EXCLUSIVEMamamia's crisis response to our salary exposé: Mia's troops hit the nuclear button but forget to delete one VERY embarrassing article. Plus, Nine bosses wake up to reality of Karl Stefanovic's $3M payday: INSIDE MAIL
In our must-read Mail+ column, Steve Jackson and Peter van Onselen reveal what's REALLY going on in the worlds of media and politics each week.
Paul Burt's offensive guest unmasked
As Elton John once sang, sorry seems to be the hardest word to say… at least for some people.
Sacked Channel Seven weatherman Paul Burt has spent the past week under fire after a series of abhorrent, misogynistic comments appeared in his eponymous outdoor adventure show on 7mate and 7Plus last month.
The professional cloud watcher clearly saw the storm brewing and profusely apologised for somehow failing to spot his guest's disgusting 'wife-beating' comments while polishing his Step Outside with Paul Burt episode for broadcast on March 23.
And so he should - after all, the show is made by his production company.
'They [the guest's comments] were uncalled for, appalling and contrary to everything I believe in,' Burt said on Instagram on the weekend.
Seven's group managing director, Angus Ross, also manned up and unreservedly apologised to viewers on behalf of the network.
Former Seven weatherman Paul Burt has publicly apologised for a series of misogynistic remarks that appeared in his adventure show Step Outside with Paul Burt on 7Mate last month
'Seven was appalled and shocked by the comments made by a guest in Step Outside with Paul Burt,' he said.
'They were abhorrent and totally unacceptable. The show has been removed from 7Mate and 7Plus with immediate effect. Seven unreservedly apologises to viewers.'
And kudos to Ross for that - given none of it was actually his fault.
Indeed, the only person who has refused to say sorry for the off-colour comments appears to be the man who actually made them.
We've no idea why no one else is naming the bloke… but we certainly will: it was veteran entertainer and Guinness Book of Records title holder for cooking the world's longest damper, Nicholas Small.
Let's make no mistake about it, there is absolutely no way to excuse the remarks 'Ranger Nick', as he calls himself, made during the show's regular bush cooking segment.
'Beat the egg like you beat the missus...that's what I do,' he told Burt while walking him through his latest recipe on camera.
'Tie her to a tree and beat her with fencing wire.'
We've no idea why no one else is naming the guy… but we will: it was veteran entertainer and Guinness Book of Records title holder for cooking the world's longest damper, Nicholas Small
What the actual…?
Now, maybe Ol' Nick regrets making the comments - and he most certainly should - but, really, who would know?
Certainly not us... because we've tried ringing him every single day this week to see whether he has anything to say about his baffling 'joke' - and apparently he doesn't.
Indeed, Ranger Nick - who describes himself as an 'Aussie celebrity camp oven bush cook' - was far too busy to take our calls or respond to our texts.
Though not too busy, it seems, to keep posting his supposedly side-splitting comedic takes on life on social media.
'There are a lot of lessons to be learnt about alcohol,' Small opined on his Facebook page on Tuesday evening.
'Now, I only drink when I am with somebody, or when I am by myself.'
Christ almighty, who put this fossil on air in the first place?
Oh, that's right, Paul Burt did - and he wasn't taking our calls either.
Little wonder, given it appears Ranger Nick's off-piste zingers are now causing him dramas on yet another front.
Inside Mail couldn't help but notice that Nine Radio has been busy removing some of Burt's shows from the website of its Brisbane-based 4BC outlet, where the former weatherman has been fronting the weekend breakfast program since the start of last month.
Apparently, Nine decided to get on the front foot and proactively rip down any segments that featured Ranger Nick after reading about the abhorrent 'wife-beating' remarks he made in Burt's 7mate show.
And good on 'em.
What's more, we're told the bush chef is no longer welcome on any of the Nine Radio network's programs.
Sorry, Ranger Nick... (see, it's not so hard to say after all).
Mamamia's scorched earth PR strategy
They say a lot can happen in a week.
On Monday, we exposed unrest at women's website Mamamia over co-founder Mia Freedman's 27-year-old son son Luca Lavigne earning $300,000 a year as the media company's chief operating officer.
While we are not suggesting he is unqualified for the role or undeserving of his salary, we can confirm that hard-working staff - most of them women - were upset to learn how much Luca was earning compared to them.
Particularly given that pay rises at Mamamia are known to be meagre and infrequent.
Last Friday afternoon, three days before publishing, we sent a firm-but-fair email to Mamamia's chief-of-staff and people and culture manager with a list of questions about staff frustration at the outlet.
Mamamia's 'Mr $300k' Luca Lavigne (left, with wife Jessie Stephens) vanished from the news website after we made enquiries regarding unrest at the company over his COO salary
We did not receive a response but that doesn't mean Mamamia was sitting idly by.
Shortly after pressing send on that email, we discovered Luca's author page and seemingly every article he'd ever written for the website had been swiftly deleted.
If you try to access Luca's Mamamia bio, it redirects to the Mamamia homepage. An archived version of his author page as it used to appear can be found here.
Likewise, all the stories that were authored by Luca dating back to his earliest days at the company in 2016 now return 404 not found pages.
Naturally, our first thought was that perhaps some at Mamamia were worried articles Luca penned in the past might have aged badly following revelations about his salary.
It's a reasonable concern, especially as a still-live article penned by Luca's wife and colleague Jessie Stephens in October 2017 has aged like milk in the sun.
The article with the headline 'If we want true equality in the workplace, we need to start with pay transparency' begins with a truly extraordinary few pars that we'll republish in full here:
'This week, I had a heated argument with my boss about pay transparency.
'"Pay is a very private thing," she insisted, "why is it anyone else’s business what someone earns?"
'It would be terrible for staff morale, she told me, to suddenly discover that the person sitting next to you is on a higher salary. This could be for a myriad of reasons, she explained; maybe they’re a better negotiator, maybe they jumped ship, or maybe they are understood to be of more value to the business in a way that is difficult to quantify.'
Given Mamamia's editors like to spike stories, here's a link to an archived version.
This Mamamia article penned by Luca's wife Jessie Stephens recounts a conversation with her 'boss' about pay transparency at Mamamia. It makes for interesting reading...
We asked our sources at Mamamia about this whole 'scorched earth' PR strategy that seems to be going on, and were told: 'This is classic Mia.
'It's so funny they are just deleting his old stories rather than actually saying anything.
'Whenever there's a crisis, this is what they do - just tuck your head in and wait for it all to blow over.'
And we hope the furore does blow over soon - especially as we hear that another Lavigne has just entered the building.
Mia's daughter Coco Lavigne recently appeared in the credits for the outlet's Out Loud podcast as a 'junior podcast producer'.
We wish her luck.
The third and final leadership debate
It's all come down to this: the race for the third and final federal election debate before we head to the polls next month.
As regular readers of this column will know, we were last week forced to eat a slice of humble pie after Sky News Australia proved us wrong and locked in the critical first face-off between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton this week.
The debate, which was broadcast live from western Sydney on Tuesday night and hosted by the channel's revered political editor Kieran Gilbert, was quite the coup and was locked in after months of negotiations behind the scenes by Sky News Australia boss Paul Whittaker, content chief Mark Calvert and deputy news director Tom O'Brien.
The significance of the occasion wasn't lost on either leader, with Albo carefully workshopping discussion points with his entourage of heavy-hitters - Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke - right up until broadcast.
Dutton, meanwhile, was accompanied to the debate by his wife, Kirilly, and daughter Rebecca, who doubtless provided some much-needed comfort given he had just learned his father, Bruce, had suffered a heart attack.
The ABC will host the second debate next Wednesday. It remains to be seen whether the leaders have been briefed to wear fawn cardigans in keeping with the public broadcaster's drab aesthetic.
As for the third debate? Albo and Dutton are yet to commit to anything... but we're hearing that it's most likely to go to Seven while the Nine Network - once a political powerhouse - is left out in the cold.
'They [Albo and Dutton] have certainly not agreed to do either of the commercial networks as yet,' one insider told us.
'The parties are pushing to make their ABC debate available to the commercial networks so they don't need to do either Seven or Nine... but it's hard to see the networks agreeing to simply relay an ABC-hosted event.'
Yes, well, that certainly does seem unlikely, and we're reliably informed both Seven and Nine are still hustling to lock in the leaders for one final hit out at the end of the month.
So why does Seven have the edge? Well, for starters, their federal election coverage is being driven by the network's chief rainmaker Ray 'The Wolf' Kuka, who is widely regarded as one of the industry's most incisive television news brains.
When he's not bamboozling rival network chief executives during hard-hitting bounces in Paris (cough, cough, Mike Sneesby), he's Seven's rather successful resident Mr Fix-It... and if anyone can get it across the line, it's him.
What's more, Seven's power-base in West Australia is looming as the key battleground this election, so Kuka also has a strong case to press.
Whether Albo would be willing to risk alienating Nine for a crack at Seven chair Kerry Stokes' home state is another question altogether, though.
We're going to say that this is one race that's too close to call.
Buyer's remorse at Sky
Apparently the powers that be at Sky News weren't exactly thrilled with the 'stacked' audience of supposedly independent swinging voters at its first leaders debate.
Question after question sounded like what you might expect to hear asked at an ABC dinner party rather than on Sky News after dark.
The powers-that-be at Sky News weren't exactly thrilled with the left-leaning audience at the leaders debate. One woman (left) asked Dutton and Albanese about the 'genocide' in Gaza
Here at Inside Mail we thought we'd cracked the case when we were told that 'Q&A' selected the audience members…
...after all, the ABC's Q&A program on Monday nights is well-known for its biased audience and questions.
But it turns out the Q&A that selected Sky’s debate audience isn’t the ABC TV show, rather it's a market research company the broadcaster tasked with the job.
Three years is a long time between drinks, but we’re confidently predicting Sky will go elsewhere next time it hosts a leaders debate on the campaign trail.
Liberals' lesson in stupidity
Victoria likes to think of itself as the education state - that's literally the line used on its number plates.
Which is why it was so odd that the Coalition decided to pick a fight with the state's universities by coming up with a new higher education policy that takes an axe to international student numbers.
Higher education is Australia's second largest export industry after mining, and Victoria leads the way. Who came up with this vote-losing policy? Presumably the shadow education minister Sarah Henderson, who is meant to be a Victorian.
Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson (pictured), who is meant to be a Victorian, presumably signed off on the Coalition's new higher education policy that takes an axe to international student numbers. Good luck winning those marginal seats in Melbourne
It's the equivalent of a WA Liberal suggesting a mining tax.
Peter Dutton had been tracking rather well in Melbourne marginal seats, capitalising on the unpopularity of the long-in-the-tooth state Labor government.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a certainly skill - it's just not one that's especially becoming in a shadow minister.
'New Karl' at a fraction of the price
It's the head-scratching maths teaser that has Nine's cash-strapped executives - and their ever-calculating bean counters - flummoxed.
Try as they might, they just can't figure out a way to make Karl Stefanovic's opulent, near-$3million annual salary add up.
As free-to-air television audiences continue to shrink - along with their profit margins - it seems Stefanovic's main man, celebrity number cruncher Anthony Bell, has quite the challenge on his hands when he sits down to renegotiate the Today show host's contract with Nine in the coming months.
And if Bell hoped Stefanovic's recent, much-discussed two-week break over one of the biggest news cycles of the year might reinforce the frontman's value, he will be sorely disappointed.
Why? Well, not only did the perennially second-placed Today show kick along just fine in Karl's absence, it actually managed to close the gap with the market leader, rival Seven's Sunrise program.
That's right! Shock, gasp! We've been punching the numbers in here at Inside Mail.
In the two weeks leading up to Stefanovic's on-air absence, on average, the Today show trailed Sunrise by almost 205,000 when it came to total national reach (i.e. the number of people who tune in across the timeslot) and 106,000 in the critical national average audience battle.
Channel Nine's top brass may be finding it increasingly hard to justify Karl Stefanovic's near-$3million annual salary. (Pictured: Stefanovic, left, and Today co-host Sarah Abo, right)
With likeable sports anchor James Bracey (left) filling in for Stefanovic, Today managed to close the gap with breakfast market leader Sunrise
But in the following fortnight, with likeable sports anchor James Bracey filling in on the couch, the margin narrowed considerably to just 182,000 total national reach, and 93,000 in the national average audience.
Indeed, the Bracey factor was even more pronounced the longer he was on Today, with the gap between the rival breakfast shows closing even further during his second week on the job, to just 178,000 and 85,000 respectively.
Of course, we weren't the only ones going over the numbers. In fact, we're reliably informed Nine's execs were more than a little impressed with Today's trajectory during the clean-cut Bracey's run as interim anchor.
'We all love working with Brace - he comes in every day with a big smile on his face and full of energy and positivity,' one Nine Network insider told us.
'It's great to see one of the industry's nicest guys having a win.'
And Bracey isn't the only one smiling - the accountants are too: after all, the sports presenter pulls in just a smidgen under $600,000 a year at Nine, which is a fraction of Stefanovic's whopping pay packet.
Now, as everyone knows, there is such a thing as a 'honeymoon period', and Nine's top brass are particularly skittish given Today's disastrous ratings nosedive the last time the network tried to replace Stefanovic in 2019.
Still, with the long-serving breakfast host heading off on holidays again next week, you can be sure the powers-that-be will have plenty to contemplate.
Foster vs Stefanovic update
Wait, what's that now? Karl's off on another holiday?
Yep, little more than a week and a half after returning from leave, Stefanovic is heading out the door again for an Easter getaway with the family.
Inside Mail hears his wife Jasmine and daughter Harper are planning on slipping off to Fiji on Wednesday, with Stefanovic jetting across after Today wraps the following day.
Of course, that means serial fraudster Peter Foster's legal team will have to get their skates on if they want to serve the presenter with a subpoena to produce documents they are convinced will prove Stefanovic colluded with a rogue NSW Police officer to have him falsely arrested five years ago.
'I'm actually a bit concerned because Fiji doesn't have an extradition treaty with Australia,' Foster laughed when we called him on Wednesday. 'But don't worry, I've given my lawyers a bit of a hurry up just this morning!'
The brewing legal brouhaha comes as Inside Mail this week revealed Foster was suing Stefanovic and Nine for millions after he was slapped in cuffs in a 'made-for-TV arrest' in front of the presenter and his 60 Minutes team in Port Douglas in August 2020.
If that seems just a little optimistic, don't forget, Foster has already sued the NSW Police over the incident - and won.
Fat Tony wants an offer he can't refuse
Drug kingpin Tony Mokbel is already fielding six-figure deals from commercial television networks for the exclusive rights to his 'tell-all' story.
Inside Mail hears the underworld figure once known as 'Fat Tony' - only for him to shed more than a few kilos while knocking out 14km a day on the treadmill during his time behind bars - has been swamped with offers since being released on bail last Friday.
The 59-year-old crime lord, who has spent the past 18 years incarcerated, has been asked to do everything from sit down for exclusive long-form interviews, sell the rights to a drama series about his life, and even pen an autobiography with a ghost writer.
However, we're told Mokbel is in no rush to make a deal and is set on fully clearing his name before cashing in on his notoriety - doubtless so he can keep the cash rather than forfeit it to the Commonwealth under federal proceeds of crime legislation.
And he's understandably confident of doing just that… given Victoria's Court of Appeal has already agreed he was set up by his disgraced former barrister and notorious police informer Nicola 'Lawyer X' Gobbo.
Indeed, while releasing Mokbel on bail, Justices Karin Emerton, Robert Osborn and Jane Dixon said he stood a solid chance of winning his appeal against the three drug trafficking convictions, which had seen him languish in jail since 2007, when it was heard later this year.
But our sources inside Mokbel's camp reckon the TV networks will have to do a little better than six figures if they want to lock him down.
'Tony wants to do it properly, so he'll wait for his court matters to finish before he does a tell-all,' our source, known as Insider X, told us this week.
'But Tony knows what he's worth to TV networks and, like it or not, it's $1milllion-plus for a sit-down.
'The networks might say they don't have that sort of money. But trust me, they do.'
Maybe someone should let the bean counters know.
Independents... united?
If being an independent MP is your thing, surely paying for a joint billboard with another 'independent' isn't playing into that narrative?
Yet that is exactly what teal 'independents' Sophie Scamps and Zali Steggall have done, as you can see.
The teals lose their minds when you dare to suggest they are a political party. But how do these two 'independent' candidates explain this billboard?
The teals froth at the mouth at the suggestion they are a de facto political party, yet all evidence points in exactly that direction.
Even if they have found a way around having to identity as a political party, as this billboard clearly demonstrates, they certainly aren't the 'independents' they sanctimoniously claim to be.
Remember me? No?
The better Albo does on the campaign trail, the more his Treasurer Jim Chalmers appears to be struggling with relevance deprivation syndrome.
So much so that he recently called a media conference just to tell the RBA that Trump's tariffs mean it should cut rates next month.
The better Albo does on the campaign trail the more his Treasurer Jim Chalmers appears to be struggling with relevance deprivation syndrome
Channeling former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John McCain, Jim then suspended his campaign to meet with bank CEOs for a chinwag about the economic turmoil ahead.
McCain had, of course, famously suspended his 2008 presidential campaign briefly to attend to the Wall Street meltdown.
No one within the Labor Party had the heart to tell our Treasurer that suspending his campaign went largely unnoticed, other than the strategically leaked news item that appeared on, you guessed it, the ABC.
He's been as much of a non-entity in this election campaign as the shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, and that's saying something! Jim had hoped that he'd get all the credit for an election win coming off the back of his Budget, but it seems more likely that voters casting their ballots for Labor might struggle to even name who the Treasurer is.
Team Albo is laughing its way to victory already… assuming the PM doesn't find a way to derail between now and May 3.
A rare win for Spotlight
Hallelujah! After 331 days (or as we would describe it 'almost a year') without a win, Channel Seven's Spotlight has finally chalked one up.
The long-overdue victory came in the form of a stellar investigation by towering six-foot-five star reporter Liam Bartlett, energetic senior producer Luke Mortimer and award-winning cinematographers John Varga and Ben Fogarty.
The Spotlight team's compelling probe into the 'blood nickel' trade, which effectively powers the electronic vehicle industry, showcased the horrific conditions inside two Indonesian mines, while being lifted by a little trademark Bartlett argy-bargy involving some buffed-up plonker who calls himself 'The Electric Viking'.
The story certainly resonated with viewers, with Spotlight edging out Channel Nine's 60 Minutes 850,000 to 825,000 in the ratings for their first win since May 12 last year.
And no mistake, the success was a long time coming.
Inside Mail can reveal Bartlett pitched the idea for the investigation more than 15 months ago - and had it greenlit by the network's executives well before Seven's current news boss, Anthony De Ceglie, took charge.
Talk about long-form journalism!
As always though, there is more than one way to skin a ratings report...
And Nine is still claiming victory for overall national television reach with their equally contentious episode featuring multimillionaire adman John Singleton breaking his silence on the death of his daughter Dawn in the horrific stabbing spree that unfolded at Westfield Bondi Junction last year.
The program also showcased Sixty's journalism Swiss army knife, Amelia Adams, breaking out her magnifying glass and examining Elon Musk's influence within the White House.
What was particularly interesting about Adams' story (at least to us) was that it was apparently part of a new content strategy by Nine's long-running news and current affairs staple.
We hear 60 Minutes is making a conscious effort to produce stories that attract an international audience on YouTube, rather than being targeted solely at Australian viewers.
And with their show's online success now a major multimillion-dollar money-spinner for the cash-strapped network, that's probably not such a bad idea, really.
So expect to see even more U.S.-centric content on Sixty in the coming months.
Enemies become friends on the campaign trail
Stela Todorovic, the journo who stumped Albo on the cash rate during the 2022 campaign trail, is now his press secretary as he sets his sights on a second term. Smart move
There is no denying that Anthony Albanese had a much better first week in this year's election campaign than he did back in 2022.
On that occasion, day one was dominated by him not knowing the cash rate.
The question was asked by Stela Todorovic, then a journo, now a press secretary for none other than Mr Albanese.
It was clever thinking by the PM once in office to hire the same reporter who made his life difficult on the last campaign so she couldn't do it again.
That doesn't explain him also appointing former Guardian political editor Katherine Murphy to his comms unit, of course, but we assume he knew the left-wing news site wouldn't exactly lurch to the right without her.
- Additional reporting by Jo Scrimshire
