Leigh Sales’ Accidental Exposé

I was so keen to read Leigh Sales’ new book on journalism I pre-ordered it. It’s called Storytellers: Questions, Answers and the Craft of Journalism. It’s already an Amazon best-seller. What’s not to like? The ABC icon interviewed some 30 well-known practitioners. They’re not just front-of-house, such as TV anchors, investigative reporters and columnists. They include editors, producers, “cammos” (camera) and technical people.

For sure, Sales lives within the ABC bubble, a shrinking one judging by the massive fall-off in radio and flagship TV ratings. But I wasn’t fussed by her take on things or her constant reminders of how impartial she is. The book’s insights are about the nitty-gritty of journalism, not ideology.

Did you know, for example, that Stan Grant has a clock inside his head that tells him when to finish his segment? “I can feel what five , ten , thirty seconds , a minute feels like,” he writes (p203). Did you know that investigative journalist Pam Williams each evening rips the day’s pages from her notebook and staples and stashes them safely at home (to avoid losing a notebook, which is every journo’s dread (p135).

However – and it’s a huge ‘however’ – by p228 I reached the chapter with Sales interviewing Four Corners’ expert cameraman Levent “Louie” Eroglu. This section is headed, “Telling a story with pictures”. Sales probes Eroglu on how he brings current affairs pieces to life with that all-important “vision”. Lighting, angles, scene selection, mood, symbolism. Not controversial? Heavens, this particular chapter is fake news squared!

Sales invites Eroglu to have a good chat about how he put the cinematography for a major ABC three part docco. Which docco? You won’t believe this: it’s Four Corners’ Sarah Ferguson and her 2018 “Story of the Century”. Ferguson fantasised about how Trump colluded with Putin’s Russia to win office and negate American democracy. After the Mueller report’s exhaustive investigation probing 500 witnesses and thousands of pages of documentation, and much else in the way of revelations, it is now a matter of record that the Russia collusion story was a Democrat-financed and Deep State facilitated hit job. The Democrat-friendly media swallowed and ran with the fake news for four relentless years – led Down Under by the ABC. The Steele Dossier’s claim, for example, that Trump allegedly organised a “golden shower” on a Moscow hotel bed previously used by Obama, is now a proven fake organised by Hillary Clinton’s team and bigged-up by James Comey’s lying FBI.

Hillary’s apparatus was fined a total $US113,000 on March 30 last year for lying about its $US1 million funding of the “pee dossier”. The ABC has never apologised for, amended, nor retracted Ferguson’s three part innuendo-fest. Here’s how Sales’ “Telling a story with pictures” chapter goes, from p229 (My emphases):

Sales: Let’s discuss a three – part series you shot for Four Corners on allegations [whose allegations exactly?] of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election . Talk us through the way you decided that series would look.

Eroglu: I didn’t come up with the idea to do Trump/Russia; the journalist approached me [of course]. What I do is implement my visuals for it. The first thing with the assignment, whether it’s one or two parts, is that you’ve got to vary it a bit. And so, two angles: wide and tight … I did another thing I like, it’s quite stylish, it’s to go both smooth and rough. So doing things where you do a shot locked off on the tripod – for example, of New York, shot from Hoboken, from the other side [of the river], looking back. It’s really lovely. You can do time lapses and whatnot; that’s smooth. And then boom, you go off-the-shoulder, into the streets of Manhattan; it’s rough. And so it’s a full-on mash, smooth and rough.

Sales: And what does a mash achieve?

Eroglu: It can give you a sense of edge. That something’s about to happen. Or it can enhance the fact of New York. When you’re watching New York from a distance, across the water, it’s quite serene. But as soon as you come out of the Lincoln Tunnel, it’s like aarrgghh! That scream can be replicated audio-wise and visually, by quick edits. And you keep the camera moving. Then you add music; it all builds tension.

Sales: If you’re shooting a war, it’s very visual and you are overwhelmed by choice. This story was not like that. It was about computer hacking [No, Leigh, it was about a Hillary/FBI/Big Media/ABC conspiracy to besmirch the then US President]. How do you come up with ideas to illustrate something so visually dull?

Eroglu: Well, you might have some archive, FBI press conferences and stuff. Once you’ve got what’s available from archive in your head, you can find ways of making the transition from the present to the archives. The other thing we can do is stylise things. We don’t go too literal with the re-enactments, cos we weren’t there. We shoot in a way that, hopefully, people can fill in the blanks….

Sales: How much detail do you like a journalist or producer to give you about a story?

Eroglu: Detail is important…. I was probably too busy worrying about the mechanics of the camera. But if you listen to a story that’s being given to you to capture, you can understand things and work smart. You can say, ‘I know that at some point, I’ve got this scene that can help with your line there.’…

Sales: How do the best journalists help you do your job?

Eroglu: They understood my role in creating their narrative. Just understanding one another.

In no way am I criticising cameraman Eroglu, he was just doing his day-job. But can anything be more brazen than Sales’ choice for a laudable series and her tone-deaf questions about the ABC’s most shameful (and expensive) journalism this century?

There are two Leigh Sales: Leigh Sales 101 is the ace reporter/presenter who is also a lovable hug-bunny teaming when off-duty with Annabel Crabb on their hugely popular Chat10/Looks3 podcast. The other is Leigh Sales 2.0, the ABC groupthinker with her left-woke worldviews presented for the moral improvement of all Australian taxpayers.

Last weekend, Sales addressed Sydney’s Women in Media conference and professed grave concern about (other) journalists’ pernicious “activism” and loss of independence:

I’m so big on things like setting aside your own opinion and trying to go into things with an open minded mindset. Fake news, misinformation … the bullying that occurs on social media, reporters are doing reporting that doesn’t fit with the zeitgeist or world view, that all really concerns me.

Just a fortnight ago Sales was quoted in the Herald Sun’s Weekend magazine, “Be open-minded and curious. You can’t build genuine relationships with people and learn new things if you arrive with your options already formed, ready to judge.”

The Australian’s Sophie Ellsworth reported September 11 that Sales, in an interview on The Project this month, had assured co-host Waleed Aly that she didn’t take positions on anything: If you want to be a journalist, you have to leave your opinions at the door”. The Australian’s story generated 400+ reader comments, all but half a dozen suggesting strongly that Sales lacks self-awareness.

In Storytellers, Sales writes as early as page 9 that some journalists

…have become disillusioned with the direction of the media and the trend in some organisations towards open ideological bias … Opinion and activism are dressed up as objective reporting ; deliberate bias, misinformation and the skewing of facts are common . These things cause readers and viewers to either become bored and tune out or , worse , to lose trust.

NB to Sales: The ABC brand’s trust ranking in 2021 fell nine slots to 19^th.

Amid all this fluff came the revelation that Sales has a previously hidden role enforcing ABC political dogma on its reporters.

At issue was the top-down ABC endorsement of Prime Minister Albanese’s Yes-team fiction that the 26-page Uluru Statement from the Heart consists only of its 440-word frontispiece. In an email to staff Sales dubbed the “26-pages” as “misinformation”. She supplied ABC presenters and reporters with scripts to be delivered with a straight face:

Ms X, respectfully, I’ll correct your claim that the Uluru statement is a 26-page document. It is a one-page document, the other 25 pages were minutes collected during a consultation phase [as if!] that do not form part of the final document.” If any punter pushes back, Sales’ script goes, “It is inaccurate to suggest I am correcting the record because the ABC is ‘biased’ ” or “The ABC is far from the only organisation to call out the spread of this misinformation.

The reporter is then to cut off the interlocutor by moving on to the next question. Sales couldn’t care less that the key architects of the Voice have themselves said, and said repeatedly, that the document, in full, is 18 pages (or 26 pages, maybe the type sizes vary). And after the cover page, the document demands sovereignty, treaties and reparations as a percent of GDP to anyone claiming to have a “first nations” great-grandmother (up to 300,000 are suspect as tribespeople). Sales should find time in the course of her busy, unbiased, preconception-free day to read Keith Windschuttle and Chris Battle’s analysis of the Uluru Statement’s hidden documents.

IT’S not well-known that Sales’ late father was a regimental sergeant-major:

Discipline was strict in our house and there was no more powerful tool than Mum’s threat, ‘I’ll tell your father when he gets home’. Dad was an infantryman, a regimental sergeant major by the time I was a teenager. You could see your face in his boots, and your life flashing before you in his eyes. Like most people in his line of work, the sound of his raised voice crossed a chainsaw with a starving grizzly bear.[1] (On Doubt, p8).

I can imagine Leigh Sales addressing her own ABC troops:

“Stand to attention when I come into the room! You there, pronouns she/her, show some respect for the ABC, straighten that Yes badge! Now listen up, here’s today’s instructions, and let no-one forget this: The Uluru Statement is one page comprising 440 words!”

Trooper Paul Barry (Media Watch), pronouns he/him: “Isn’t that [he makes air quotes with his fingers] ‘disputed’?”

Sgt-Mjr Leigh (bellows): “Call me Ze/Zir when you address me! You are not at the ABC to think. I do that for you.”

Trooper Barry: “Sorry Zir. But what if someone says we’re biased?”

Sgt-Mjr Leigh (enraged): “If you’re at close quarters with the enemy — pronouns they/them — don’t explain, just stick your bayonet in the No voter’s guts and twist!”

This is too much for many young ABC persons identifying as men, women or in-between, who rush to the Sydney newsroom multisex toilets for a good sooking. But the cubicles are already occupied, as we learn from Sales’ Storytellers (pp86,87), by weeping ABC youngsters already overwhelmed by the newsroom’s everyday pressure…[2]

Sales must also be talking about the ABC woke workplace when she writes,

I know also that some older journalists are anxious about providing critical feedback to young reporters for fear of being accused of bullying or sexism . In the age of cancel culture, they also worry that they might step on a landmine they don’t know exists and find themselves reported to Human Resources. (Storytellers, p9)

Sales on the ABC itself suggested two years ago a reason for the ABC stress levels: she was frank enough to call out what she calls the “left-wing zealots” infesting X (Twitter):

Let’s not duck the common thread here — it is overwhelmingly left-leaning Twitter users who are targeting ABC journalists for abuse. Of course, there are right-wing attacks too, but the most ferocious campaigns are reserved for any journalist who questions, in even the most anodyne manner, the policies or public statements of Labor politicians.

But let’s get back to her Storytellers interview with cameraman Eroglu about dressing up pictorially Ferguson’s Trump/Russia farrago. In my perhaps biased opinion, Sales herself is a case study in Trump Derangement Syndrome (not to mention Murdoch derangement — I assume she’s over her Cardinal Pell derangement now that he’s dead). She even seems to be a US-election denier, writing in her On Doubt (2017, p42-43) not that he was elected in 2016 but that

Donald Trump, a proven liar and bully on any clear-headed analysis of his words and deeds, has blustered his way into the White House.

Silly me, I thought Trump won 304 Electoral College votes to Hillary’s 227.

Sure, one can personally detest the bloke 63 million Americans voted for in 2016, 67 million endorsed in 2020, and who is now the leading Republican candidate while being prosecuted banana-republic style by President Biden’s Justice Department. But as a journalist at the statutorily impartial ABC, Sales needs to keep her visceral hatred under control. It rather contrasts with her hero-worship of Barack Obama, whom she ranks Number One on her interview wish-list (Well Hello, p483), and Hillary Clinton, paymaster for the Trump/Russia exercise. As Sales gushes (Storytellers, p72),

In these [reporting] roles , you meet a lot of famous people , but every now and again , I’d meet someone so famous – say , a Hillary Clinton level of fame – and get this weird sense of , ‘ Oh my god , they’re actually a real human being . ’

Let’s look at Sales at work during her 7.30 role, interviewing three US female politicals.

♦ On 10 September 2020 she interviewed Jane Fonda, ostensibly about her global warming panic book “What can I do?” Contemplating the imminent death of the planet, the 82-year-old wept on camera:

All these wonderful species are going to go and life is going to be very, very difficult to live and eventually possibly the human species will go as well because we are trashing our home and I just, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or die with myself if I don’t do something

Fonda. of course. is infamous for giving the North Vietnamese in Hanoi a photoshoot of herself alongside a Soviet ground-to-air missile. According to Sales’ euphemism, that was just Hanoi Jane’s “public opposition to the US war in Vietnam.” Here’s Sales’ ever-so-gentle softball.

Sales: Because of your activism, you’ve attracted plenty of controversy. A lot of people dislike you; they have strong opinions about you. Has that been hard to take?”

Fonda: No. I don’t know why. It’s because I’ve never been alone. I’m always part of a movement.

Fonda then grieved, without any Sales pushback, about her struggle to make ends meet, notwithstanding her $US200 million net worth, which includes a $US100 million divorce settlement from billionnaire Ted Turner and a $US5.4 million Los Angeles town-house.

Fonda: Do I need money? There’s that. People forget that we are working people. I belong to three unions. I have to earn a living. I have a bottom line that I’ve got, that I have to meet and its tough right now. I mean, not that tough, I have a roof over my head and a very nice home that’s paid for and food and I have an assistant with me and I’m very, very lucky, but I’m worried. We will have gone almost a year without working and that’s scary…. I have to keep working.

♦ Six days later Sales had another female American guest, Trump’s ex-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a devout Christian who in her memoir – believe it or not – described Trump as kind, considerate and respectful of his junior staff. No softballs this time. As the Left media gloated, Sales “rips her apart”. She opened with, “Can Donald Trump tell the difference between the truth and a lie?”

Sales brought up the California wildfires as proof of climate emergency – although, as usual, rain followed the dry. She asked Sanders re Trump’s (valid) scepticism about climate causation of the fires, “Was that a display of lying, ignorance or insanity?”

While Sales was a lioness tackling an ex-press secretary across the seas, I can’t imagine her similarly clawing at Victoria’s Premier Dan Andrews over his dismissal of the Lawyer X (Nicola Gobba) inquiry: ‘Mr Andrews, was that a display of lying, ignorance or insanity?’ Other questions by Sales to Sanders were soapbox speeches playing to the ABC team’s wokerati.

♦ An earlier interviewee (May 14, 2018) was Sales’ living goddess who walks amongst us, Hillary Clinton.

On the Huckabee Sanders’ interview precedent, did Sales ask Hillary about her presidential husband encouraging a young intern to put cigars into her vagina in the Oval Office, and who ejaculated there on the intern’s blue dress?[3] Well, no.

Sales: Somebody who has watched 30-plus years of your career would see extreme hours, high pressure, sexism, relentless public attacks, loss of privacy…

Hillary Clinton (laughs): Ooh, sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it? (Laughs)

Sales (laughs): Well, and then, you know: also at the end a brutal exit … What would you say to people who look at your experience and go: “Well, there’s just …  it’s not worth it: going into public life.

Sales never seized the opportunity to ask Hillary about her leading role in the “nuts and sluts” pushback strategy against the women accusing her husband of rape, such as working woman and Bill Clinton survivor Paula Jones who copped the Hillary team’s epithet, “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

Back home now (as the newsreaders segue) and some parts of Sales’ Storytellers have been overtaken by events. For example, she lauds Samantha Maiden’s news.com.au coverage of the Brittany Higgins rape claim, which won Maiden her Press Gallery Journalist of the Year title and two other “journalist-of-the-year” titles. The Walter Sofronoff KC report now offers of course a fuller account.  Maiden tells Sales,

Brittany Higgins was obviously a massive story , and maybe it is the most important story I will ever write … (Sales’ transcript: Samantha starts to cry)

Maiden empathises with Ms Higgins over the “very traumatic” media attention (p31). The chapter doesn’t mention Higgins collecting the abrupt government compensation widely reported as being of $2.5 million or more. Maybe that was after Sales’ manuscript deadline.[4] Instead, Maiden effuses about how the Higgins case “changed laws, led to this huge national debate that’s been applauded by thousands of women around the country.”

Talking of tears, Sales says the only person to make her openly cry on camera was ex-PM Bob Hawke’s wife Blanche d’Alpuget, when Hawke was close to death. While sad on a personal level, it so happens that throughout his career Hawke was not only a sexual abuser of women but corruptly paid off by the late Sir Peter Abeles, as revealed in Troy Bramston’s excellent 720-page biography. Throughout, the media — 7.30 and Four Corners included –looked away, too timid or too involved to speak truth to power.

I’VE long been annoyed that ABC stars’ pay remains a state secret, unlike the BBC, which discloses not only the pay of numerous on-air types but even publicly itemises the expense accounts of the director-general when he spends as little as seven pounds on a train ticket. Hmm, what’s Ita claiming these days? Is she using ABC cab vouchers to get from Ultimo to wherever she records those radio ads spruiking COVID’s peril and Pfizer’s remedies?

Sales’ pay gets only two mentions in her three books. Best guess now is $460,000 upwards — way back in 2012 a leaked spreadsheet showed she was paid $280,400. But the ABC top-paid female might instead be Sarah Ferguson. I don’t want to start any handbag duels at six paces.[5] [6]

Sales says the high pay for TV anchors reflects their often precarious tenure: “The position is subject to intense scrutiny and can be short – lived .” (p277). Her own tenure at 7.30 lasted a decade to last year. Hence she adds, “The flipside is that a skilled anchor can turn their programs – and themselves – into beloved and trusted public institutions .” She also remarks about hesitating to see a London show in the West End, “And then I was full of self-loathing because I was like , ‘ You are such an entitled moll because look at you , you’ve got the money to go and see one of the world’s great shows.’ (Well Hello, p478).

In all her memoirs she talks about her impartiality and determination to give all views a go. Her whole mini-book On Doubt in 2009 stressed that political controversies involve legitimate argumentation on all sides. She spruiked there the reality of human-caused global warming, but seemed unaware that the controversy is actually over how much and how dangerous the warming is, if at all. To my surprise she wrote that so-called ‘deniers’ and ‘heretics’ should be welcomed as productive dissenters challenging the consensus and forcing the establishment to test their evidence: “It will lead to better outcomes for us all.” (P36-7).

She continues even more provocatively, quoting ABC colleague Chris Uhlmann:

When the weather department can tell me what the weather is going to be like next Friday with any certainty and Treasury can get within a million dollars of what the surplus is going to be next year, I’ll believe an economic model that marries those two things and casts them out over 100 years .

Her own conclusion went,

When men are most sure and arrogant,’ Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote more than two hundred years ago, ‘they are most commonly mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities…

Her attack on groupthink at the ABC might have come back to bite her, because in her 2017 update to On Doubt and her interviewing thereafter, she hurried back to the safety of the climate-catastrophe herd.

Storyteller’s dullest chapter, surprisingly, is her interview of her former 7.30 boss and now ABC news director Justin Stevens (pay north of $676,000, which is what his predecessor Gaven Morris pocketed –Annual Report p178). Stevens gives nothing away. But I did enjoy learning from Julia Baird that at one point Sales was keen to marry him.[7]

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Sales, Leigh. On Doubt, p. 8. Hachette Australia. Kindle Edition.

[2] Sales: “What would be your main tip for somebody starting out in journalism, for that person crying in the toilet every second day because it’s overwhelming?” (p87)

[3] “Ms. Lewinsky did perform oral sex on him.⁽²⁰⁹⁾ Afterward, she and the President moved to the Oval Office and talked. According to Ms. Lewinsky: “[H]e was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, some time.”⁽²¹⁰⁾

[4] The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen quotes $2.5m as fact.

[5] When I lodged a complaint last month against the sexism of Media Watch’s Paul Barry referring to Peta Credlin with the phrase “handbags at six paces”, I got this response (email August 25) from Investigations Officer “James” at the ABC Ombudsman depot:

“I cannot agree with you that the phrase you complained about is sexist and demeaning. It is on old-fashioned, rarely used reference to a ‘minor disagreement’ – see for example Handbags at 6 paces – Idioms by The Free Dictionary.”

Hence my fellow journos can feel free to use the handbag phrase in the context of Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney’s denial of the 26-page Uluru Statement, or ABC chair Ita Buttrose defending her ABC against parliamentarians.

[6] The ABC’s then-managing director, Michelle Guthrie, rashly told Senate Estimates in 2017 that her top presenter – female – earned about an eighth of the BBC’s top presenter (male) on $A3.7m, which suggests $A460,000.

[7] From the context, I’d say Sales is joking.