AMANDA MEADE. 'It was magic': Kerry O'Brien on ABC bosses, battles and why it's no bed of lefties (The Guardian)

Media

AMANDA MEADE. ‘It was magic’: Kerry O’Brien on ABC bosses, battles and why it’s no bed of lefties (The Guardian)

Nov 13, 2018

‘It was magic’: Kerry O’Brien on ABC bosses, battles and why it’s no bed of lefties.

Kerry O’Brien has been both a candidate to lead the ABC and at the top of a hit list of Aunty journalists for any incoming managing director to ditch.

And that was on top of fronting the 7.30 Report for 15 years and Lateline for five, a job he describes in his new memoir as “magic” and the most intellectually satisfying period in a more than 50-year career.

From hosting election night coverage to grilling local politicians and interviewing the giants of the world stage including Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, there aren’t too many journalists with a CV like O’Brien.

In Kerry O’Brien: A Memoir (Allen & Unwin), to be released next week, the veteran journalist who spent 33 years at the ABC reveals that when Jonathan Shier was hired as managing director in 2000 the board had a list of ABC staff they wanted sacked.

The three names at the top of the list were Barrie Cassidy, Heather Ewart and O’Brien, then the editor and host of the 7.30 Report.

“At the time various directors, including Donald McDonald and [Liberal powerbroker] Michael Kroger, denied any knowledge of a hit list,” O’Brien wrote.

But one of the candidates, Stephen Claypole, later revealed that a director had showed him the list.

Shier, who was sacked less than two years into his tumultuous term, denied he had a hit list but he wasted no time in making O’Brien feel like his days were numbered.

O’Brien says that despite the sacking of Michelle Guthrie and the resignation of Justin Milne, nothing compares to the traumatic months under that “narcissistic strutter” Shier.

“When Shier spoke to staff for the first time three months into his tenure, he flagged that everything was up for grabs across the program schedule but singled out 7.30 for special criticism,” O’Brien writes.

“I didn’t need much imagination to conclude I was in the crosshairs – helped along by headlines such as ‘ABC’s dead man talking’ next to a large photo of me.”

Just five years earlier, in 1995, when David Hill resigned, O’Brien was approached to run for the job of managing director. Despite not having any managerial aspirations he was persuaded to apply and was shortlisted for an interview. The job eventually went to Brian Johns, the former head of SBS.

A constant theme in the memoir is O’Brien’s rejection of any suggestion that the ABC is a hotbed of lefties.

He maintains he has never seen any evidence of political bias among colleagues – he includes a long list of ABC journalists who went on to work for the Liberals – and in his 15 years at 7.30 not a single complaint of bias was ever upheld against any of his hundreds political interviews.

“Shier’s demise was seen by some in carper’s corner as another victory for the (imaginary) socialist collective,” he writes.

“And so it goes on today, except now the argument seems to have shifted beyond a knowing conspiracy of the left inside the ABC to something a little more amorphous but still, apparently insidious.”

O’Brien is well aware he was a target of the Murdoch press, and doesn’t shy away from criticising them for skewing or shutting down important policy debates.

“I miss the less ideological, less culture war-obsessed Australian of twenty or so years ago, when it was still on the right but much more diverse in its commentary and played a straighter bat in its reporting,” he writes. “The shame of it is that Murdoch who created this one great newspaper, has presided over its diminution”.

He also takes aim at ABC management for running down and then axing Lateline in what they claimed was a response to the digital challenge.

“What I don’t understand is why a current affairs concept like Lateline had to be part of the sacrifice on the digital altar,” he says.

“In 2014 news management clearly degraded the importance of the program by reducing its budget and staff numbers, switching its first run of the night to News24 at 9.30pm with a tiny audience base, and repeating it later in the night on the main ABC network. That was the kiss of death.

“People’s desire for knowledge has not changed in the digital age, nor has their need to be able to trust their sources. If anything in the echo chamber of social media when we simply don’t know who to trust anymore the need for demonstrable integrity is greater than ever.”

Since retiring from the ABC he has produced an interview series and book on former prime minister Paul Keating, and found the time and freedom to speak out in defence of the ABC, addressing an ABC friends rally earlier this year.

Now living in Byron Bay with his second wife of almost 40 years Sue Javes, this father of six feels “tinges of regret” about the “edges of toughness that had crept into my life” and how they affected his family: “the protective shell that people in jobs like mine develop as a kind of shield against the harsh capacity of humanity to which we’re often exposed”.

“I feel sad about that but I wouldn’t for a minute have wanted to miss the events in my working life that might have contributed to the condition such as it is.”