We’re looking at Kyle and Jackie O fighting – investors are looking at their boss

April 10, 2026 — 6:00am

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In this week’s edition of On Background, Hamish McLennan’s chairmanship of ARN comes under threat, Karl Stefanovic and Eddie McGuire could be on a Gold hunt, and Bruce Lehrmann decides to try his hand at lecturing the media on ethics.

Hamish McLennan’s ARN Media chairmanship is under threat ahead of its annual general meeting next month, where he is up for re-election after two terms.

On Background has learnt several high-profile shareholders are voicing their displeasure over ARN’s handling of not only the ongoing Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson saga, but a suite of other major decisions on “The Hammer’s” watch.

“If I was Hamish, I’d see the writing on the wall,” one shareholder told On Background on Thursday afternoon as the company’s share price hit another low of just 18¢, down from a high of $2 at the end of 2021. Another said ominously that it was worth “making plans to attend the AGM”.

From handing Henderson and Sandilands a “too long and too much” contract that left ARN bearing almost all the risk if their show tanked, to paying a staggering $307 million for regional broadcaster Grant Broadcasters in 2021 (just shy of six times the current value of ARN), and the handling of the Sandilands-Henderson contractual fallout, some investors have had enough. At the same time, ARN has failed to find a buyer for Hong Kong-based outdoor media business Cody, a relic of the company’s history as a billboard firm, in the year since McLennan flagged its intentions to sell it off.

This week, we learnt that McLennan and former chief executive Ciaran Davis had been informed of Henderson’s concerns about Sandilands as far back as August last year. ARN is expected to file its response to Henderson’s statement of claim in the coming week, when we will learn just what measures the company had put in place since then.

But staggeringly, despite the disaster at ARN, one person who has managed to avoid any financial headache is McLennan........

© The Sydney Morning Herald