So how much tension do you think all of that caused within Nine?

Huge.

Uh, you know, Nine spent millions and millions upon dollars defending those investigations.

The dogged, committed investigative reporting that Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters conducted over years upon years was extraordinary, and the amount of money that Nine spent defending that was not insignificant.

Uh, the same with Kate McClymont with Charlie Teo.

To have one of its own stars...

And look, there's a conflict in there.

Um, so how do you think he will work without all of that?

So how difficult was it to get people to talk on the record?

Getting them to talk on the record was certainly very difficult.

That was one of the trickiest parts, but getting them to talk to begin with was already quite tricky.

As you mentioned, it was pretty extensive from very senior executives to very high profile on-air talent, producers, all sorts of different people.

Look, when I started researching this pace, and often I think this can be the way, it started out in my head as a different piece to what it became a little bit i did want to explore how carl stefanovic uh you know supposed supposedly serious newsman i mean some might differ on that uh but um supposedly serious newsman who once credited laurie oaks in his logie speech became uh this sort of far-right platformer a podcast bro so to speak and So I just started making some calls with people that I knew who'd worked with him, people that I was a little bit friendlier with.

And I said, look, I'm just, you know, and I think I was throwing a few ideas around in my head and they agreed to speak to me on background.

But the further I got into it, it definitely, it got tricky at times because, you know, I was approaching some very high profile executives, some former executives.

And so what I'm thinking about is, so is Carl moving his brand and his journalism, let's say, to an area that is populous and therefore more profitable or And if so, is that a problem if we're talking about a commercial operation?

It was always the female co-host that would be rotated.

I found this... really remarkable, right? He was such a protected species.

I mean, even when he was taken off air for a year because his public image and brand at that time was deemed toxic, Nine didn't fire him.

They just took him off the Today Show and sort of rested him and kept paying him this exorbitant $2 million salary.

And then after the ratings really nosedived and it clearly wasn't working with Georgie Gardner and Deborah Knight, he was brought back with Alison Langdon.

But Even going back as far as when he first ascended to the anchorship of the Today Show, he replaced Steve Liebman, who was a very different sort of character in television news.

Liebman was considered a serious newsman.

How much did that come up in the conversations that you were having with people about Carl's career and these like later stage changes and how much was that, did that appear to people to be a driving factor?

It's not a small thing, though, to give up, you know, literally millions of dollars, probably not quite millions of viewers on free-to-air television these days, but a big job that he has thrown over for freedom of speech, he alleges.

Well, I think it's all part of a brand.

Some are saying a grift, but we'll stick with brand for now.

But it's, I mean, yeah, you're right.

It's a million dollar, you know, millions of dollars in, yeah, sorry, a million dollar contract and also hundreds of thousands of viewers.

And he's been doing that gig for 21 years.

So it is kind of a big deal.

What went so wrong for Keir so quickly?