Tuesday, July 3, 2007
The Age To Own Big Brother?
3:13PM Jess McGuire | What looked like a boring business-related article to us (our limited attention span is a problem, we know) might actually be a rather interesting media development, now that a Defamer Australia tipster has put a few things in perspective for us.
Fairfax Media and Macquarie Media have joined forces to break up Southern Cross Broadcasting in a deal expected to be worth $1.3 billion. Fairfax, owner of The Age, will return to the radio airwaves in Melbourne and Sydney after an absence of almost two decades.
Under the deal, to be announced as early as this morning, Macquarie Media will buy Southern Cross – capitalised at $1.19 billion – to get its Ten Network affiliate stations in regional Queensland, NSW and Victoria, as well as Seven Network affiliates in Darwin and Tasmania.
On completion of the purchase, it will sell to Fairfax the company’s metropolitan radio business, including the 2UE and 3AW talkback stations plus talkback and music stations in Brisbane and Perth. The deal comes a month after Fairfax completed its $2.7 billion takeover of Rural Press.
Sources said the deal would also give the newspaper and online operator the Southern Star TV and video production assets, allowing it to add expertise to its expanding online video products, and a satellite music business that provides subscription music channels to pay TV networks Foxtel and Austar.
What does this mean? As our anonymous tipster so wonderfully put it, “Should this buyout succeed, Big Brother will essentially be owned by Fairfax. … Awesome. However it will mean Fairfax has a 49% ownership of Endemol Southern Star (while it has FULL ownership of the other Southern Star arms). I don’t really get business so I don’t know why they won’t have 50% or nuffin’.”
Very interesting indeed!
A NOTE ABOUT TIP OFFS TO DEFAMER AUSTRALIA! – If you’ve sent something in and not heard anything back from us, don’t be disheartened! The embarrassing truth is… we bugger up our email settings “back in the day” and while we can receive email, we’re getting nothing but error messages when we try to reply. So rest assured we appreciate and love every bit of feedback and still adore the contributions from you guys, it’s just your editor is a fucking idiot. We’re arranging for someone to fix it next week though, which is nice news. More » 
Once Again, BBUK Entertains Us More In One 5-Minute Clip Than Australian BB Has In Ten Weeks
11:46AM Jess McGuire | This is, frankly, amazing.
Thanks to our beloved UK correspondent Will Fop for the heads up.
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Diddy’s Entire ‘Concert For Diana’ Wankfest Transcribed
9:43AM Jess McGuire | We salute HolyMoly for bothering to transcribe P Diddy’s entire gut-churning spoken word bit during his performance at the Concert For Diana extravanganza. Prepare a sick bucket and relive the shitfulness…
It starts pretty terribly: Sometimes in life we lose people that are close to us.Princess Diana was close to all of us.She was our princess.Diana, we miss you.If you miss Diana, make some noise!
Then gets even worse:If you’ve come here to celebrate Diana,I want you to put your hands in the air and wave from side to side.She’s smiling down on us right now.
Before Diddy starts coming out with this rubbish:I want you to sing this with me, come on.Say “I love you, I love you. We miss you, we miss you.”Prince William, Prince Harry, we love you, we respect you.
And finally says possibly the crassest thing ever spoken on a stage:So beautiful, so graceful, so elegant.Princess Diana, we’ll never forget you.Take me to the bridge.
What a cunt.
More » Hamas TV Mickey Mouse Is Being Held For Questioning
8:38AM Defamer Hollywood | A pipe bomb exploded earlier today in a garbage can at Disney World in Orlando, but no need to panic: no one cares enough about Disneyland to bother with a copycat attack. [Breitbart] More »‘Tired And Emotional’ Molly Meldrum Versus Australia’s Favourite Fuckwit
8:02AM Jess McGuire | When we heard Molly “Do Yourself A Favour” Meldrum had unleashed a torrent of abuse at Australian Idol judge and inexplicably successful radio “personality” Kylie Sandilands, we were quite excited and thrilled.
After reading the article in the Daily Telegraph about their verbal fisticuffs, we are still happy Kyle copped an earbashing, but listening to the audio of the ill-fated post-Concert For Diana interview makes us kind of wish Molly sounded a little less “Stamos-y” so his brutally honest words could be taken more seriously by the general public.
Radio host and Australian Idol judge Kyle Sandilands was told he was “fat and ugly” and had no talent in a withering attack from music guru Molly Meldrum this morning.
The conversation soon descended into a slanging match between Meldrum and Sandilands, however, with Molly telling Sandilands “you’ve got no talent and you’re fat” and asking “why don’t you get off television”.
Taking aim at Sandilands’ role as a TV talent judge, Meldrum then said: “Your advice on Australian Idol means sweet jack s***.”
Molly Meldrum – drunken beacon of truth in a messed up world which incomprehensibly allows Kyle Sandilands to molest the airwaves on a regular basis.
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‘Simpsons’ Fans To Step Into Their Wildest Convenience Store Fantasies
7:48AM Defamer Hollywood | As we first noted back in March, select 7-Eleven’s across the States have been magically transformed over the weekend into Kwik-E-Mart’s – part of an elaborate promotional tie-in for The Simpsons Movie. There’s a Burbank location at the corners of Olive and Verdugo, where a Flickr user has lovingly documented all the WooHoo! Blue Vanilla Squishees and Sprinklicious donuts that will be gobbled up in the days to come by die-hard Simpsons fanatics who have long cursed their lack of yellow skin. LAist, meanwhile, has a photo of their resident Apu-alike, Golam, whose sunshiny smile belies his familiarity with armed-robbery protocol. Kwik-E-Mart [Flicker] More »
John Stamos: “You’ll Never Find Me Eating A Hamburger Off The Floor Like That Lush Hasselhoff”
7:36AM Defamer Hollywood | One happy byproduct of John Stamos’s recent Australian escapades – including an unhinged KAK visit in which the actor waxed incoherently about the size of a Tele journalist’s genitalia and Princess Diana’s death – is that the ER star’s deformed belly button has ceased to be the most interesting about him. Still, the series of discombobulated media appearances Down Under seem to have done more bad than good for Stamos’s profile, and now the actor wants everyone to know that the real culprit was just some prescription sleep-aids. From TVGuide.com: More »
Lynne Spears Hopeful Smell Of Charred Meats Will Lure Back Estranged Daughter
6:44AM Defamer Hollywood | We know we left many of you hanging Friday, after the personal delivery of a Scary Lawyer letter heralded an all-time low in Spears Family mother-daughter relations. (That the paparazzi footage happened to kick start a hot, new jean-thong trend among fans offered little consolation.) Realising how traumatic such a public estrangement from her cherished, elder meal-ticket daughter might be, Lynne Spears had some comforting words for concerned fans, via People: More »
Happy 21st Birthday To A Rehabbing Lindsay Lohan!
6:25AM Defamer Hollywood | Today, as you may or may not realise, is Lindsay Lohan’s 21st birthday, an occasion which, under normal circumstances, would likely have been celebrated in Las Vegas, where the actress’s passage into legal-drinking womanhood would have been commemorated by the filling of the Mandalay Bay’s lazy river with hundreds of thousands of gallons of top-shelf vodka provided by a loyal corporate sponsor. More »
