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Sky News Australia will now pre-record its newest After Dark show, Freya Fires Up, rather than broadcast it live, after the network invited a guest promoting Islamophobic views wearing rashers of raw bacon on his chest onto its program on Sunday evening.
The News Corp network had no senior editors or managers on hand to vet the show’s guest in advance on Sunday, leaving 22-year-old Freya Leach and her sole junior producer to allow the guest’s comments go to air live and unchecked, two sources with knowledge of the matter, but not authorised to speak publicly, said. Both Leach and her producer are expected to keep their roles.
Sky News host Freya Leach with guest Ryan Williams (left) wearing raw rashers of bacon on Sunday night.
Sky usually cycles through a roster of senior editors on a Sunday, and it is standard practice for all programs to submit their list of guests in advance, a network staffer said. Its head of programs Mark Calvert is on leave and did not approve the guest. This masthead revealed on Monday that Sky will be reviewing the program and its booking processes after the interview was scrubbed from the show’s full reupload online.
There was a senior producer overseeing the live broadcast, who pulled the guest around one minute into his appearance.
In 2018, when Sky News aired an interview between its host Adam Giles and neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell on immigration, the network committed internally to having a manager oversee every guest booking made on the channel. Cottrell also appeared on a Sunday, and Giles’ show was suspended for two months.
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Leach issued a full apology during The Late Debate, a show she also co-hosts, on Monday evening. She said the guest, 33-year-old British citizen Ryan Williams, should not have appeared.
“He was asked specifically for his reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination and its fallout, but instead used our platform to spread his harmful views,” Leach told viewers in a pre-recorded statement.
But although he may not have responded directly to the question Leach had asked him, the night before his appearance on Sky, Williams had posted several videos of himself wearing two pieces of bacon on his bare chest on his public Instagram account, repeating the same Islamophobic rant.
“I’m going on Sky News tomorrow! What would you like me to talk about and which message is crucial to get out there?” he asked followers in the caption of a video in which included several examples of Islamophobic language.
Sky admitted its editorial processes had failed in a statement to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Monday.
Meanwhile, new footage posted by Williams shows he appeared in Sky’s Perth studio in person on Sunday with a Sky employee, setting up a microphone on his shirt with pieces of bacon taped to him.
“Are we actually doing this with bacon? Bacon right there?” Williams says in a video.
A Sky spokesperson said the employee in the video is a casual technical guest liaison who meets guests and mics them up. “He was not aware of the guest’s background and not involved in booking the guest or any editorial processes,” the spokesperson said.
When Leach introduced Williams, she described him as a “social media sensation.”
Williams asks followers online to donate to his cause of inflicting “maximum damage on Islam” and keeping “Europe Christian at all costs”. Williams is from Scotland and has had no previous media exposure in Australia. Last year, he appeared as a contestant on Netflix’s British game show Love Is Blind, but was largely cut from the final edit of the program.
After his appearance was liked more than 200,000 times on Monday, Williams told his followers he thinks he will be arrested for hate speech, and is looking for a hideout in Miami.
A Sky staffer said that Leach – only a month into hosting her own show – was let down by management, giving her a show with little experience and then failing to have adequate processes in place to prevent an event like this happening.
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