a fight to protect women's only spaces.You're here to defend biological rights, is that right?Yes.For Roxanne Tickle, it's a fight to be included.

Sal Grover unsuccessfully appealed a ruling she discriminated against Tickle in denying her access to the Giggle for Girls app.Do you accept that you've broken Australian law?

No.I think it's nonsense.I think it's absurd.

Grover, undeterred, is now seeking leave to appeal to the High Court.While also campaigning for biology -based definitions of man and woman, she claimed were once contained in the Sex Discrimination Act, a position she'd sought to argue on the ABC website.Ten days ago, the ABC declined to run it.Grover, then walking her article over the road, to the Australian.

This is the Sal Grover opinion piece the ABC refused to publish.

The only prerequisite to being a trans woman is to be male.

Sal Grover offered her op -ed to the ABC in May after Aunty had run a piece by legal scholar Paula Gerber which claimed the appeal decision was a win for trans rights and women's rights.So why did the ABC ultimately reject Grover's opinion?There were certainly genuine attempts by the ABC's Religion and Ethics Division to publish.Its editor, Scott Stevens, embarking on a three -week chain of correspondence with Grover.

I would be very happy to receive an article from you by way of response to Paula Gerber's article.It will be subject to the same editorial consideration.But it didn't take long before Stephens had identified what he called...Editorial headaches.A piece like this that makes the kind of sweeping or categorical claims that it does needs also to provide readers sufficient evidence or research to justify those claims.

Central to his initial concern was his belief that Grover's piece inferred that trans women's access to women's spaces may increase incidents of violence against women.After Grover explicitly said she was open to a different approach, without any reference to male violence, she submitted a new version, which Stevens told her he would not publish because it still had serious problems.Categorical language that dismissed alternative views, the mischaracterisation of others, including the federal court itself, and an unavoidable implication that trans women are predators.Grover then tried for a third time, filing a new piece the next morning absent any reference at all to male violence.A piece which Stevens told her was...

But seven days later, he rejected the piece again.on the basis of pervasive inaccuracies and overstatement about the extent to which changes to the Sex Discrimination Act present a threat or danger to women.I'm afraid our decision is not to publish your piece.

So did the ABC get it right?The opinion piece, even after undergoingedits, still had issues.This claim that the Sex Discrimination Act once used explicit biological definitions of man and woman is not nearly so straightforward and remains a matter of contested legal interpretation.Sal Grover told us her piece was not inaccurate, and she was prepared to continue to work with Arty to get it published.

Because the ABC is the national broadcaster and should represent both or all sides of issues.On gender ideology, it does not.The ABC is clearly biased on this issue.

The ABC, meanwhile, told us it tried to work with Sal Grover in good faith, but ultimately...

We welcome future pitches by Ms Grover and others.

And indeed, just this morning, the ABC published this opinion piece, arguing the Federal Court decision was bad for women's rights.Alan Sunderland, a former ABC editorial director, believes the organisation should have been able to publish Sal Grover.

Given the substantially refocused and restructured nature of the most recent piece, and the apparent willingness of Ms Grover to make further changes as required, it is not clear to me why the ABC was not able to find a way of publishing the article.

As challenging as Grover's arguments might be to sections of the community, we really see no reason why a version of her article could not have been published in the first place.Not least because the businesswoman had made very plain her willingness to do what was necessary to meet the ABC standards.Indeed, her campaign to change the law is now a public conversation, and the ABC should not deny its audience the opportunity to hear from its central player.And now to the New South Wales town of Cootamundra.where last week, readers of the Coota Herald were treated to some much -needed spiritual education.Kuta locals given the detail they needed in their yearning to understand a centuries -old tradition involving the search for an earthly vessel, the drawing of lots and, most critically, securing formal approval from the central government.

And not just any central government, because the search for a new Dalai Lama shall be conducted exclusively within the territory of China.And why the obsession with nationality and central government approval?

This is branded content for Embassy of the People's Republic of China.

Yes, full throttle Chinese Communist Party agitprop, which ran across the Australian Community Newspapers Network.But does the next Dalai Lama need government approval?

One leading scholar called the claim...

And does the Dalai Lama only ever come from inside territorial China?Also false.

The fourth Dalai Lama was born in Mongolia and the sixth in Tuan, India.

So why was Beijing insisting it be Xi Jinping, not cosmic fate, deciding the next Dalai Lama?Well, next week marks the current officeholder's 91st birthday.The bloke is elderly.His representative here in Australia told us the article was propaganda and...

Part of a broader strategy to erase Tibetan cultural and spiritual identity.

While the Chinese embassy is standing by the accuracy of its splendid contribution, Australian community media said it clearly designated the peacesponsored content, which helps to pay for local journalism and it welcomes the viewpoints of our readers who may disagree with this advertiser and look forward to publishing their opinions.If only there were an ancient and mystical power which might help reincarnate this regional newspaper empire as a more discerning publisher.And that's all from us tonight.Be sure to check us out on ABC iview as well as YouTube, Facebook and also Reddit.You can find full statements on our website and don't forget to send us your tips.

See you next week.