Diary can reveal Hadley has been advised he is likely to be called to testify in Jones’ long-running indecent sexual assault case as early as Thursday once the court finishes hearing from the second of his former colleague’s alleged victims.
The man – one of six complainants who have accused Jones of preying on them at various points over two decades – once worked on Jones’ hit 2GB breakfast program, with prosecutor Georgina Wright last week telling the court his final chore each day was to drive Jones home from 2GB’s Pyrmont studios to his harbourfront apartment overlooking Sydney’s Circular Quay after his show wrapped.
It was during these brief, three-kilometre trips that Jones is accused of first lavishing the young employee – known only as “Complainant C” – with unwanted attention, kissing and sexually touching him, while calling him “donkey”, in reference to the size of his penis.
In her opening statement last Monday, Wright claimed Jones became progressively brazen and public with his affection for the young man as time went on, with inappropriate encounters occurring at a lunch attended by radio station colleagues, in a walk-in robe backstage at a Melbourne show as another employee was waiting nearby, and even in the 2GB studio’s internal elevator.
The employee allegedly grew increasingly distressed about the encounters and made a number of partial disclosures to colleagues, including Hadley, who hosted the top-rating show that followed Jones’ program each weekday.
The alleged victim is expected to give evidence about his experiences from Monday, with legal sources telling Diary that Hadley had been notified he would be called the moment Complainant C had finished on the stand.
Unlike Jones’ accusers, who are all giving evidence via video link, Hadley will be the first witness to appear in person in the courtroom and potentially lock eyes with the man against whom he is giving evidence. What’s more, it is understood it will be the first time Hadley and Jones – once close colleagues – will have been in a room together since the latter left 2GB in May 2020, six months into an $8m, two-year contract, for “health reasons”.
Funnily enough, his exit came just weeks after Diary started asking if he was about to get the boot for costing the outlet upwards of $6m amid an ongoing advertiser boycott after telling listeners then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern should have “a sock shoved down her throat” … only to be told he was most definitely not going anywhere.
(Of course, his is the same network that just last month told us 4BC breakfast Sofie Formica and Dean Miller weren’t going anywhere only for them to be sacked four days later … so excuse our enduring scepticism when Tapt Media tells us things).
Jones and Hadley’s impromptu reunion will come just a week before Tapt celebrates the 100th anniversary of 2GB with a series of off-site broadcasts around the city – though we hear neither man will contribute to the event even though they led the station to glory for two decades in its golden age.
Despite being afforded the presumption of innocence, sources told us Jones hadn’t been asked to take part, while Hadley has apparently advised Tapt he’s got better things to do after the network stuffed up and failed to invite him to the 40th anniversary festivities for its once-popular rugby league Continuous Call Team show.
Cruising for a bruising
Move over Tom Cruise because Nine’s bumbling bosses have finally just about finished assembling their Mission: Impossible cast and are about to issue them the daunting task of saving the network’s imperilled Today show after months of diabolical mismanagement – and not so surprisingly, it looks like Samantha Armytage and Tom Steinfort are all but locked in to lead the new-look line-up.
Of course, the daunting task need not have been quite so daunting. Diary can reveal Nine had the opportunity to screen-test all the real, viable hosting combos to take on fronting Today – and even director of television Michael Healy’s good friend and close neighbour Mike Willesee Jr – over the course of one weekend, only for the channel’s bosses to refuse to do the sensible thing and instead insist on conducting a series of unedifying – and completely unnecessary – on-air trials in a bid to alienate as many viewers as possible.
Well, mission accomplished on that front, with even the show producers admitting they were struggling to keep up with all the chopping and changing and whether their hosts were Arthur or Martha (we suspect it was actually Willesee Jr on that occasion because it certainly wasn’t Joel Dry after he got vetoed by Armytage) as ratings tanked.
But, hey, it’s not like Today is at the heart of a morning TV schedule that brings in $100m a year for Nine or anything … oh wait, it is.
Mercifully, Armytage and Steinfort sent the show’s spiralling numbers back in the right direction after clicking on air last week, with Today’s audience growing by almost 10 per cent from a lacklustre 265,000 viewers on average across the country on Monday to finish the week with just shy of 290,000, sending a clear message to the station’s bosses about what could actually be achieved if only they settled them in for the long haul.
Even then there remains much work to be done behind the scenes before the show mounts a serious challenge for the timeslot’s ratings title, with Seven’s all-conquering Sunrise somehow scooping Today last week by securing an exclusive breakfast television interview with former Qantas boss Alan Joyce … even though Tracy Grimshaw had only just filed a book report on his boring, new memoir while interviewing him for 60 Minutes the previous night. Yikes.
As it turns out, we will have to sit through yet another Today show hosting upheaval, with Armytage disappearing from the program for the next two weeks – with sources suggesting she’s jetting off to Thailand for a pre-existing media commitment – while Sylvia Jeffreys is pulled back into the fray to keep the human headline’s seat warm until she returns on August 24.
For crying out loud
It’s their party and they’ll cry if they want to … and, make no mistake, One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson and her chief political strategist, James Ashby, are both still crying long and hard about the grilling she copped on Seven’s Spotlight almost a month ago.
In fact, Diary’s sources claimed the duo were even crying foul just last Friday and blaming the show after some rather embarrassing details emerged about their recent summer sojourn in Europe, with Nine’s tabloids revealing One Nation was left to foot the bill for their $900-a-night hotel rooms to sit vacant in London while they flitted off to Italy to meet up with billionaire businesswoman Gina Rinehart.
And wouldn’t you know it, within hours of that news breaking we were reading “leaked emails” that showed the team in at Spotlight had discussed taking Hanson to visit a refugee camp in Syria as part of its months-long road show with the flame-haired firebrand pollie and had even contracted a professional outfit, GM Risk Group, to conduct a detailed risk assessment ahead of the proposed trip.
What has any of this got to do with party-funded, luxury hotel rooms sitting empty? Well, absolutely nothing – and it’s hardly earth-shattering to learn a current affairs-style show came come up with a confrontational, current affairs-style idea for the episode. Heaven forfend.
Besides, Hanson had long since put the kybosh on the idea and the show instead simply filmed her making a visit to an Islamic college in Brisbane, which might not have been quite as exciting for viewers but would have at least had Seven’s embattled bean counters salivating over the drastically reduced cost.
Hilariously, the “leaked emails” only succeeded in making a mockery of One Nation’s ridiculous claims Spotlight cajoled Hanson into meeting with convicted thug Tommy Robinson against her better judgment. If she could say no to one thought-bubble, why couldn’t she have said no to that too?
Well, because, as we keep hearing, it was actually One Nation’s idea, and was done as a deliberate “f..k you” to Nine for sacking Karl Stefanovic for performing the exact same stunt. Classic.
Nine lives for Stevo
Breaking up is hard to do – just ask ARN’s unlucky-in-love chief executive Michael Stephenson.
Just four months ago, the rookie radio boss was dumping the country’s biggest – and best-paid – personalities, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson, and busting up their popular KIIS FM breakfast show in a move that looks destined to cost the company tens of millions of dollars in payouts and its long-held dominance in Sydney’s fiercely competitive FM timeslot.
Now, Stephenson has found himself on the receiving end of a good, old fashioned dumping, with Sandilands and Henderson’s long-time newsreader, Brooklyn Ross, walking out on the station on Friday after agreeing to join the new Kyle Sandilands Live program ahead of its launch on Monday.
Not to worry, Stevo will surely have little trouble replacing Ross given he boasts one of the biggest contact books in the business – who cares if it only contains contacts for people he used to work with at Nine during his former life as the channel’s top sales boss? Not Stevo that’s for sure and certain.
Just last December, he hired one-time nine.com.au director Kerri Elstub as his chief content officer in what ARN described as a “power play” – even though it came just two weeks after the Daily Mail revealed she hadn’t had the best of break-ups with Nine and was taking the network to the Fair Work Commission over alleged “contraventions involving (her) dismissal”.
Then, in May, he hired one-time Nine star Karl Stefanovic to host a weekly podcast even though he was clearly in the midst of a very messy and public break-up with Nine, claiming the signing was “an excellent example of our strategy coming to life” at ARN, only to kill Karl off after just two outings. Quite the lively strategy, that one.
And, of course, he also hired one-time Nine game show host Eddie McGuire to talk over Stefanovic on their blink-and-you-will-fortunately-miss-it podcast, only to have to scramble to find something else for him after the show was canned.
With Ross’s seat now sitting empty at KIIS, Stevo might want to look to one-time Nine weather presenter Amber Sherlock to fill the void. After all, she’s going through a bad break-up with the network and is currently suing it for unfair dismissal, so she seemingly ticks just about all of his hiring criteria.
Sunrise, sunset
There’s an old adage that insists “a bad excuse is better than none”. We’re not sure about that, but the excuse Sunrise has been busy peddling since its leading lady, Natalie ‘Boomer’ Barr, was caught surreptitiously screenshotting pics of small-screen rival Samantha Armytage sure is funnier than none.
The latest development in the saga comes after we last week revealed Barr had suffered a “boomer fail” when she accidentally uploaded a shot of her photo reel while trying to flog a few cardigans on Instagram; before hastily deleting the post when she realised it showed she had been taking sneaky pics of Armytage hosting Nine’s Today.
Since then, the network has apparently been at pains to stress that Barr wasn’t bagging her former colleague but rather she was simply still trying to copy her style – and had sent the screenshot to Seven’s wardrobe department in the hope they could rustle up a similar outfit for her to wear on Sunrise. Lol – we’ll keep an eye out for that.
Still, even as Barr was concerned with dressing up for Seven’s breakfast show, one of its popular talking heads, Amanda Rose, was giving it a dressing down.
A regular fixture on the show’s Hot Topics segment opposite 2GB radio presenter James Willis, Rose revealed she’d quit the weekly spot (after what we hear was “an explosive row” with executive producer Jake Lyle) when she was asked to can her rival media appearances and become exclusive Sunrise talent in exchange for, well, nothing.
“Essentially I was told: be exclusive with us – unpaid – or we will pull back your appearances,” Rose fumed. “The audacity … wanting me to be exclusive (for nothing).
“What was my reaction when I first read the email – which was probably one of the most unprofessional emails I’ve ever read (it looked like a fifth-grader wrote it actually)? I said, ‘Sure, you can have your exclusivity … with someone else. I quit.’”
And, hey, we couldn’t agree with Rose more. Why should any show expect professional journos and talking heads to help fill their airtime for free? We’ll start doing that the day the hosts start rocking up without getting paid too.
Dan’s still the man
Ten’s ironically named 10 News+ went out not with a bang, and nary even a whimper, with the overhyped and underwhelming current affairs show attracting so few viewers it failed to make any noise at all when it made its final weeknight appearance on Friday.
Despite launching amid much grandiose fanfare and unchecked hubris, the nightly news flop attracted just 118,000 viewers on average across the entire country for the inauspicious outing, having lost almost two-thirds of the 291,000 people who tuned in to watch its debut little more than a year ago.
The show’s meagre audience, which works out to be a distinctly commercially unviable 0.42 per cent of the population, was bested by such non-ratings powerhouses as The Bold and the Beautiful, Find My Country House Australia, a repeat of Deal or No Deal and even Win News (even though that doesn’t air in any of the nation’s densely populated capital cities).
The only real plus to the whole sorry 10 News+ affair was that it revealed fledgling executive producer Dan Sutton as one of the industry’s rare “noble” newsroom leaders after he insisted on signing all the show’s new recruits – including wooden anchors Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace – on watertight deals, ensuring most of them will survive even though the program has gone from an hour-long run six nights a week, to just half an hour on Sunday evenings.
“Dan insisted every new hire on 10 News+ get a two-year contract instead of a run-of-show one,” one source said. “He knew (the show) would be another Ten shit sandwich and wanted to protect them.
“ It wasn’t popular with his bosses but it was a rare noble act in the world of commercial television. He’s one of the best blokes around.”
Sutton made an even nobler sacrifice last week after he put his hand up for a voluntary redundancy and walked out of Ten after more than two decades, with sources claiming he hoped his departure would free up enough cash to spare some junior staffers the chop.
His gesture may prove in vain, with Ten’s ailing 5pm bulletin to be extended by half an hour from Monday to fill the gap. The move will see it go head to head with Seven and Nine’s 6pm offerings for a third of its airtime, and its ratings go down the gurgler accordingly.
Albo finds his voice
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese might have had his hopes dashed when it came to being remembered for ushering in an Indigenous Voice to Parliament but, on the upside, he will always be remembered for ushering in a new era for conservative news voices.
After all, News24 has just put up a plaque note just that – and memorialising the fact that Albanese and his NSW Labor counterpart, Premier Chris Minns, officially opened its new, state-of-the-art television studios earlier this year.
That the nation’s two most powerful Labor leaders united for the proverbial ribbon-cutting back in February speaks volumes about the channel’s growing prestige and audience, both of which have continued to increase unabated following its rebrand from Sky News Australia a couple of weeks ago; much to the chagrin of the alarmist Henny Pennies over at the Grauniad’s dour Aussie newsroom who have spent months clucking on about how the sky would fall in and the station suffer a disastrous ratings collapse in the wake of the relaunch (note to subs: insert side-splitting snort of derision here).
Interestingly, the studio opening came 35 years after late Labor prime minister Bob Hawke cut the ribbon on the public broadcaster’s then-state-of-the-art ABC Ultimo Centre. At the time, Hawke recognised that, under managing director David Hill, “the ABC’s strength, and the basis for the enormous reservoir of goodwill that exists in the community for the ABC, is its non-commercial style – its capacity to be an independent provider of news and information”.
“In an industry where broadcasters are too often blamed for appealing to the lowest common denominator, the ABC is still the quality alternative,” he said.
“And what is just as important, this quality alternative does not mean that the ABC is forever locked into serving a narrow elite of the community.”
Sadly, somewhere along the line that changed and the ABC developed a defensive, siege mentality when it came to accepting any criticism from its stakeholders (that would be us, the taxpayers, who foot the astronomical bill for the whole operation) while allowing a select few activist journalists to run rampant and trash the public’s trust in the institution by pursuing their own personal and political agendas. Thank goodness current managing director, Hugh Marks, is prepared to make the tough calls and mop up the mess.
Going wild out west
Things are about to get wild out west, with Perth’s most notable independent mastheads expanding their operations and looking to duel it out with The West Australian in a bid to break the paper’s stranglehold on the city.
Diary hears the “Little Newspaper That Could”, The Post, is steaming away with plans to expand its footprint, currently encompassing the city’s wealthy western suburbs, by creeping into the Perth’s northern reaches, as editor Bret Christian looks to make the most of the company’s new high-speed printing press.
Business News is also about to scale up, though its eyes are firmly looking east, with managing editor Sean Cowan and reporter Gary Adshead heading to the nation’s capital this week to recruit a couple of federal political gun-slingers for its soon-to-launch Canberra bureau and also lobby for some primo real estate in Parliament House.
The increasing competition comes as The West continues to cut back on staff; though the team shouldn’t get despondent because we hear that media mogul Kerry Stokes’ heir apparent (and the new sheriff in town at Southern Cross Media), Ryan Stokes, has developed a new-found fondness for the publication and is particularly committed to its ongoing success.
In fact, any unwitting SCM execs who dare even think of suggesting the media giant should consider selling off its publishing division might soon find themselves OK Corral’d out of the company … if they haven’t been already.
Hypocrites in frame
We were forced to do a quick double-take when the Kennedy Awards announced freelance photographer Banjo McLachlan had been named a finalist heading into next week’s gala ceremony for his world exclusive images of gunmen Sajid and Naveed Akram as they carried out their evil massacre at Bondi Beach … not because the pictures were up for two prizes, but to double-check which outlet had actually submitted them.
As the Diary faithful will recall, McLachlan was working on another job for the Daily Mail when the father-and-son shooters went on their hate-filled attack, and risked his life to capture frames of the accused terrorists in the midst of all the carnage and chaos.
His work was immediately picked up by news outlets around the globe after the Mail published the pics online, and they were even splashed across the front pages of just about all of News Corp’s mastheads, as well as getting a run on Nine’s television news bulletins and in its tabloid newspapers.
While News promptly acknowledged the Mail’s copyright and paid up for the right to run the frames, the pictorial kleptomaniacs at Nine did not. Indeed, almost eight months on, the multibillion-dollar media company still insists it had the right to pilfer McLachlan’s pics and publish them without paying a single, solitary cent.
And yes; we’re talking about the very same sanctimonious Nine that spends most of its time sermonising about its ethically superior approach to journalism, and which is run by chief exec Matt Stanton, who just last week was out castigating the government for allowing big tech to loot and pillage his own company’s content.
And no; the hypocrisy is not lost on us. That’s why we were so pleased to see McLachlan and the Mail are both recognised as finalists in the Outstanding News Camera Coverage and Outstanding News Photography categories.
Not only that, the snapper is even a chance of walking away with a hat-trick of prizes after being short-listed for The Power of the Lens, People’s Choice Award.
If McLachlan wins even one of the awards, hopefully the hypocrites running Nine will finally concede it’s time to do the right thing – and that his work is actually worth paying for … because it is.
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