‘Scared to speak?’: Kyle’s on-air warning before tirade at Jackie

March 6, 2026 — 5:00am

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In this week’s On Background, Kyle Sandiland’s very bad broadcast is worse in full, Lachlan Murdoch finds a new consigliere, and ABC staff take aim at their chairman for disclosing a new and improved pay offer in an “outrageous” way.

The other Kyle tirade

Kyle and Jackie O’s broadcast of February 20, 2026, has gone down in the history books for one reason: his excoriation of her passion for astrology that was so severe that it broke their partnership of 27 years.

But that moment was just the most minute of straws on the camel’s back, as the rest of that episode shows.

Earlier in the show, in the build-up to horoscope-gate, it was already clear Sandilands had got out of bed on the wrong side.

“I might as well tell you guys now so you don’t wait for a meeting next week. I told Bruno [Bouchet, Sandilands’ manager and the show’s executive producer] yesterday, everyone needs to up their game,” Sandilands vented, before directing his fury at “Intern Pete”, one of the show’s staff members and not, in fact, an intern.

“We’re onto you that you’re doing hardly any work, you spend most of your time here eating and then down at the gay sauna,” Sandilands said.

After Pete told Sandilands he was banned from attending the red carpet event for Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie’s Wuthering Heights, Sandilands insisted staff “elevate your problems, rather than just letting the show turn into a piece of shit”, and to stop “bludging their way through the show”.

“We can’t have liars working on the show ... Does everyone understand?” he thundered at the flock of producers, to which only two responded affirmatively.

“What about the other eight people, just too scared to speak?” he added accusingly. Who........

© The Age