There ain't nothing new about audience panic: when the baked-in viewers of a show like Nine's Today start to dwindle, any halfway competitive presenter might pull the panic lever to get some attention. That usually involves animals, sick kids or celebrities.

And there ain't nothing new about grievance merchants attempting to leverage genuine community disaffection and anxiety into something that can be monetised. That goes back as far as Cleon of Athens, who turned Athenian anger about the "elites" into a very personally useful populist movement of resentment.

But what is pretty new about Nine presenter Karl Stefanovic's seemingly sudden lurch to the right is how unembarrassed he seems to be about changing almost everything about himself as a mainstream broadcaster to get a bit of what everyone else is having.

"So I'm free, truly independent," he started his post-Today exit video on Friday morning, before pivoting to a defence of free speech and a call for more advertisers. 

Like the highly successful, and greatly enriched, men who have gone before him — such as Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson — Stefanovic has very rapidly spun his relatively new podcast into a platform for outsider politics and conspiracy-friendly monologue. 

There are soft, mostly praiseworthy interviews with disinformation peddlers like Pete Evans. Then there's Stefanovic's own apology for supporting vaccination, rapidly pivoting him from the mainstream to the margins.

Listening to the culture war showman schtick he has so quickly adopted, Stefanovic is now less a newsman than an ideological performer.

Robinson interview a new chapter

Stefanovic's fawning embrace of convicted fraudster, assaulter and far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson is as absurd as it is surprising, given that this very mainstream anchor would never consider giving a favourable platform to any other person who had been refused a visa to enter Australia multiple times. Imagine his approach if such a failed visa applicant was Muslim? In any other circumstance, he might at least properly interview him; with Robinson, he did not.

Is it of a part with the anger of the comedian Dave Hughes, who seems to have dropped the irony from his longtime grievance-merchant schtick to fully embrace it as a serious conviction?

He is the angry, hard-done-by everyman, with an estimated net worth in the millions.

Is this shift to the rhetoric of division and resentment simply informed by it being where the audiences, and the money, are at?

From a distance, these wealthy and successful men seem to have been hit by a delayed dose of post-COVID resentment at the power elites to which they profess not to belong.

Follow the money

So, why? What's really going on here? And why are we paying so much attention to one TV host's apparent reinvention of himself as a post-mainstream media polemicist?

On the one hand — who cares?

On the other — I was always taught in journalism to follow the money — and the bucks are big these days in trading the usual bugaboos of new-wave grievance politics. You know them well — immigration, "elites", Islamophobia and taxation.

When these complaints are packaged into advertising, fundraising and podcasts and the wider attention economy in the US, there is serious money to be made. In the last US election, immigration-themed political ads reached more than $350 million, with more than 90 per cent of those ads paid for by Republicans.

The argument is no longer just political: it is a business model built on turning border anxiety into airtime, clicks and donations.

When the money is that big, the lure is clearly irresistible — and Stefanovic wants some. He has apparently even taken to calling himself Joe Bogan.

More than that, the better example — warning, even — about what Stefanovic (and probably others to follow) is doing, is that of Charlie Kirk: all this attention eventually converts not only to money, but to political power.

More broadly, as Australia's own politics appear to shift right, the money will roll that way too. One Nation's recent reported fundraising will certainly be funnelled into similar advertising to the US when the election comes around, and the language will certainly be as inflammatory and divisive. Calling for a monoculture, whatever that is, will be the least of it. Pauline Hanson's YouTube channel republished Stefanovic's full interview, in which Robinson praised Hanson and said he was "happy" for her.

Fascinatingly, the mainstream media, for all its many faults, still isn't biting, and the Robinson interview seems to have broken Stefanovic's relationship with his employer, Nine — a statement perhaps that they don't want what he's having.

Let's see if Karl's trading of the discipline of broadcast journalism for the reach and theatricality of the grievance podcast economy turns out to be worth it.

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.