By Darryl Mason
With an ego this vast and royal and regal, and a fall so very hard and fast and public, 'the king' should probably be on suicide watch right now :
That's not fake. That's Kye Sandilands actual production company logo.
He can forget about TV and radio for the time being. 'Multimedia'? How quaint to see that word still being used. He could do a film, but from the impression you get of reading Australians' feelings towards Sandilands right now, most would only want to see the film if it ended with him giving live organ donations.
In one of the most exhilarating fuckups by a manufactured celebrity, Kyle Sandilands has lost his main sponsors, the corporations that pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be associated with his Brand.
Sandilands has also lost his 'Number One' radio show and his gig on Australian Idol. His name, his Brand, has plunged in value to advertisers. He's just another loudmouth obnoxious fuckwit to most Australians now he doesn't have these high-profile gigs anymore. He might as well be a blogger.
Sandilands corporate sponsors, of course, wanted him to be controversial, they wanted him to grab headlines for outrageous behaviour, for going off, for doing the stuff that teenagers might think is cool, even if, or because, much of it was cruel.
But no corporation with shareholders wants someone they're paying six figures to to suddenly have their name, their Brand, anywhere near endless headlines that throb ugly with the words '14 YEAR OLD GIRL' and 'RAPE SCANDAL'.
As far as corporate advertisers go, Sandilands might as well have been caught frotting a pregnant panda that he'd just bludgeoned to death with a handful of puppies.
The media, every branch and wing of it, has gone hard on this story. It's rare you see such a public crucifixion by the media of one of their own biggest stars, even one who hammered in his own nails.
It's been an online orgy for the Murdoch media in particular, and a successful one, with huge viewerships, and comment counts raging beyond 500 for multiple stories. And this time, they didn't have to print unverified old titty photos and claim, on the promise of self-sackings if they were wrong, that the nipples belonged to Pauline Hanson, to get such heavy traffic and ad revenue zing.
Sandilands did all of this to himself, and his genuinely weird attempt to explain himself in The Punch, acting like he wasn't in control of his own show and hey, he knows people that have been raped, so....only further fuelled and fevered the coverage, and the (probably temporary) destruction of his career.
Media Watch last night revealed an episode of incredible cruelty and humiliation heaped onto genuinely upset young people, all of it totally refereed by Sandilands. What he did to these two young women is far worse than his moronic attempt to get a laugh out of a rape confession by asking, "was that your only (sexual) experience?"
As far as I'm concerned, Kyle Sandilands should have known he was doomed from the moment he decided to fuck with Ernie Dingo.
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