Milestones for the host we trust the most

[Mark]

KERRY O'Brien knows how it feels to land a story through chequebook journalism. And it certainly didn't give him the joy the $2.6million Beaconsfield miners deal gave Nine host Tracy Grimshaw, who says it was the highlight of her career.

"When I worked on the Sydney Sun 35 years ago," O'Brien says, "I remember having the inside running on a family from Canberra who'd given birth to quintuplets, and at that point it was a record. I think the Sun paid for that story, as it was in competition with The Mirror. I happened to be the journalist who did that story.

"I felt no sense of smugness. I took no pride in that; that's a commercial arrangement. I remember feeling uncomfortable because you're not getting it through any kind of skill, but because somebody is prepared to take out a chequebook and pay for it."

It was an early lesson in job satisfaction and ethics in the enduring, high-profile career of O'Brien, who recently clocked up a record 10 years as host and editor of the ABC current affairs program The 7.30 Report.

This year he will also celebrate 17 years of unbroken service as a daily news presenter on ABC television, as he jumped into The 7.30 Report straight from six years as the founding host of Lateline. O'Brien has surpassed his friend Andrew Olle, who hosted Four Corners for years, as well as Geraldine Doogue, Caroline Jones and Bill Peach. Among commercial current affairs hosts, careers are even shorter.

O'Brien was 25 when he wrote the quintuplets story and he had been in the game for five years, having opted for a cadetship with Channel 9 in Brisbane after a period of uncertainty about what to do with his life.

Now, at 60, he has a raft of achievements behind him including a Logie award in 1991 for Lateline's coverage of the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. He has also won four Walkley Awards: a current affairs Walkley and the Gold Walkley in 1982, when he was working for Seven; another current affairs Walkley in 1991 for the ABC's coverage of the Soviet coup; and in 2000 he won for broadcast interviewing on The 7.30 Report. Perhaps best of all, he also won the public's vote as most preferred and most credible journalist in Australia, across all media. An Australian Broadcasting Authority survey in 2001 also found he was admired for his ability to extract answers from politicians and for not sensationalising the news.

After 40 years in journalism - yet another milestone this year - O'Brien is as sharp and committed to his craft as ever. "You don't sit in the chair for this long without having your down moments or flat spots, but if you do have a flat spot there is always going to be something around the corner to pick you up and you never have to wait very long," O'Brien tells Media.

He has no plans to retire and takes pride in fronting two hours of live television a week, including the tough political interviews for which he is famous. He also regularly conducts interviews with non-politicians - artists and the like - which often involve reading several books and travelling interstate.

From early morning, while soaking up the newspapers at his Sydney home, O'Brien is on the phone to executive producer Steve Taylor, planning the night's program.

"Every now and then I notice I am criticised for taking too many holidays," O'Brien says. "But you have to pace yourself and we are the only television current affairs show that goes 52 weeks of the year." Four Corners, 60 Minutes and Stateline all take a Christmas break.

"I don't know how you measure the wear and tear of hours of live television a week; what is unnatural is the way your adrenalin is recharged each night," he says. Golf and Pilates help him to maintain his health.

O'Brien seems to be less of a target these days than he was in the early days of The 7.30 Report. He survived a year of uncertainty under former ABC managing director Jonathan Shier, who made noises about axing the program in 2001. And he also hit the headlines when John Howard's Liberal Party refused in 1996 and 1998 to allow him to moderate the federal election debates. O'Brien was accused of being too tough on Liberal leader John Hewson. He has also been painted by some sections of the Coalition as "Red Kerry", perhaps as a result of his combative interviews with Coalition ministers. Certainly, a stint as Gough Whitlam's press secretary in 1977 has always been used by his critics as evidence he is a Labor supporter.

Conservative columnist Michael Duffy summed up the view of O'Brien critics in this newspaper in 1998: "It is not the fact that Kerry O'Brien prefers the ALP in private that annoys them but his public behaviour, such as the way he ran the debate between Paul Keating and John Hewson in 1993, and his questioning of the forthcoming budget's honesty in an interview with John Howard last week."

O'Brien has always maintained he is tough on politicians of all colours and the Whitlam job was invaluable experience that he does not regret. As former Labor senator Graham Richardson said in 1993 when Labor was in power in Canberra: "He's not just a good interviewer; he's a great interviewer. Kerry's interview with Keating late last year tied the PM up better than anyone had in 20 years."

O'Brien says The 7.30 Report is the most scrutinised program on Australian TV and he decided a long time ago he wasn't going to be distracted by criticism. "We are mindful of the brief we have and the responsibilities we have. And in personal terms I could drive myself around the twist focusing on all this negative stuff. I think some of the scrutiny the ABC is subjected to is beyond the pale. But I am happy for us to be judged honestly on our work."

These days there is little competition in serious current affairs, apart from 7.30's sister program Lateline, hosted by the equally tough Tony Jones. In an industry where news and current affairs is being transformed into entertainment and the biggest stories are going to the highest bidder, O'Brien provides a very different product, a solid, reliable diet of national affairs.

Naomi Robson, host of Seven's Today Tonight, is not known for asking tough questions and Nine's A Current Affair, hosted by Grimshaw, rarely wastes its time on a political interview.

O'Brien barely notices TT and ACA. What frustrates him is the way politicians avoid answers. It is increasingly like pulling teeth, he says. "With one cabinet minister I counted five 'Kerrys' in one answer," he says. "A media trainer has clearly told him it pays to be familiar with your interviewer. You see it all the time. Anecdotally, I get comments about politicians filling up space and not saying anything, not answering questions and using interviews as soapboxes. It's part of the pattern of cynicism that's developed in this country about politicians and institutions."

When the program went national with a new format and host in December 1995, the ABC said at the time it was to save money and to offer viewers a better product. Since mid-1994 the program, which had seven separate state and territory editions, had been patchy in quality and its ratings were low. O'Brien's new national program was described as radical and attracted the criticism that it was abandoning the states. However, 10 years on that debate is largely forgotten.

"If the program was not meeting a need, the critics would be coming out of the woodwork, and they're not," he says. However, a recent column by David Salter in Media accused O'Brien and staff of taking a three-day weekend each week because Stateline runs on Fridays, and of being colourless. O'Brien, whose program was cut from five to four days a week by Shier despite his protestations, says Salter is wrong. "No one has a Friday holiday," he says. "They work productively, so that is a complete furphy. If they find the program dull because we do important stories, then I suggest the problem is theirs, not ours. But we know we can never be complacent or smug about the fact it is our task to do the main stories of the day. And we know we've got to tell them in as interesting a way as possible.

"I absolutely reject (the complaint) that we don't have good storytellers on the show: we have terrific reporters and an enormous skill base, and there is light and shade."

For O'Brien, this is also a year of personal milestones. He has six children, aged from 11 to 36, and four grandchildren, and will soon celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary with his second wife, The Sydney Morning Herald's radio writer Sue Javes. He reckons he has to keep working at least until his youngest daughter has finished her education. Luckily, he loves TV. Especially the adrenalin rush that comes with live TV.

"The thing about television is it's an exacting medium," he says. "It brings great rewards when it all works and is very exciting to both the audience and the journalists. But when something goes wrong with the 25 to 30 people in the chain - and you just need one of those links to go wrong - the whole thing can tumble at your feet, and in that way it's very frustrating."

Unlike his commercial counterparts, O'Brien does not live for the daily ratings report at 8.30am, but he is proud the program averages 850,000 to 900,000 viewers in the five capital cities. "The first thing I would say about the ratings system is that it's incredibly arrogant," he says, "because the ratings only reflect the people in the five capital cities. We don't even hear about Hobart, never mind the audience in the Hunter Valley or the Illawarra or the Gold Coast and so on."

O'Brien is most engaged when talking about the future of the ABC and, not surprisingly, he does not favour accepting any advertising, even online. "You either have a public broadcaster or you don't," he says. "A public broadcaster should be supported entirely by the public, by the government of the day. Governments of whatever shade should not be allowed to walk away from their responsibility to properly fund the public broadcaster. It is a treasured institution in Australia. It is the most important news and cultural institution we have and has been at the heart of Australians' lives over the past 80 years."

He says incoming managing director Mark Scott has a wonderful opportunity he should embrace. "The corridors of the ABC are not exactly filled with the portraits of managing directors that have been great success stories. I don't know why. It could be such a great job for someone involved in public debate and the arts."

Source