"Sonia Says!" - a daily lightning bolt of hair-raising hollering delivered straight to your television sets and from there to your Twitter feeds and Facebook pages and talkback radio lines and everywhere else the nation gathers to mull over the latest dose of outrage (or outspoken wisdom, depending on your viewpoint) from Channel Nine's freshly minted, conservative-tinted opinion machine.

OK, I'm making that up. But somewhere in the bowels of Channel Nine you just know a producer is fantasising about the ratings potential - and the bonanza of associated media coverage - to be had from Sonia Kruger's unexpected elevation to the ranks of blow-waved bloviators upon whose every hair-twirling word the nation is thought to hang.

In recent weeks, Kruger, once fondly fixed in the public mind as Tina Sparkles, has leapt from Strictly Ballroom to strictly ballsy or, for many, strictly Bolt-like in a "Bloody hell, what's she said now?" kind of way.

First there was the call for a ban on Muslim immigration - complete with the Boltian "Some of my best friends are…" qualification; then this week came her blast against "reverse discrimination" in debate over an LGBTI scholarship program.

What is going on? Is it deliberate? Will it work? And if so, why?

To which the answers are: Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? And, lastly, who knows?

But we can hazard a guess. And mine would be that the Kruger metamorphosis from morning television link-woman - a skill-set requiring the seamless blending of celebrity interviews with ads for steam mops and pressure cookers - into morning telly's most over-publicised motor-mouth began as an accident with the Muslim firestorm. (If you think they had any idea what was coming, check the looks from Lisa Wilkinson and David Campbell when Kruger let fly.)

But now it becomes something else. Channel Nine soaked in a mud bath of publicity for days afterwards. And, in the time-honoured tradition of "no publicity is bad publicity", it will not have escaped network attention that here was a free and surefire way to lavish the Today Extra brand with both eyeballs and excitement.

That holds true regardless of how much critics want to tut-tut about broadcasting standards and civic responsibility. In fact, it holds true the more critics tut-tut about such things. If you think the producers of commercial morning television sit about fretting over anything much beyond ratings and video replays, you haven't watched much of it in recent years.

It was not always this way (and to be fair, it is not always this way now - there is much fine interviewing and news coverage to be found in the morning hours if you are willing to sit through the dross.)

But once, the dross was not the driving force. And once, viewers neither needed nor were invited to become familiar with the political and personal peccadillos of the hosts navigating us through the minutes and hours post our evening slumber.

Consider, if you will, the woman in whose impeccably professional footsteps Sonia Kruger followed in Nine's post-Today morning slot. Kerri-Anne Kennerley was a breakfast TV pioneer in this country, co-hosting Ten's Good Morning Australia for 11 years from its 1981 debut and later returning to the genre on Mornings with Kerri-Anne, the predecessor of the show Kruger now shares with Campbell.

In all those years, you'd struggle to remember a moment when Kennerley felt the need to share her political views on anything. That's the way things were done.

Not any more. Now, opinions - the more outrageous the better - are the gold standard, and Channel Nine might just have found its human equivalent of South Africa's prized gold coin.

Let's call it the Kruger-Rant.