Daily Mail deletes pictures of Karl Stefanovic’s daughter Harper

Photos of Today host Karl Stefanovic’s toddler daughter were splashed across the front of a Sydney tabloid— until they weren’t.

NINE has denied Today host Karl Stefanovic or the media company took issue with a set of photographs published by The Daily Mail last Saturday before they were mysteriously pulled from the website.

In the images, Stefanovic’s toddler daughter with second wife Jasmine Yarbrough, two-year-old Harper, is seen taking a tumble after falling from her ladybird suitcase as it was being pulled through Brisbane airport.

The little girl regularly rides a suitcase through the airport and in April was filmed enjoying a ride on dad’s trolley luggage, the footage published to Yarby’s Instagram account.

Karl Stefanovic, daughter Harper and wife Jasmine. Picture: Instagram

The story was published by the Mail at around 3pm Saturday and the story was doing sufficient traffic to be upgraded to the site’s prominent banner shortly after and a rewrite was in the works focusing on an image showing Stefanovic, ladybird suitcase in hand, looking grumpy. But by 8pm the story was offline.

The Daily Mail’s editor Barclay Crawford last week said he’d made the call and confirmed it was unrelated to the images showing the child’s face, something the child’s parents regularly show on their social media accounts.

Stefanovic and Harper on a flight together. Picture: Instagram

One of the Daily Mail website pictures of of Karl Stefanovic.

“The decision to spike was made by me. There was no complaint, no conspiracy, no deals. I just thought it was in bad taste to run pictures of a little girl falling over – pure and simple,” Crawford said.

The family had flown to Brisbane from Sydney so Stefanovic could MC a fundraising event into melanoma research.

As to Stefanovic’s alleged bad mood, could it be due to Today’s battle to hold onto its audience with the program struggling to breach the 200,000 (all people national) threshold most days?