The Top Of The Morning
The Age
Thursday September 6, 2007
THE Prime Minister was late. The man who wanted his job was slow to leave the AM studios. "I had to usher Mark Latham out of the studio," says Tony Eastley, weekday presenter of the current affairs program that this week marks its 40th year.
"The two of them met right outside the door when that testosterone-fuelled handshake appeared and it marked a real change in the campaign."Now the famously tense encounter in the lead-up to the last Federal election is recalled in a photograph that has pride of place outside the studios at the ABC's head offices in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo.Though John Howard recently praised Sydney's 2UE radio host John Laws and said talkback radio had a unique place in Australian life, Eastley says AM has a bigger audience on more than 60 ABC programs. He's been travelling interstate, recently visited Broome and Derby and broadcast from an isolated WA roadhouse. "There was a big, hairy truck driver sitting at the table next to me. He scowled over at me as he hunched over his bacon and eggs. I thought, 'Oh, God, what have I done wrong?' ""Not a bad program yesterday," Eastley mimics the gruff approval.AM seeks to set the day's news agenda with reports and analysis from Australia and overseas. Peter Cave, the national broadcaster's foreign editor, was AM presenter from 1997 to 2001. He remembers Howard's long-time interest in the program."During his rise from backbencher to shadow minister to PM, he was very keen to get on AM and used it very regularly," Cave says. "During the Hawke and Keating years, John Howard was a regular visitor and it wasn't always at the urging of the program."Cave joined the ABC when the first of its 13 presenters, Robert Peach, was still broadcasting. He prized his role as AM presenter above postings to Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Washington. "To be perfectly honest, the reason I embarked on an overseas career (was that) I saw that as a path to become presenter of AM . . . I just think it's the most important job in radio. It was the most influential radio program. If something happened on AM, it was heard around Australia."The first program reported on a circus strongman who was munching razor blades to prepare to eat a car and that Salvador Dali was then riding Himalayan elephants.While Eastley insists its style and character has not changed much, Cave disagrees. "It's certainly taken on a harder edge," he says. "In the early years, executive producer Russell Warner wanted to shy away from politics as much as possible. Now politics is the backbone of the program."He says it first "hit its straps in this regard" in the mid-1970s coverage of the dismissal of the Whitlam government and politicians soon realised "if they could get a story onto AM, they could change the political flavour of the day quite often".Eastley's predecessor, Linda Mottram, was presenter when former communications minister Richard Alston referred allegations of bias in AM's coverage of the war in Iraq to the Australian Broadcasting Authority."I came in at a hot time," Eastley says. "The ship was in good nick. But it just needed a little bit of steadying and we got through it OK."Had the perception of bias gone away? "Ah, look, that's a question you'd have to pose to the political masters in Canberra," Eastley says.AM airs on Radio National at 7.10am and on 774 at 6.05am and 8am every day bar Sunday.
© 2007 The Age