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I knew Karl before he was famous. He came into the Nine Sydney newsroom as a young man who’d paid his dues: Rockhampton, Auckland, Brisbane. The best kind of instant success – built on grind.
He was immediately likable. A larrikin; funny but hard-working and serious about his craft. One of the striking things about his sudden shift into martyred hero of the far right is the way people feel it’s a stage act. Almost as if the donkey costume will fall off any minute and there will be Karl, grinning, smirking – “gotcha there!”
“I like Karl,” said the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, when asked for his reaction to the split from Nine. The gleam of tears in the eyes of Today Show co-host Sarah Abo as she announced his exit was not confected. Even the Asio boss, Mike Burgess, referred to Karl – chummily – by his first name.
“I’m free!” declared Stefanovic in his video release. Free from the tyranny of the 4am alarm, for sure. Free to make podcasts. But free from what else? Free to do what, exactly?
Let’s make no mistake about Tommy Robinson. The man rose through the ranks of England’s notorious football hooligans. His criminal convictions include fraud as well as violence.
He is a racist in general but is most relentless in his loathing of Islam. He never misses a chance to conflate all Muslims with terrorism and sex crimes. He has posted pictures or by other means identified everyone from doting grandparents to schoolchildren as sex offenders – anyone will do, so long as they’re black or Asian. Entirely innocent people have lost jobs or had to flee their homes as a result. A “rightwing thug”, in the view of former conservative PM Boris Johnson. As a journalist, Stefanovic seemed uninterested in any of that, even less in Robinson’s history of stalking and threatening journalists.
Supported by far-right American billionaires, including publicly by Elon Musk, Robinson has attached the never-sleeping engine of his hatreds to powerful friends. This year he travelled to Russia. It was not his first visit. A BBC investigation into “Direct Action”, a Russian front organisation working to sow division in the UK, found part of its activities was to promote the profile and image of Tommy Robinson.
So much for this noble defender of England.
“We are the storm!” bellowed Robinson as he stirred up thousands at a “United The Kingdom” rally he organised in London last September. Who, exactly, is the storm? Who is the “we”? Putin’s psy-ops merchants? Shadowy American billionaires? The people who backed Brexit and now profit politically from the huge rise in non-EU migration since?
All of this could have made Robinson a fascinating interview, worthy of Stefanovic’s considerable intelligence and skill. Instead we had Karl telling this man “I love you”.
And this is the mystery. Karl is smart. He has spent 20 years in a difficult job playing the larrikin boy – and then man – next door, who asks questions of leaders in ways that make it hard for them to wriggle free. His gift is to speak the language of ordinary Australians, while being alive to their concerns. And making it seem like fun.
How has his compass shifted so far that he platforms a man who stirs up terrorist attacks on mosques?
“Freedom of speech, here and around the world, is what this show’s about,” said Stefanovic in his video pitching for new sponsors. Written down, those words seem pompous, aggrandising and disingenuous, but Karl has always known how to sell a line.
The temptation is to see his love-in with Robinson as based on a new commonality: they both see ordinary punters as a group to exploit. To stir up. A seam to mine for profit. As media analyst Tim Burrowes from Mumbrella notes, the money in the freelance political commentator space is found on the far right.
The social cost is the bill we pay.
“The clickbait model of media these days,” warned Burgess this week, “drive[s] anger [and] there is a direct correlation … between anger and language, inflamed language, inflamed tension, and violence.”
I have always liked Karl. I have enjoyed his success. If he’s now setting off to sell racists, thugs and conspiracy theorists, I hope he fails.
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