 Hello, Michael Fullylove here. In this episode of The Director's Chair, we're speaking with the ABC's Lee Sayles about journalism, the United States, and why we just can't look away from Donald Trump. Two things really struck me in the time that I lived in America. The first was the longer I stayed, the less I felt I really understood about America, even though that's counter-intuitive because obviously I was learning more all the time, but you just realise like it is a vast and deep country that is extremely different to Australia. I just think that there is an increasing trend towards opinion creeping into journalism across media organisations. And the kind of where it comes from, I guess, is this idea of, well, you know, this is the truth and so we should stand up for the truth. Well, actually your job as a journalist is not to determine necessarily what the truth is, it's to present all of the available information to the public and to say you make up your own mind. Welcome to the first episode of a new season of The Director's Chair, a Lowy Institute podcast. My name is Michael Fullylove and I'm the Executive Director of The Lowy Institute. On The Director's Chair, I sit down with political leaders, policymakers and commentators to understand what's happening in the world. And there's a lot happening in the world at the moment. Wars in Europe in the Middle East, tensions in the South China Sea and the looming possibility of Donald Trump's return to the White House and the retribution that he has promised will follow from that. The best way to approach a challenge is to be informed about it and so excellent journalism is more important than ever and in that spirit it's a pleasure for me that my first guest on this season of The Director's Chair is one of Australia's very best journalists, Lee Sayles. Lee joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1995 and since then she's held many of the national broadcasters most prominent roles including Washington correspondent, National Security correspondent, host of Late Line, host of 730 and now host of Australian Story. She's also a best-selling and award-winning author. She's recently been on tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and she's the co-host of a struggling little podcast called Chat 10 Looks 3. Lee, thank you for coming into Bly Street today to join me on The Director's Chair. How dare you malign my podcast in your opening remarks? Well, I'm actually hoping to borrow some of your podcast listeners for my little podcast. It becomes clear why I've been invited to join the other luminaries who've appeared on this. Yeah, so Lee, let me begin by declaring a conflict and that is that you and I are mates. We met about 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago actually, in Washington DC when you were the ABC's foreign correspondent. I had just finished completing the feasibility study for the Lowy Institute for Frank Lowy. I'd gone back to Oxford to write my PhD on FDR and I was coming to Washington to do some research at the National Archives and a mutual friend of ours recommended that I stay with you and I felt a bit awkward about introducing myself to Arando but in fact you're incredibly generous and you have me to come to stay with you. So ever since there we've been mates. And I've been trying to shed you ever since and sadly have just been stuck with you. No, it's true and I remember our mutual friend said, look my mate's coming through town. I think you'd get on quite well and I was kind of rattling around by myself in this house in Washington. My husband was living in Philadelphia and so I still couldn't remember when you know you kind of showed up at the front door and I'm thinking, God this complete stranger. Am I mad? What if he turns out to be a nightmare? But I'd kind of banked on that you must be okay because of our mutual friend and then we got on like a house on fire. All right now you weren't you say you were rattling around the house but you were very busy because it was an incredible period actually in American history because I arrived I think in late 2002 so it was a year after 9 11. It was in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. So tell us about your memories of that sort of feverish time in American history. I think people actually forget now how intense it was because it's so long ago but in that immediate I got there at the end of November start of December 2001 and in fact I applied for the job before 9 11. So it was you know you got to think back to that era of the 90s you've come through mostly you know the back half of the 90s dominated by the Clinton Lewinsky affair and then suddenly it's just this drastically different environment and so at that time you know you'd get on the metro in DC or the subway in New York and if the train stopped between stations you could literally sense the anxiety the airport security was just absolute peak craziness everything was just heightened all the time because everyone at that time believed that another terror attack on that kind of a scale was probably going to be imminent and happening and so forth so it's very intense and then and very rapidly after I got there of course there was the war in Afghanistan began but also then attention turned fairly rapidly to Iraq and was the Bush administration going to invade Iraq and so for about a quarter I would say of the first year that I was there 2002 I was in New York at the United Nations as the United States tried to see if they could get agreement around this so it was it was a very interesting exciting time to be US correspondent and you mentioned the build-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and I mean do you ever reflect back on the effects of the Iraq war and how it sort of echoed down through the ages because within a couple of years it became clear that the United States had made a stake in going to Iraq not only because it didn't find the weapons of mass destruction but because of the cost in blood and treasure and the opportunity cost and certainly when we look back on it now I think it made our ally poorer and weaker and less respected in bold and Iran yeah I don't know do you see it seems to me that it's one of those real discontinuities in history where the world really changed a hundred percent and and also I feel like a lot of the way that debate unfolded with the polarization around the views of whether the US should invade Iraq or not and the attitudes towards the Bush administration that kind of you know just polarization politically and the way the public kind of split that's continued to be kind of those really violent kind of splits have continued to be evident I mean I always found it because I believe in you know fact reason and logic and data and you know things of this nature I always found it a very strange pivot because to me the core thing was always and what I was always asking my reporting is what does this have to do with 9-11 and so I can understand Afghanistan because of the links to al-Qaeda but I found it hard to understand how Iraq actually fit with that but you know what one of my lasting memories of stories that I covered there was Tony Blair when it was all just going disastrously Tony Blair the then British Prime Minister came to address a sitting of both houses of Congress to persuade them to kind of stay the course and why it was important and he did something that I feel also like he's increasingly rare in the media and in politics these days which is he made this speech where he laid out this very persuasive case as to why it was important and why it had been the right decision and so forth and and he kind of argued using reason and logic to the degree that even though I myself had always kind of wondered gee how is this logical he finished his speech and I thought hmm yeah actually he might be right about that and how you know ask yourself these days how often do you ever hear somebody deliver a speech or make a case that causes you to reassess the way that you've analyzed the facts or considered the issue until that point and that's always stuck with me the power of that incredible address that he gave I agree that I agree very much with you about Blair's incredible persuasive ability of course that decision he made to go into Iraq was really the finish of Blair but I remember living through this myself because I was just starting a career as a think tanker yes and unlike you you want I wasn't reporting it I had to sort of start to make judgments about some of these issues and you wrote a piece I recall for the international herald tribune yeah exactly I a friend and I wrote a piece saying that Australia shouldn't participate in the Iraq war for some of the reasons that you've mentioned the strangeness of the pivot but also just that despite all the you know all the eloquence of tiny Blair it just felt like if you squinted your eyes this business of invading and occupying an Arab country wouldn't end well yeah and but I remember when we sent that piece off to the IHT I think in early 2003 my finger really hesitated over the send button because I sort of felt like I'm betting against America by pressing this and I'm betting against Tony Blair and I'm betting and and most of my mentors in the American system and the Australian system were supporting the war we forget now that people like Democrats like John Kerry who was a Democratic nominee Joe Biden supported the Iraq war it was pretty broad support John Kerry's famous line in the 2004 election well I supported the war before I voted against it you know the the thing again that people forget is that if you questioned any policy directive of the Bush administration in that immediate particularly 2002 but also going well into 2003 2004 you were considered to be on the side of terrorists and and you know remember the French the surrender the cheese eating surrender monkeys whatever they were referred to and so freedom for us freedom for us it took quite a lot to question it because you were pretty much seen as a trader and as a supporter of terrorists that the closest I've seen to that mentality again was during COVID where if you raised questions about lockdown you were accused of being in favour of killing people it was like all nuance disappeared you were either with us or you're against us I think that was even Bush's actual framing of of what they were doing and then what happened over time of course is as we learned more about what happened they made all these quite extreme decisions in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 detaining people without charge and extreme national security laws and so forth and then over time those overreaches which were kind of understandable in the in the early days they didn't wind them back and they didn't pull them back and a lot of it was done in secrecy and so over time we learned that there'd been these quite catastrophic decisions made that had had negative consequences that no one was kind of aware of at the time or if you did question you were accused of being a terrorist sympathiser and also at the international level I mean when we look back on it the invasion of Iraq in the absence of a Security Council resolution was a violation of the rules-based international order and now 20 years ago when we're using that language to in defense of Ukraine against Russia I get lots of people on social media saying but your country supported the the invasion of Iraq so you have to remember that you know sometimes when you're very strong as America was at that moment it felt that it could do anything but actually in the long term supporting supporting the order I think is in the interests of the west as in the interests of the strong as well as the weak yeah let me let me stay on the United States you you you covered I mean you you traveled around the United States a lot you went you did everything from from the Iraq Water Hurricane Katrina so all all the really exciting uplifting stories and then the Academy Awards and all the kind of American fluff that you associate with that posting as well okay well we can talk about the Academy Awards another time but but when when you are getting out into into the rust belt into the suburbs into the rural areas tell us did you start to see the seeds of the dissatisfaction the the loss of the decline in working conditions that would lead members the white working class over time to to go further and further to the right and end up in the camp of Marga 100 100% and it's actually been one of the because I love America and so it's been a sad I've found that a sad thing to watch to go god this was so obvious that this where this was going and that people were being left behind and that there was discontent brewing and and you know that the people who traditionally looked after the white working class being the democrat party kind of didn't weren't attuned to you know some of of what was going on free trade and so forth in the effects of free trade I mean the thing that two things really struck me in the time that I lived in America the first was the longer I stayed the less I felt I really understood about America even though that's counter intuitive because obviously I was learning more all the time but you just realize like it is a vast and deep country that is extremely different to Australia and I think Australians underestimate how different America is because we speak the same language we have a close alliance and so forth we think because we've lived our life in proximity to a television set and what consumed a lot of American culture that we understand America and actually the longer I was there the more I felt like gee this is a really drastically different country to Australia and then the other thing actually over time that as you mentioned like the extent of travel I did I actually was amazed that America through its history had managed to stay as one country because you'd meet people in Vermont who would have just absolutely nothing in common with people that you would meet in Louisiana or people in California that would be drastically different to people in Ohio but the thing that I found incredibly inspiring was and this was the case whether they were kind of new migrants or people who'd come on the Mayflower or whose family had come on the Mayflower they had a very strong sense of what it meant to be an American and what American values were and so forth so what tied all these people together was this very strong sense of where Americans and of course that was very pronounced as well in the post 9-11 era so even though the country kind of you know Bush was a polarizing figure there was still this very strong sense that we're all in this together and this is what it means to be an American and I mean I haven't lived there obviously now for you know almost two decades I've been back obviously but I do wonder whether there's that still that strong sense of you know unity about what it means to be an American or not and that we're all in this together I'm just I'm not sure but to get back sorry to your question um yeah we were in the 2004 presidential election which was Bush versus Kerry which at the time of course I found massively exciting to be covering a presidential election now now it seems like possibly the most boring US presidential election going back to maybe the 1960s. Boring is not necessarily bad but exactly um but that was fascinating because you got we're going to like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, classic swing states and particularly I remember being in Ohio and talking to a guy who was a union organizer and there was a there was a classic town where you know granddad had worked in the local industry dad had worked there that had good jobs the families kind of affluence had improved all the time and then suddenly 2004 election things were starting to bite with the economy and that we were having also it was the era of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and you know we were start to discover over time the extent of kind of you know corporate corruption and so forth and so average Americans were starting to find actually life's getting a bit harder and we were told that like this free trade stuff would actually improve our lives but turns out now this our local town business has moved offshore and it's gone to China or it's gone to Mexico or they're bringing in workers or whatever was going on and people felt like oh our lives are getting harder not easier and so this was what it turned into short term and again you know I think people forget because it's so long ago it was the tea party movement fostered by people like Glenn Beck on Fox News and so forth and Sarah Palin and became the figurehead of it and all of that kind of thing and so these forces that you saw kick in are the things that have really come to fruition now with with Trump's rise so a lot of these issues are coming up for decision again in another election that will not be the most boring election since the 1960s it makes you wish for a boring one doesn't it yeah let me ask you about Biden and Trump as media performers because as a foreign policy analyst I would say that Biden has been really an excellent president a very basically a very strong foreign policy president good for Australia in many ways which he expects because of his length of his experience in foreign policy yeah all that stuff great team around him but but he looks his age Trump is only I think four years younger he's got he's carrying a lot more weight but somehow he looks a lot more vital but also he's just so watchable in fact it's you know it it's very hard to look away from Donald Trump what how would you how would you assess both of them as media performers and in particular is why why is Trump such good media talent see I maybe look at it a bit differently because I always watch Trump through the lens of what if I had to interview this person because that's the way I often kind of have had to assess people and I must admit that even though you know we would have obviously like to land Trump I was relieved to that we did not land Trump in the era in which I was hosting 730 for a couple of reasons one is because the volume of abuse that you get these days when you land these big interviews is just absolutely off the charts and I felt like I'd had a gut full of you know security threats and so forth and the other is those kind of people like Trump are very very difficult to interview you'll remember the famous interview with Jonathan Swan and Donald Trump that was a really interesting watch and I remember talking about it to one of my colleagues at the time to say Jonathan interviewed Trump in a way that I don't know I would have gotten away with as a national broadcaster which is he he betrayed in his face like huh what what are you talking about but he was a bit of a ham in that interview actually he was but it was to great effect because he was kind of able to marry your reaction that you were thinking as a viewer and also when Trump would say something outlandish rather than challenge it Jonathan would kind of challenge it but the way that he would challenge it would be to go well hang on show me on this bit of paper show me what you mean and so you kind of got this full it was a brilliant interview because you just got this full kind of sense of you know Trump's dynamic but generally I find those kind of people extremely difficult to interview because of the fact that as I said before I'm someone who relies on reason and logic in fact so when you're speaking I'm listening to what you're saying and I'm trying to process it in a logical way and respond in kind so when I interview people who don't operate on that basis so say for example like a Clive Palmer or a Bob Catter or someone like that who's more Trumpy in their vibe I find them very difficult it's like sweating a fly the flies landed here and you kind of sweat but then the flies buzzed off over here and so it I find it extremely difficult to have a productive interview with someone of that nature and so I when I watched Trump I would often be watching it through that lens but also I just would be because I'd be trying to listen for the logic I I find it a baffling word soup so I actually don't find him particularly compelling myself but I think possibly what it comes down to is as you say the energy and also the use of words that have a great emotive impact and that resonate and so there might it might be a whole word soup but then also he'll use the word say unfair all the time and people feel like things are unfair because they feel like they're they're doing it tough I'm reminded as well of my late father who once said something to me about Kevin Rudd he said I don't that guy must be really smart because I don't understand anything that he's saying because my father wasn't an educated man and I just wonder sometimes if people kind of have that vibe as well like I don't understand everything he's saying but I like the guy I did get what he was saying there about the unfairness so maybe the rest of it he's like president level he's a successful businessman maybe I just don't understand the full extent of what he's saying we're talking about interviews you said you don't like those interviews where you're swatting where you have where you're swatting a fly what are the interviews you really enjoy then I really love it if the other person if you're like bowling the ball at them and they're batting it back or it's like a tennis game actually tennis would be a better analogy you're hitting it it's a good rally and it's going back and forth and so I enjoy I always used to love when I was at late line some of the interviews we'd do there because you'd get these you'd have time firstly and you'd get these top shelf I'm thinking of some of the Brits like British thinkers so John Micklethwaite who used to edit The Economist, I think that Bloomberg now was one of my favorites Simon Sharma you know obviously Christopher Hitchens Matthew Parris these guys who they've had those kind of top flight British education where they can illustrate things using history pop culture regular culture the current events and so they're just gigantically engaging and so those are the kind of interviews I like the best where it's actually an engaging conversation the ones I like least are where the person has a set kind of spin or line that they're sticking to and they're kind of just reciting it like an automaton no matter what you say all right and when what did you can what do you when you sit back and think about all these great and good people that you interviewed yeah what sort of conclusions do you draw in general I mean do you find I mean that these are extremely powerful influential people I mean in general when they entered the room did the did the temperature change did you feel that they were sort of super men and super women or did you often sit there feeling thinking actually if you didn't tell me if I didn't know that this person was a foreign minister or president I wouldn't have guessed it no usually I think at that level by the time someone's got to that level they have a certain confidence and assuredness about themselves whether whether it's warranted or not so and also just the level of fame I think of some of those people they walk in and it does kind of change the energy in the room so Hilary Clinton walks in or Tony Blair walks in like it does you know everyone in the room knows who they are it does definitely alter the vibe in the room I do think probably I mean you form your personal views of course of all of them and that was one of the great pleasures of and is of what I've chosen as a career is that I got to meet and and talk to a lot of people one-on-one and not filtered by having to watch them through something else so you see the way they interact with the camera crew or the people around them or their own people and so forth how they are when they're making small talk with you and so you do form you know impressions of people and their professionalism or their charisma and so forth sometimes that's unexpected I remember interviewing Renee Zellweger the actress and I wasn't really that interested in doing it I hadn't nothing she'd ever been it had particularly won me over and so for me it was kind of just another day in the office which I know sounds ridiculous but it was and she walked into this room and it was honestly it was like this beam of sunshine walked into the room she was hilarious she was warm she just everyone in the room within about one minute fell in love with her it's like she just radiated light and she I thought to myself oh I just saw why you're a movie star like you you have got so much charisma it is just oozing um off you and then other people kind of you know are more like what you'd expect but then you see it up close so say for example Bill Gates he came in and I just he was impossible to make small talk with and I realized it's probably actually making it worse that I'm trying to make small talk I think it would be better to just give him his space and then we just start the interview and he'll talk about what he wants to talk about so and then other people you know Hillary Clinton is quite chatty David Cameron Tony Blair that polite Britishist Boris Johnson as you'd expect I mean who you've also met kind of shambolic and you know all of that it what you see is what you get sometimes you know with these people too we uh one of the biggest interviews we did recently was with President Zelensky yeah of Ukraine we did that uh in October 2022 so how did you find him I haven't done him well first of all going into it I had enormous respect for Zelensky's physical and moral courage in standing up to Vladimir Putin I had already been blacklisted by the time I interviewed him by the Kremlin for saying mean things about Putin so so maybe I was sort of inclined to like him anyway yeah I thought he'd be living in exile in an apartment in Paris for sure so full props to the guy yeah no just amazing to your point when when we dealt with his staff in the lead-up they were all delightful easy to deal with despite the incredible pressure they were under the thing I really remember is that Zelensky came on we had a big screen he was coming from Zoom via Zoom from from the presidential palace in Kiev we're having this conversation it's hard to make too many personal connections with someone at a distance but halfway through the conversation he started to quote something that Angela Merkel had said to me seven years earlier when she was giving the Loewe lecture oh so he'd done his homework he'd done his homework and and afterwards I said you know to my colleagues did we did we give him that Merkel quote because it was a perfect Merkel quote it was something she'd said about Russia and we hadn't given it to them and and what I realized was that even though they had missiles falling around their heads someone in in a bunker in Kiev is spending two hours on the Loewe Institute website to get the perfect phrase to give to the boss for the weird interview he's doing with the Australian think tank and I thought that is a level of professionalism and flair and trade craft yeah that you don't get often from the White House or the Elisa Palace or the Lodge but here you're getting it from a wartime leader who's making life and deaths decisions every single hour yeah and understanding the value of public opinion and that every person that you can reach who is going to form an opinion about you or what you're doing that you know it's important to do your homework on that I remember um the second time I interviewed Hillary Clinton this thing happened where she kind of arrived you know there's always like this huge entourage around her she arrived and she said Lee it's so nice to see you again now tell me how's your baby I hear you have a baby and I was just imagining it in the lift on the way down that someone probably said to her this is Lee Sales you met her in Melbourne three years ago she's had a baby and just given it a quick it's the body person from Veep yeah exactly that's right Gary quickly in the year giving me um giving the information um but yeah that that's impressive doing the homework being done like that yeah all right let me come back to being let me ask you one more question about foreign correspondents um obviously we can get news now from anywhere in the world via internet you can tap the New York Times or the Washington Post or or the the Jakarta Post or whatever it is and yet still we I certainly believe that there's value in having Australian foreign correspondents on the beat who look at and who see a story through an Australian lens who see Australian interests who have an Australian sensibility or sense of humour yeah um how do you feel about that now because of course the ranks of Australian foreign correspondents are thinning a lot less than they used to be 20 or 30 years ago how important is it still to have Australian foreign chorus on the beat yeah what are the limitations to that foreign correspondents operate under um okay I think it's important particularly in locations with which Australia has you know important links or interests right so the United States UK in our own region and so forth um I think that it's exactly as you said those are the important reasons why because you're putting an Australian lens on things but say for example if you take Orcus um if you read say the New York Times coverage of Orcus it's not going to necessarily tell you everything you want to know from an Australian perspective because our national interest is not exactly the same as the United States national interest so an Australian journalist is going to listen to a press conference about that or ask questions about that that are going to be different to what the Americans ask so it's particularly when there's issues and stories where there's an Australian link that you want an Australian kind of take on it but also even in terms of say what's going on in the United States something I was always looking at was what's going on in the Australian news and what's happening here that might have some resonance for back home so for example I remember when I was there Oregon was debating whether to introduce a legalised voluntary euthanasia that obviously is a story that at the time had some resonance for Australia as well so you're looking for those kind of issues that the limitations are firstly correspondence who stays places for a long time you start to view it as normal you stop noticing the foreignness of it and I think that's a risk because then things that should strike you as a story don't necessarily strike you as a story and you're losing a bit of touch with what's going on back home so a bit more disconnected from what your home audience wants as well so I don't think people should be on postings for like you know hugely long periods of time having said that you've got to be there long enough to understand the country and have some contacts the other issue which is a major one somewhere like Washington is access because an Australian correspondent in Washington DC is just an absolute nobody it's like you know a local you know reporter from the middle of nowhere in Australia shows up at the Canberra press gallery they're not getting a look in compared to Phil Corrie and Laura Tingl and so forth you wouldn't you wouldn't get a seat in the in the White House press room you'd have to apply if you wanted to go to the White House the Pentagon whatever you'd have to apply for permission to go in and so it was hard to get access it was hard to get people to return your calls members of Congress why do they need to speak to you know no votes TV as my BBC colleague used to call us they BBC had a hard time getting access yeah so if the BBC is not getting a look in you know ABC really kind of struggling so that's that was a tricky thing to try to find ways to you know get around that in fact something I used to do actually being here in a think tank which is quite appropriate at the time there was a big story that I was on which was Guantanamo Bay because there was a couple of Australians being held at Guantanamo Bay as part of the War on Terror and getting access to anyone who was kind of running it at the American end was really difficult because they were in the National Security Council mid-ranked people in the Pentagon and so forth but they're the kind of people that often show up at think tanks to talk and so you could never kind of get past their secretary you couldn't get on to them at work but you could go to like a lunchtime thing at a think tank and jump in a lift with them at the end or grab them at the end and ask for a coffee so I used to keep an assiduous look on what was going on at Brookings and Heritage and so forth so that I could go and just buttonhole people we're happy to be of service I'm glad um let me ask you let me come from overseas back to Australia and ask you uh a question about how the Australian media is doing you gave the Andrew Oli lecture um last year and you stuck your neck out you made some strong arguments um and one of them was that you were critical of some of your journalistic colleagues who are who were starting to behave as much like activists as they were like journalists so tell us a bit about that argument so I just think that there is an increasing trend um towards opinion creeping into journalism across media organisations and the kind of where it comes from I guess is this idea of well you know this is the truth and so we should stand up for the truth well well actually your job as a journalist is not to determine necessarily what the truth is it's to present all of the available information to the public and to say you make up your own mind that's not to say that you can't apply analytical tools like you know a plus b equals c therefore d must be true or you know whatever but it's not your job to start from a position of well I think this about this issue and therefore I'm gonna you know do this in my reporting and so I'm bothered by so many issues that this seems to have become a thing and that you know people question the value of the basic tenets of journalism like impartiality fairness and so on setting aside your own opinion um this argument towards I guess include incorporating your lived experience into your work having a diversity of lived experience is super important um in a newsroom because that helps you see stories that other people might not spot um but it doesn't mean that you should become you know your opinion should become part of the story and so I wanted to make this case which in this day and age it kind of alarms me that that's a controversial argument to make it just seems ludicrous to me that that that's a question in journalism about whether you should park your opinions at the door but nonetheless that that's where the debate is how does that link to social media because I notice you've kind of disengaged over the years from social media you're a big user of twitter when it started and then you sort of became a bit more distant and I think you you jumped off at a couple of years ago yeah do you think other journalists should be on social media because social media is it's hard to disguise your opinions if you're on social media a lot isn't it it's very tempting yeah to to disclose your opinions and and to reach judgments and to broadcast judgments I think the other thing people find hard to do is not to react to people like so someone says something that's inflammatory to you about a report you've done something you feel the need to react and so you see people getting into trouble with that look I always right from the start my my friend the late mark colvin who you know was your friend as well um we used to talk about this a lot because he was a very active twitter user too and so we we always had in our own mind very strong thoughts about you know you don't weigh in on stories that you're covering or generally on any story really because it undermines your credibility you've got to be careful of your behavior because it influences as well the way people think of you your authority and so forth mark was fantastic it just you know what I loved about twitter in the early days was was what mark was doing with it which was he read so widely that he'd post so many different things that I wouldn't otherwise have seen if not for mark drawing my attention to them but over time it turned into kind of less of an interesting conversation and more of a just people having potshots at each other so over time I ended up using it as kind of a one-way marketing tool to say this is what's on 7 30 tonight or here's my latest book or whatever and then in the end even the utility of that was kind of limited so um yeah I jumped off it but I do I do think you know it certainly made me think less of some journalists seeing their kind of opinions out there constantly and I think people should be very you know very careful about that and also just to keep in mind like who do you think needs to hear your opinion who do you care you know I just find that tricky sometimes too like why do you think we need hot take 151 on you know xyz story it's just yeah go and go and do some stories so so now that you're not a a young foreign correspondent in washington but you're a sort of eminence grease of of the australian media world when you squint your eyes do you think that the australian media has got better or worse in the period that you've been working in it a bit of both um I'm super cautious as well about I don't I never want to be one of those people's oh back in the day when I was a youngster we used to have to go out and do three stories a day you know like all that kind of nonsense it just makes you roll your eyes um certainly obviously the gender balance has improved gigantically over the time um you know that I've I've worked in newsrooms there's much much more um you know recognition of of that um and just general understanding too of the importance of diversity um in in newsrooms I'd like to see more class diversity um and people understanding the need that a lot of people come into it now who've gotten gone through university and so forth whereas 30 40 50 years ago people were coming in they'd leave school in grade 10 come in and be a copy boy or copy girl and then work their way up and that means you got a different cohort of people through work you know people that came from working class backgrounds rather than you know mums or dad doctors lawyer and I went to a elite Sydney private school ideological diversity as well yeah and I think that partly comes from the economic diversity um too but there's certainly been a much better recognition of the need for diversity there's still a way to go in that but it's definitely improved gigantically um and then I think the so I think there's some positives in that kind of sense what one of the major positives has been just technology and what you can do with technology I mean it's just absolutely gobsmacking even the fact that we can be sitting here in a location filming something if we wanted to this could actually be going out live right now from here um it could be going out live to the other side of the world like I remember covering Hurricane Katrina and there was this moment where I just felt like oh my god which was a technological game changer which was I had this great American producer who was really great with all the latest gadgets we had been in New Orleans airport where they were evacuating people it was just absolute disaster and normally in this era when you were filing you'd have to find a place with a landline telephone you'd pull the cables out you'd plug up the cables into your phone into the into the phone jack and then you would hear the sort of noise and then you would watch it as it sent and took an hour to send like two minutes of audio couldn't really get television vision out like that and Jason we're sitting on the median strip outside the airport and Jason has brought this wireless dongle and he said I've got this wi-fi and he put it into the side of the laptop and we sat there edited our story digitally on the laptop and then sent it off it went and I remember just thinking this is unbelievable that we just could get that audio and our digital record is into the laptop and it's back no need to be anywhere near a phone line and so and then you think that that sounds primitive now me explaining that compared to what we can actually do now yeah I mean I was broadcasting out of my own bedroom alone during COVID for some episodes of 730 well also in the think tank world what you say reminds me of something Owen Harry's a mutual friend of ours once told me which was that when he was when he wrote was first writing for foreign affairs he was an academic at the University of New South Wales and he would write that he would type this article send it to New York and like three months later he'd get a letter saying professor harry's we've decided to publish your article whereas now as people as as professionals who interact with the media we can have constant discussions and emails you can be you can be publishing things you it makes it much more feasible to be to to be an international analyst while you're living in Australia or you're producing your own content so say for example in the early years of the Lowe Institute to my great benefit when you had great people coming through you bring me and go well David Petraeus is coming do you want to interview him on 730 or whatever Boris Johnson's here do you want him for 730 yep great thanks Michael well now you do it yourself you don't need to go and put them you know elsewhere you can produce your own content and so I think that's been an incredible development for I guess the democratization of the media and then you know all my concerns are all the things I outlined before just the lack of impartiality and opinion and you know inaccuracy and bias and all that all that kind of stuff which you know I do worry I'm on the sinking ship adhering to those views I hope I'm not but look who knows I've had a good run and if it changes and new generations coming through have a different view of journalism well that's that's fine all right let me finish with a couple of final questions first of all given this is an international podcast I know you you love watching world affairs what are the what are the biggest most important sources of international news for you what do you log on are there particular blogs that you think other people should look at or magazines or what so I do tend to shift a little bit from time to time so for example at the moment because it's a US election year I've got a few podcasts that I dip in and out of mostly the New York Times ones about American politics and I'll tend to I don't listen all the time but I'll tend to think oh okay well it's you know Super Tuesday so I'll whack that one this week and have a listen and then I can kind of catch up and I can do something else while I'm doing it I subscribe to the New York Times and the Washington Post I'd say probably though my preferred American media at the moment is the Atlantic I think the Atlantic is doing really good work I think they've kind of shifted into the terrain that you know as I was saying to you that I kind of support which is curious questioning journalism that's kind of chief motivation is curiosity and the facts not ideology I think they do some fantastic work so I my if I could only read one thing every day I'd go to the Atlantic I've always rated the economist I I tend that that would be probably the they would be the things that I mostly go to I think for oh the BBC website I glance at C&N I glance at and then that's about it and then I skim all of the Australian news websites as well but generally I would not read my foreign news on the Australian websites I'd go to the overseas websites and I think my own bias if you had someone here who'd been a London correspondent I bet they'd rattle through I read the Times and say my bias is just towards the American publications yeah and what about fiction and TV and movies and stuff like that about politics and foreign policy and spooks so I mean I love all of that stuff I for anyone that didn't watch the Bureau which was a French television show about their foreign intelligence agency that was so so good I could not have loved it anymore it's I'm not sure if it's all still on sbs it was on sbs on demand and in a similar vein I loved a show called the Americans did you end up watching that no oh Michael how many times have I told you to watch it the Americans which was about it's set in the 1980s in Washington it's about these two Russian agents living in deep cover in suburban Washington it was it was really fantastic too so yeah I take your recommendations with a handful of salt to be honest so um yeah they're my they're my two favorites of recent times I'd say I just did watch actually scoop which is the thing about securing the interview oh yeah prince uh news night securing the interview yeah where the producer is is the is the star not the host the producers are always the star Michael the real star um I probably haven't seen a television show that captured so accurately what the nature of my job as an anchor used to be like it's really accurate except I didn't get the memo about swarming around in the office with a designer dog the entire time which they portray Emily Matles as as doing which I asked him at the BBC did she really have that dog with her the entire time and they were like she had it occasionally they've taken a few leaves there but just the kind of um for anyone who watches that the way the team works on the interview lands the interview and then works on what are we going to ask and the way they're schmoozing Prince Andrew and his press secretary his private secretary that that was all very very true to what it's what it's really like well just to do the other side of the sales fully love book club I've been I've been recommending to you for many years slow horses and you've ignored that recommendation I know both the books and the and and the TV show are brilliant but the other one as you know I'm writing a book on JFK at the moment and um a couple of years ago Fred Logavale who's a historian at Harvard wrote this absolutely magnificent biography just called JFK volume one about Kennedy's early life which is an incredible read but also makes a pretty compelling argument that Kennedy is a more substantial figure than many people have mistaken in for so I recommend that I find this fascinating because an admirer you know that you because you also did an FDR book these these giant figures you sometimes feel like oh I should say one sometimes feels like um is there possibly anything more to say about JFK or about FDR and what's kind of exhilarating is when someone writes a take where you go oh god that's that's fantastic I haven't you know thought about like remember my friend Julia Baird writing a book about Queen Victoria and I was just thinking what new can there possibly be to add on this person but there is and I also find that that it's such an effort as you know as a as you've written many books it's such a big effort you have to have a person that you're you find appealing and attractive you have to have a big big story yeah and again to go back to Owen Harries who who was a mentor of mine I remember Owen once giving me some advice and that is Michael if you're ever going swimming swimming the deep waters not in the shallows yeah and so it's better to take on a huge topic or a big figure like a very important president and and try to try to come it try to give that a new try to come at that from a new angle rather than taking some sort of obscure figure on the margins well because you're going to be living with them for a long time yeah and and generally even someone that you like or admire or whatever by the end of the process you're going to be over it because it's a lot of work to kind of write a book so if you're starting from a premise of ah I hope they're going to sustain it or this is a bit interesting but I'm not sure about the whole thing it's it's you're going to struggle so it's good advice unsurprisingly from from the great Owen Harries Lee sales I've really enjoyed speaking with you today we've done the book recommendations so we'll have nothing to discuss over lunch but you've been a very gracious host you've done your own sound effects on the modem you've you've talked about swatting flies you've given us some of your tricks like jumping into elevators at think tanks pursuing mid-level officials so you're giving away your secrets I put some makeup on I made an effort to look nice for you it's yeah it's all it's all it's all I've done my homework like Zelensky so thank you very much for joining us for this episode of the director's chair thank you very much for inviting me the director's chair is a podcast from the Lowey Institute the producers for this episode were Josh Godding and Andrew Griffiths David Valance provided research assistance if you've enjoyed this episode please leave a review in your podcast app and you can find all our past episodes at our website loweyinstitute.org slash director's chair I'm Michael Fully Love thank you for listening