It’s all about Leigh Sales

On Tuesday night, viewers watching the ABC’s flagship current affairs programme, 7.30, saw everything that is wrong with the organisation encapsulated in one excruciating interview. The moment came when presenter Leigh Sales was supposedly interrogating Defence Minister Kevin Andrews about the dispatch of a new joint Australian-New Zealand training contingent to Iraq.

The struggle to rebuild Iraq, to train its forces to expel Islamic State, in the maelstrom of religious and political forces competing for power and territory is a complex and important story.  Australia’s contribution is relevant, both for the Middle East, and our own domestic security.

Yet Leigh Sales thought it important — and funny — to reduce the interview to farce.

What exactly  was the purpose of suddenly asking the minister to name the head of ISIS?  If he had answered “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi”, what would she have said next? The answers to those two questions are crucial to an understanding of what the ABC’s flagship 7.30 current affairs programme has become under the presentation of a narcissistic airhead.

The panting excitement, obvious as she awaited the exact moment to inject the irrelevancy of her gotcha, was eclipsed only by the look of unsuppressed triumph as her target failed to provide the correct answer.

Her beaming exultation at the successful springing of her trap produced the desired “look at me” reaction, effectively making Sales, rather than her subject, the focus of her interview.

That this was conceived more to impress her fellow workers and the fawning acolytes of the Sydney Morning Herald has been proven by the formers’ rush to include the minister’s  “gaffe” in this morning’s  radio news bulletins, and the SMH‘s splash in print and online.

Unfortunately, Ms Sales needs to be taught her proper role — and her real station in life. A former reporter, competent, but of modest intellect and no  special expertise in anything, she now feels free to offend her audience by drawing attention to herself with bizarre and frequent changes in hair style, plus bullying questioning accompanied by exaggerated hand movements, which merely emphasise how badly she has phrased her sentences.

The role of the person in her chair is to draw relevant information from the subject, not to attempt self-aggrandisement.  Leigh Sales began in this role as shrewish, but for a time became almost professional.

Now, she reveals herself as a silly, spoiled little girl — just how silly and spoiled can be observed via the link below

— Geoffrey Luck

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