Sharp Shooting: Seven boss’s awkward slapdown, Alan Jones’ secret ‘love-broker’ role
Seven’s overhauled senior news team was treated to some unsolicited feedback from the network chair during a private lunch.
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Some of Channel 7’s most senior news types apparently didn’t know where to look when chairman Kerry Stokes started giving his guests some unsolicited feedback during a private lunch at his Darling Point home last Friday.
Stokes and his wife Christine had invited the network’s Sydney news stars – and newbie news bosses – to sit down to lunch at their gracious and historic home, Glanworth.
Joining them were Seven’s news director Anthony De Ceglie, newsreaders Mark Ferguson and Angela Cox, Spotlight reporter Liam Bartlett, veteran reporters Michael Usher and Chris Reason, weather presenter Angie Asimus and Spotlight EP Gemma Williams who has to have set some sort of record this year with her rapid rise from Channel 9 chief-of-staff to Spotlight executive producer.
We hear Stokes, 84, was furious to learn that someone had tipped off a paparazzi photographer about the soiree, and the photographer potentially furnished with Stokes’s private address.
No fan of understatement, Stokes somehow managed to contain his disappointment about the tip-off we hear – but couldn’t quite skirt around the other disappointments of the year in an address in which he is said to have called 2024 a “sh*t year”.
Stokes next is said to have openly acknowledged departed news boss Craig Macpherson as the “best” news boss Seven has ever had, “better even than (Peter) Meakin...”, before giving voice to his regret that Macpherson had to be sacrificed in the name of the Spotlight Bruce Lehrmann clean-up after claims were made in Lehrmann’s Federal Court case that Seven paid for cocaine and sex workers.
A Seven rep denied these comments were made by its chairman when the question was put last week.
Ouch.
New CEO Jeff Howard apparently could offer little to the conversation and sat silently tucking into his Guillaume Brahimi lunch.
A day later the Sunrise crew were invited to the Stokes’ mansion for their lunch although, oddly, hosts Natalie Barr and Matt Shirvington apparently held less appeal to paps than the ashen-faced De Ceglie and co.
Alan Jones’ behind-the-scenes role revealed
Broadcaster Alan Jones’ influence over politicians, businessmen and sportsmen during his talkback radio years is a matter of public record.
His influence, privately, as a potential love broker is less established.
This week, as the countdown to the wedding of PR-loving accountant Anthony Bell to Annika Martyn, ex wife of retired Australian test cricketer Damien Martyn, began, we were reminded of Jones’s once close friendship with the cricketer and enduring and familiar connection to his former wife.
Jones and Martyn were tight two decades ago when the good-looking WA batsman reportedly turned to Jones, then described in media reports as Martyn’s confidant, for advice.
Jones at one time played an instrumental role in the cricketer’s career, so much so he was rumoured to have penned the batsman’s shock letter of resignation to Cricket Australia in December 2006.
Martyn and his then new wife became visitors to Jones’ homes and even reportedly holidayed with at the talk back star at a NSW rural retreat.
The future Mrs Bell, formerly Annika McNamara, was a little-known 22-year-old horseriding trainer from WA when her wedding, attended by cricketers Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer, Andrew Symonds, Matthew Hayden and Shane Watson, made the pages of Woman’s Day in 2006.
The Martyn marriage would last just five years, from 2006 to 2011, and produce a son, Ryder.
Having been welcomed into Jones’ influential circle, the high-voltage Annika would soon befriend the broadcaster’s niece and heir, Tonia Taylor, a fellow equestrian enthusiast.
Also close to Jones and a beneficiary of his generous patronage at that time was a roll call of famous sportsmen, media hopefuls and the serially unlucky-in-love Bell.
Taylor and her tennis coach husband Justin, along with Jones, are expected to be among guests invited to this weekend’s Bell/Martyn nuptials, which, we hear, will be held at a private property in the Noosa hinterland and definitely not in the public park where Bell’s mates Karl Stefanovic and Michael Clarke had their messy falling out in January 2023.
The wedding guestlist is also expected to include Bell’s roster of celebrity clients including Stefanovic and wife Jasmine, Richard Wilkins and his latest girlfriend, Larry and Sylvie Emdur, Anthony Minichiello and Terry Biviano along with the couple’s four children from their respective failed marriages.
The wedding, which comes 18 months after he and Martyn started dating, is Bell’s third marriage.
His first, to wife Tara, was a short-lived affair, while his second, to TV presenter Kelly Landry, who Bell once dubbed “the one”, ended after five years amid ugly allegations and headlines after Landry obtained an interim AVO following a “chilling” confrontation at the couple’s Watson’s Bay home in November 2016.
Bell successfully challenged a bid for a final AVO in 2017 and the court subsequently dismissed the request with the magistrate accepting that while Bell had been “intimidating” he was not “abusive”.
Questions around Hadley’s hurried exit
Ray Hadley’s resignation from 2GB continues to spur talk about the circumstances of his seemingly hurried departure.
This week, as Hadley’s radio program lost its first radio ratings survey in 20 years, this column put questions to Nine Radio’s boss Tom Malone about Hadley’s resignation which was announced on November 7, the date of Nine’s AGM.
Malone refused to address our questions but hosed down rumours Hadley was encouraged to resign at a meeting with network honchos in late October.
He further refused to address rumours Hadley would walk away from 2GB with $4 million in his pocket – the amount we calculate he is owed given he is mid contract after being given a two-year contract extension by Malone last year.
Because Hadley has chosen to resign, a Nine source insisted, he will get nothing, which strikes this writer as unlikely given his decades of loyalty and record ratings.
Hadley signs off from 2GB for the last time on December 13 as 2GB comes to terms with its declining audience which fell to 9.8 per cent share in the latest ratings survey, released Thursday.
2GB’s loss was WSFM’s win.
Meanwhile Hadley’s longtime understudy Mark Levy is highly favoured to replace the broadcaster in the morning slot, which will represent a significant cost saving for Nine, which will then only have one presenter, Ben Fordham, on top dollar.
Nine’s next news boss out the door
Still with Nine, the departure of Sydney news boss Simon Hobbs shocked the industry on Wednesday.
Insiders claim the popular Hobbs lost a war with Nine’s new News Director Fiona Dear, who was formerly Hobbs’ deputy.
Dear is fast earning a fearsome reputation as a ball-breaker following the move against Hobbs and his Brisbane counterpart Amanda Paterson days earlier.
Originally published as Sharp Shooting: Seven boss’s awkward slapdown, Alan Jones’ secret ‘love-broker’ role
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