Lisa Wilkinson’s dig at Channel Nine
Lisa Wilkinson has taken a cheeky jab at Channel 9’s Today, talking about her decade-long career with the network at a recent event.
Yesterday, The Project co-host spoke at a Business Chicks breakfast to a crowd of 1500 as the keynote speaker.
“Someone once said to me, find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. Well that is me,” she said.
“I do feel that every day for more than three decades now I’ve been taking money under false pretences, which is kind of funny because it turns out my last boss thought exactly the same thing.”
Wilkinson confessed that she had been scared of failure but thrived because of her passion for journalism.
“There is nothing about journalism and the adrenaline of live television that I don’t love.”
“Sure there have been some incredible challenges and I’m not just talking about working with Karl Stefanovic. I love Karl, despite what you may have read in the latest issue of Woman’s Day and any of those magazines.”
Last year, Wilkinson announced her shocking decision to leave the breakfast show on Twitter.
A Nine spokesman said at the time it had “been unable to meet expectations of Lisa Wilkinson and her manager on a contract renewal”.
In the past, it was reported that Wilkinson’s decision was influenced by her unequal pay with her former co-host Karl Stefanovic.
Although Wilkinson refused to discuss the reasons for her departure, she admitted salary was one of the factors.
“There were lots of reasons why it was time to make a move, and that [pay gap] was part of it. I was very happy that it reignited the conversation, because the gender pay gap is real,” she told Stellar Magazine at the time.
Shortly after Wilkinson’s exit from Channel Nine, the network’s CEO Hugh Marks outlined publicly why he thought Stefanovic was worth more than Wilkinson, and the price she had asked for.
“I went to an incredible amount of trouble to build that [$1.8 million] package for her. She wanted $2.3 million. It wasn’t a $200,000 shortfall to [Karl’s] $2 million magic number. It was $500,000,” he said at the time.