Today co-host Karl Stefanovic has accused the Daily Mail of publishing sexist and degrading stories designed to humiliate women after the website pictured him checking into a caravan park with a young female colleague and a dozens cans of pre-mixed rum.
“Fact: This was work,” Stefanovic said on Nine’s Today show on Friday morning. “We were filming a story about our struggling prawn farmers.
“The producer pictured on the website is a committed, talented, hard-working and totally professional young woman and not deserving of this cheap, lazy, sexist online slur.
“A young woman who spent the past hours in tears because of the hurtful and false way she’s been portrayed by this website.”
In January last year the Nine Entertainment Co still had a stake in the Daily Mail Australia, which it helped establish locally, but it sold out to British-based parent company The Daily Mail General Trust after two years.
The Daily Mail article was headlined: “Karl Stefanovic checks into humble caravan park with a Channel Nine colleague and 12 cans of pre-mixed rum, but girlfriend in nowhere to be seen”. They later amended the headline to remove the reference to a girlfriend.
The colleague Lauren Tomasi identified herself on Twitter saying she supported his comments.
I'm so proud to work with this man, and I'm bloody proud of the story we shot in Yamba. This needed to be said. https://t.co/Uedn6fiI8i
— Lauren Tomasi (@LaurenTomasi) June 1, 2017
Stefanovic has been the subject of dozens of articles on the Daily Mail and other outlets since splitting with his wife Cassandra Thorburn last year. He has been photographed by paparazzi and his private life has become popular fodder for women’s and celebrity magazines.
“Go hard on me,” Stefanovic said in an editorial. “Make up your stories. Publish your lies. Send out your paparazzi. But if you have a sliver of decency, if you have any care whatsoever for the women of Australia, do not slur the reputations of others in your eagerness to throw mud at me.”
“[The Daily Mail] is a news website, one which seeks to profit from criticising and publicly humiliating people, women especially,” he said.
“This site specialises in shaming women – for how they look, for what they wear, for how much they weigh, for how much weight they’ve lost, for going to the beach.”
“It has a despicable track record of denigrating women for who they are, what they look like, the choices they make, for denigrating women full-stop. This is the site that ridiculed Lisa [Wilkinson] for wearing the same blouse four months apart.
“The same site that tried to shame Sunrise host Samantha Armytage for wearing so-called ‘granny pants’.”
Stefanovic called on viewers to boycott the Daily Mail. It’s not the first time Stefanovic has criticised the media.
In 2015 he made a point about the scrutiny of women’s clothes on television by wearing the same suit for a year without anyone noticing.
After Stefanovic’s editorial went to air the Daily Mail published a second story accusing the Nine personality of unleashing a “bizarre tirade”. The Mail also selected Twitter comments which said he was a hypocrite. “What a load of crap coming from a ‘man’ who treated his wife in such a deplorable manner”, one said.
