After all the media coverage of the past few days about the phone call between brothers Karl and Peter Stefanovic, the story about what they are supposed to have said was almost an anticlimax today.
Nine did a great job on the weekend of defusing the impact of the phone call reveal by having both brothers apologise.
Helping propel the yarn in the past week has been TV news guru Peter Ford, who this morning on The Kyle and Jackie O Show called the release of details regarding the phone conversation “a horrible invasion of privacy”.
However, on another station on the KIIS network that is home to highest-rating metro FM breakfast show in Australia, Adelaide’s Mix 102.3, Mark Soderstrom told his co-host Jodie Oddy he thought it could have all been staged. “I called BS,” he said early this morning about how real the phone call actually was. When quizzed about the reasons why it probably wasn’t staged, he said, “They do it all the time.” He then asked Oddy why a high-profile TV host would ever use a speaker phone in a hire car. Soderstrom then suggested a recording of Oddy in a hire car had come into his possession. (As well as co-hosting Mix breakfast in Adelaide, Soderstrom is a Seven Adelaide sports presenter.)
The release of the phone details fill part only of a story about “Karl’s Week From Hell” in New Idea today, and there is little in the story that hadn’t already found its way into the media.
The Herald Sun’s Colin Vickery this morning called the story in New Idea “a damp squib”.
There is no love lost between the Pacific title and Karl with the breakfast TV host and Nine threatening to sue the magazine in the past over some of its stories.