Mike Carlton

Mike Carlton
Mike Carlton at a book signing in 2013
Born	(1946-01-31) 31 January 1946 (age 71)
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Columnist, radio host, journalist, author
Spouse(s)	Kerri Morag Ramsay
Children	3

Mike Carlton (born 31 January 1946) is an Australian media commentator and author. He formerly co-hosted the daily breakfast program on Sydney radio station 2UE with Peter FitzSimons and later Sandy Aloisi.

Carlton is noted for his criticism of conservative public figures such as former Prime Minister John Howard, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and radio personality Alan Jones, and for his disdain for conservative governments, including the United States' Bush administration.

Carlton's father Jim Carlton was an athlete who competed in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. In 1930, he set an Australian national record for the 100 yards, which was not broken until 1953. He would have been selected for the 1932 Olympics but left sport to become a Catholic priest. During World War II, Mike Carlton's mother was engaged to another man, who was a Catholic but she was not. She took instruction in the Catholic faith, and Father Jim Carlton was assigned to her. They fell in love, he left the priesthood, and they married. They had two sons, Mike and Peter. Jim Carlton died in 1951.

Mike Carlton has been married twice; to Kerri (two children) and Morag (one child).

Carlton began his career as a cadet journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1963, aged 17. His file reports as an ABC war correspondent in Vietnam earned him great admiration within the industry and a promotion to chief of the ABC's news bureau in Jakarta, Indonesia. Garnering further accolades on his return with the pioneering 1970s ABC-TV current affairs program This Day Tonight, he moved to his first radio program as host at Sydney commercial station 2GB in the early 1980s, this is where "Friday News Review" was born. Carlton dominated morning radio for a number of years until Alan Jones was moved into the breakfast slot at 2UE in March 1998, and Carlton's ratings started to falter. In the early 1990s he was a presenter for London's LBC Newstalk 97.3FM, then under Australian ownership. At first he presented the drivetime programme, but it was as presenter of The Morning Report breakfast programme that he came to prominence, winning a prestigious Sony Radio Academy Award. This programme helped to change the station's financial fortunes. He later wrote a novel set at a London talk radio station called Off the Air, which became a best-seller in Australia in the late 1990s.