Fallout from the on-air rape revelation

It’s not often you hear an apology from a big corporation that sounds like it really means it, but Jenny Craig’s statement last night that it “badly misjudged public perception of Kyle Sandilands” sounds genuine enough - perhaps because it’s so bloody obvious.

Hmmm, brand heavily skewed towards women with body issues, linked to the “fat slag” king, what could possibly go wrong?

The language marketing departments use when one of the stars they throw millions of dollars at to flog their products step out of line, is often at best hilarious, at worst mealy-mouthed.

Continue reading "Brands have become our new moral arbiters" »

What happened
This all started when a bearded, talentless big mouth couldn’t handle a spot of criticism. So instead of flinging a few well-aimed barbs at his critics, he decided to shoot the messenger. What a tough guy.

Let the record show that Kyle deserved the derision. His show contained, among other mind-numbing stupidity, a segment where he felt a guest’s boobs. The ratings didn’t lie. They rarely do. An initial audience of 1.3 million shrunk to a paltry 200,000 within minutes.

Afterwards Twitter went into meltdown canning the show. Enter numerous entertainment reporters and bloggers who duly recorded the Twitter mood. One of them was news.com.au’s Alison Stephenson. Ali is capable of excellent colour writing on her day, but on this occasion, she wrote a completely straight, unremarkable account of the Twitter reaction.

Continue reading "Biggest Moments of 2011 #21 Sandilands scrapes the barrel" »

Kyle Sandilands is such an inconsequential waste of space that I would normally be reluctant to expend a single millilitre of ink or pixel of web space on his unfortunate existence.

This week I made an exception, in the first instance because of the remarkably vile nature of his attack on one of our young female staff, a sexually threatening rant where he called her “a fat slag”, talked about her breasts and her hair, and issued the creepy pledge: “Watch your mouth girl, or I will hunt you down”. All this because she wrote a completely unremarkable news piece about the unpopularity of his new TV show.

I’ve decided to saddle up again today because there is an interesting broader lesson from the Sandilands episode. Not to put too fine a point on it, the long-overdue commercial destruction of Kyle Sandilands shows that it is no longer OK to be an abusive, hate-filled arsehole without facing serious consequences.

Continue reading "How the public took charge of a deserved flogging" »

Dear Kyle,

I just want to let you know that I feel sorry for you, mate. I really do. I think people are too rough on you.

Lots of people say that you have no talent, but I think you do. I’ve never listened to your show (except for those times that you’ve been played back on Media Watch), but I know that hosting a radio show does take skill, and you have certainly done that for quite some time.

For that reason alone I hope that everyone goes a bit easier on you in the future.

Continue reading "A letter to the schoolyard bully who never grew up…" »

Why is Kyle Sandilands’s toxic sludge allowed to leak out of radio speakers at breakfast?

He’s a cretin, a hate-filled belligerent whose talent is in inverse proportion to his offensiveness. As Penbo pointed out yesterday, he’s a dead-set, rolled-gold, card-carrying dickhead.

Dickheads are a dime a dozen. Why is this one given a voice?

Continue reading "Sack bloody Kyle Sandilands. Lance the boil." »

It isn’t really a bombshell observation, but Kyle Sandilands is a dead-set, rolled-gold, card-carrying dickhead.

It is with some reluctance that I burst into print about this dopey little grub. His entire marketing strategy – to presuppose a level of intellect which renders him capable of crafting a strategy for anything – is to create outrage and feed off it.

Oh, that Kyle, he’s done it again. The rejoinder to the subsequent furore from Kyle and his fans – just out of interest, what in God’s name is wrong with you people – is to deride the critics as politically correct wowsers who don’t understand his brand of humour.

Continue reading "A hole in his head where his brain should be" »

Regulars, I apologise for interrupting your regularly scheduled, generally pleasant Open Thread experience with a small rant about Kyle Sandilands. But I just had to vent.

You can’t get away from the guy and his incessant complaining. On top of his somehow-blockbuster radio show, in recent times, the man’s acquired a TV show (just the one special, we can hope) and a column in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph (just for the next few weeks, we hope). He’s groping this, whining about that, all in the public eye.

Could he give it a break? Maybe he’d have a little less to whine about if he didn’t bitch about his extremely first world problems to every microphone, camera and notepad in a metre radius. 

Ah, to be a media whore. It’s Tuesday Punchers. I’m sure there’s a lot of other things on your mind. Share them with us!

Kyle Sandilands is a genius. An absolute, out and out Einstein.

The 40 year old broadcaster has no talent, no decorum, no personality, no looks, no style, no charm and no knowledge of anything outside the vast universe that is his ego. Yet the guy is hugely successful.

I have rarely listened to Kyle Sandilands on the radio, nor indeed watched the talent shows on which he is a judge. That’s not snobbery. It’s just how it is. But just as you didn’t need to read Eat Pray Love to know it was bag of fertiliser-grade horse manure, you don’t need to listen to Kyle to know his shows are rubbish. And that, right there, is the proof that he’s so damn clever.

Continue reading "Is Kyle Sandilands Australia’s smartest man?" »

What’s your New Year’s Resolution? Do you even subscribe to that sort of thing?

Mine was to stop drinking so much but I broke that within 24 hours. Must be some kind of record. So, in honour of all those ruined resolutions, here are some suggestions for 2011.

1. NSW Premier Kristina Keneally: Stop lying, or your nose will grow long like Pinocchio’s. If you can’t stop lying, at least attend some of the ethics classes you’re bringing into NSW classrooms. You could learn a thing or two.

Continue reading "New Year’s resolutions we’d all like to see…" »

Tuning into Tony Abbott’s interview with Today FM’s Kyle and Jackie O this morning I knew it would be embarrassing - it’s just that I thought Abbott would be the one making me cringe. Not so.

Kyle Sandilands is obviously a smart man. He’s made millions out of the bogan media persona he’s built, and he isn’t the first radio shock jock to take a stereotype and flog it until it can’t get up any more.

But I still find it amazing that so many people are happy to be talked down to about how stupid they are. The Kyle and Jackie O show this morning was such a festival of ignorance it’s no wonder people like Julia Gillard think they can completely change their personality from one day to the next and the rest of us will buy it.

Continue reading "No wonder our politicians treat us like we’re stupid" »

Julia Gillard agreed to a surprise interview with controversial radio hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O this morning, where she refused to make any changes to the governments ban on gay marriage. The Punch listened to the interview and reports back on how it unfolded.

I didn’t want to like them, but there was a lot of laughter in the studios of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O this morning, as they tackled their first interview with Julia Gillard.

And while I’m yet to be convinced that Sandilands should take his comparison to a “slimmer”, “funnier” Alan Jones too seriously, the easy banter and free flow of questions between themselves, the Prime Minister and listeners calling in, was a good example of what shows like theirs can achieve.

Continue reading "Julia’s (non) gay old time with Kyle and Jackie O" »

The response to The Age’s decision to sack Catherine Deveny says a lot about the Australian media and Australian media audiences. In particular, it shows how selective both can be depending on whether they like or dislike the person — and whether it’s a man or woman at the centre of a scandal.

Soon after Deveny’s sacking was announced, some of her supporters in the Twittersphere claimed that she had been a victim of censorship.

It makes Deveny seem heroic, but it’s hard to see this as censorship.In the first place, Deveny wasn’t prevented by The Age from expressing herself. On this occasion at least, they didn’t spike her writings.

Continue reading "Deveny, Kyle, Matty Johns and TT’s rank hypocrisy" »

With the latest episode of Australian Idol still not hitting the 1 million viewer mark in the new 7.30pm time slot, it is time for Channel Ten to hit the panic button.

Kyle Sandilands may have presided over the death of Big Brother by being the host in its last year, but has he also contributed to Australian Idol’s demise by not being on the show?

Without a doubt this year Idol has had to overcome the challenge of standing down a judge the week the show premiered, the loss of co-host James Mathison, as well as other changes to try and keep a tiring concept fresh. Here is what I see the problems are:

Continue reading "What’s gone wrong with Australian Idol" »

A radio personality returned to the air this week after time out to recover from an unfortunate incident arising from a social disability before now not previously categorised – he is, I have concluded from the incident and his lack of remorse, ‘civically challenged’.

The ‘civically challenged’ person is so self-absorbed or insensitive as to be oblivious to the social and cultural impact of his or others’ egotistical or crass behaviour.

He or she behaves in a way that weakens civic virtue and sensibility. A pattern of such behaviour can desensitise others to the harm being done, normalising what in a moment of shared reflection would obviously be deemed unedifying at best. 

Continue reading "What Kyle says about the death of our civility" »

Just a few years ago I ended up in Warsaw on a business trip to Poland where my former boss Eric Dodd had been invited to talk to top government officials about reforms to Poland’s embryonic private health system.

As a journo and an amateur student of history, I was astonished to learn that our hotel in Warsaw was located on what was previously the Jewish Ghetto in World War II from which tends of thousands were shipped to their deaths.

And just a matter of a few hours drive away was the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews and gypsies were imprisoned in the most horrific conditions and slaughtered in the gas chambers.

Continue reading "Kyle should use his free time to visit Auschwitz" »

Kyle Sandilands is not expected to return to the airwaves for Austereo. That’s the assessment in Sydney radio circles where insiders say that his latest tasteless joke - where he suggested that comedian Magda Szubanski, whose father fought in the Polish resistance, could lose more weight if she were in a concentration camp - will see the network blackbanned by advertisers should he return.

Sandilands has again demonstrated that he’s achieved world’s best practice in his chosen field of stupidity with his “apology” over the remarks - a classic case of “if people were offended by what I said then I’m sorry.”

His comments show how Sandilands is ill-equipped to recognise poor behaviour on his own part and put his hand up - regarding the outrage he causes as some external event that simply happens to him, where the preciousness of the community turns him into a martyr.

Continue reading "Kyle: The End" »

Confined to a wheelchair and wearing a pith helmet and an American flag fashioned into a nappy, shouting obscenities at the justices of the United States Supreme Court, pornographer Larry Flynt was a massively flawed hero for the cause of free speech.

This morally bankrupt hillbilly was famously sued for defamation by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who in a fake advertisement for Campari published by Flynt’s Hustler magazine recalled how he lost his virginity by sleeping with his own mother in an outside toilet on the family pig farm.

It’s hard to imagine a more egregious slur. Nor a more unbelievable one, which is one of the reasons Flynt ultimately won his defamation battle, reinforcing the free speech protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Continue reading "I’m glad that this shocking drongo is back on the air" »

Kyle Sandilands is copping it from all angles and the moment, having just been dumped from Australian Idol over the terrible stunt he and Jackie O pulled last week with the 14-year-old victim of sexual assault.

Yes, his co-host Jackie O has also been put “into recess” by 2Day FM, but it bothers me she seems to be missing out on a large portion of the heat.

The only difference between O and Sandilands during the sketch that went so wrong last Wednesday, was he made that idiotic remark about it being the victim’s “only experience”.

Continue reading "Where’s Jackie O in all this?" »

UPDATE 3/8/09, 5pm : Ten has just announced that Kyle has been sacked as Idol judge. Here’s what Emma wrote last night…

The decision of Austereo to suspend Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O from the morning show will now put pressure on the producers of Australian Idol and Channel Ten to decide whether he should stay as a judge on the popular TV program.

On Saturday Channel Ten was quoted in The Age as saying Kyle “will obviously be in the audition episodes as they were filmed some time ago.”

“But Idol is a family program, we consider this a very serious incident and our executives will continue discussions over the weekend to come to a decision regarding his future on Idol.”

Considering Australian Idol premiers next Sunday, they will have to announce this week whether they are standing by or punting the controversial personality.

Continue reading "Will Kyle get kicked off Idol?" »

Last week’s on-air rape-fuelled Hindenberg disaster piloted by 2Day FM’s Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O has raised so many issues it’s like the Big Day Out of blame, where every act’s a red-hot headliner.

The national festival of finger-pointing opened with shots at the bumbling Sandilands, followed closely by jabs at the mother’s parenting skills, finishing up with blasts at the station for allowing such a suspect segment to air in the first place. All great acts and definitely worth a good moshing over.

But there’s one elusive and hard-to-pin party who haven’t had the lynch mob wield a flaming torch in their faces yet. They are the hardcore listeners who actively pander to the untouchable antics of Kyle and Jackie O by religiously setting the dial in their direction.

Continue reading "Kyle’s listeners the forgotten villains in this scandal" »

You know when a girlfriend or boyfriend says they think it’s time for a break? There’s hints of that in this, from Kyle Sandilands’ manager tonight after it was announced the Kyle and Jackie O show would not be broadcast tomorrow morning:

Kyle has decided not to go on air for the week and we’ll assess our position as the week unfolds.

Saying you’re assessing your position in your work life is like the “time for a break” moment in a relationship. It’s never good, and always sounds like the beginning of the end. At best, it means something is horribly wrong.

Continue reading "Kyle officially now off the air" »

Kyle and Jackie O have been taken off air indefinitely as a result of the massive backlash against last Wednesday’s rape debacle, where a 14-year-old girl revealed on air that she had been the victim of sexual assault. And Sandilands has said through his management that he is “unable to perform his duties on-air at this time”, without elaborating.

The announcement follows five days’ condemnation of the program and Austereo for even airing a segment where an underage girl was fitted to a lie detector machine in front of her mother and quizzed on her sexual habits - let alone with the horrifying consequence of revealing that she had been raped when she was 12, and that her Mum knew all about it.

The network’s decision is an extraordinary demonstration of the power of public opinion, with websites, talkback radio and Twitter being consumed with the issue over this past few day. The comments ran overwhelmingly against Kyle and Jackie O and Austereo, not to mention the girl’s mother, who is being investigated by the Department of Community Services.  The Austereo statement says:

Continue reading "How people power and the web took Kyle off the air" »

The puerile stunt by Sydney radio jocks Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O (Wednesday, July 29) in which a 14 year girl was strapped to a lie detector and interrogated by her mother about sexual matters reveals more than just the nation’s shock that the distressed girl revealed she was raped as a 12 year old.

The stupidity and crassness of Sandlilands and Ms O aside, the incident amplified another more disturbing and sinister aspect of disclosure by children. 

It is the agony and terror faced by many child victims of sexual violence who find the courage to disclose to an adult, only to have that adult fail to respond with any shred of justice or decency. 

Continue reading "The deeper issue raised by sick radio stunt" »

We have learned two fairly rubbish lessons from Kyle Sandilands’ latest madness - or three if you count the additional proof provided that Jackie O is feminism’s giggling Uncle Tom. 

The first is that Sandilands has all the warmth and genuine compassion of a National Rifle Association Christmas. 

The second is that Australian radio is incontestably shit.

Continue reading "Lessons of the Kyle incident: Australian radio is rubbish" »

There have only been a few occasions in my whole career that I’ve been sideswiped by something. When faced with a situation like what happened today, when a girl revealed live on air that she had been raped when she was 12, you react like anyone else. I was horrified.

We have had the lie detector thing on regularly for about six years. It’s a semi-regular segment on the show. We check with the mother before hand, and go through the questions they want asked.

I’m in New Zealand this week and all I have is a microphone, a computer screen, and a camera that relays back to Jackie and the producers in the studio.

Continue reading "Kyle Sandilands: Girl’s rape revelation stunned me" »

Update 3.05pm: Sydney’s Daily Telegraph is reporting the NSW Department of Community Services wants to speak to the girl’s mother.

RAPE crisis counsellors are already lining up to thump Kyle Sandilands after a teenage girl, live on his show this morning, revealed she had been raped when she was 12 - and then the host asked if that was the only time she had had sex.

You can listen to the audio here, but in summary, the girl was asked in a live lie detector test - in front of her mother - whether she had ever had sex. She started to cry, and then said: “I got raped when I was 12 years old.”

Silence. Then this, from Sandilands: “Right ... is that the only experience you’ve had?”

Continue reading "Radio rape scandal: Is it time for Kyle to be sacked?" »