ABC chair Kim Williams enters the lion’s den at Sky News

July 16, 2026 — 4:59pm

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In his two years as ABC chair, Kim Williams has been generous with his time, becoming a regular on the writers’ festival circuit and sitting for numerous interviews with probing journalists.

But on Thursday evening, Williams was not in Kansas any more. The one-time News Corp boss turned public broadcasting champion faced his toughest media assignment yet, a 20-minute grilling by Sky News host Chris Kenny on his nightly show.

While the News Corp-owned channel draws relatively few eyeballs to its After Dark programming, figures like Kenny are influential in conservative spaces, and are frequently critical of the public broadcaster.

For Williams, it was a trip into what Sky billed as the “lion’s den”, a tricky away fixture before a small but hostile crowd. He gave not an inch – even when he has before – defending the broadcaster’s journalism against a barrage of hostile, albeit predictable, questions about political bias, war in the Middle East, and its views on climate change.

Unsurprisingly, Kenny came out........

© WA Today