Manager to the stars, John Fordham has started earning his percentage big time as he goes into bat for his client Sammy Power in an effort to negotiate terms for next year on Mix 106.5 in Sydney. If, that is, there is a next year.

Power and her on air partner, Subby Valentine, are forbidden in their contracts to speak to the media and getting anything more than a well polished PR statement out of ARN management is difficult at the best of times. So it comes as no surprise that some tabloid newspapers when starved of facts tend to invent them.

In this case the Daily Telegraph claimed that the Mix breakfast show dropped a “staggering six points in the last survey to eighth place, the Power pairing is set to be replaced with a single host starting in 2008”.

Yet according to Nielsen Media Research figures, published after Survey 6, the show only lost 0.1% share after gaining a whole 1.0% since this time last year.

Friends of Power have told radioinfo that she was privately extremely upset at the inaccuracies in a generally hurtful article published in the Tele. The official line from her bosses that simply suggest that no decisions have been made to dump her yet do little to instil confidence in her future with the station.

With her contract up in less than a month, Fordham is doing the talking for Power claiming in the Tele that, “I spend more on my lunch in one day than Mix have spent on promoting the breakfast show in an entire year.”. Still, we wouldn’t mind an invitation to that lunch. We’d hope they’re serving the ’72 Grange rather than the ’75.