The Director's Chair: Leigh Sales on journalism, the United States and not interviewing Trump

In the first episode of this new series of The Director’s Chair, the Lowy Institute’s Executive Director Michael Fullilove is joined by respected Australian journalist Leigh Sales.

They discuss Leigh’s experience as a foreign correspondent in Washington, the shifts in American society that led to the rise of Donald Trump, why she still believes that journalists should be impartial — and she shares her reading and viewing recommendations.

Leigh Sales is host of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Australian Story. She is a former host of the national broadcaster’s flagship current affairs program, 7.30, served as the ABC’s chief Washington correspondent and is the host of her own successful podcast called Chat 10 Looks 3.

The Director’s Chair is a podcast by the Lowy Institute:
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/directorschair

Twitter:
@LowyInstitute
@mfullilove

Host: Michael Fullilove
Producers: Josh Goding and Andrew Griffits
Research: David Vallance

 

Past Director's Chair episodes here.

 

Michael Fullilove 
Hello, Michael Fullilove here. In this episode of The Director's Chair, we're speaking with the ABC’s Leigh Sales about journalism, the United States and why we just can't look away from Donald Trump.

Leigh Sales
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 counterintuitive, 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 organizations and 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.

Michael Fullilove 
Welcome to the first episode of a new season of a new season of The Director’s Chair, a Lowy Institute podcast. My name is Michael Fullilove and I’m the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute. On The Director’s Chair I sit down with political leaders, policy makers 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 and 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 Leigh Sales.

Leigh 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 Lateline, host of 7:30 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. Leigh, thank you for coming into Bligh Street today to join me on The Director's Chair.

Leigh Sales
How dare you malign my podcast in your opening remarks.

Michael Fullilove
Well, I'm actually hoping to borrow some of your podcast listeners for my little podcast so-

Leigh Sales
Oh, it becomes clear why I've been invited to join the other luminaries who've appeared on this.

Michael Fullilove 
Yeah. So, Leigh 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 and 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 a rando. But, in fact you were incredibly generous and you had me to come to stay with you. So, ever since then we've been mates.

Leigh Sales
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 can 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 kind of banked on that you must be okay, because of our mutual friend and then we got on like a house on fire.

Michael Fullilove 
Alright, now 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 leadup to the invasion of Iraq. So, tell us about your memories of that, sort of, feverish time in American history.

Leigh Sales
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'd applied for the job before 9/11. So 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, you know, imminent and happening and so forth.

So, it was very intense and then and very rapidly after I got there of course, the war in Afghanistan began. But also, then attention turned fairly rapidly to Iraq and was the Bush Administration going to invade Iraq? So, for about a quarter I would say, of the first year that I was there in 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 a very interesting, exciting time to be a US correspondent.

Michael Fullilove
And, you mentioned the build-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.  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 mistake 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 and emboldened Iran.

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove
I don't know, it seems to me that it's one of those real discontinuities in history where the world really changed.

Leigh Sales
One hundred percent, 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 polarisation 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, 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 in my reporting is, what does this have to do with 911? So I could understand Afghanistan because of the links to Al-Qaeda but I found it hard to understand how Iraq actually fit with that.

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 is 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 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, yeah actually he might be right about that and 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.

Michael Fullilove
I agree that I age 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.

Leigh Sales
It was, yeah.

Michael Fullilove 
I remember living through this myself because I was just starting a career as a think tanker. And unlike you, I wasn't reporting it I had to sort of start to make judgments about some of these issues.

Leigh Sales
And you wrote a piece I recall for the International Herald Tribune about this.

Michael Fullilove
Yeah exactly, 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 eloquence of Tony Blair it just felt like if you squinted your eyes this business of invading and occupying an Arab country wouldn't end well.

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 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.

Leigh Sales
John Kerry's famous line in the 2004 election: “Well I supported the war before I voted against it”. You know 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 you know, remember the French, the cheese eating surrender monkeys, whatever they were referred to.

Michael Fullilove
Freedom fries.

Leigh Sales
Freedom fries. It took quite a lot to question it because you were pretty much seen as a traitor 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 against us. I think that was even Bush's actual framing 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 early days, they didn't wind them back and they didn't pull them back and a lot of it was done in secrecy. So over time we learnt that there had 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 dared question you were accused of being a terrorist sympathizer.

Michael Fullilove
And also at the international level, I mean when we look back on it the invasion of Iraq, 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 in defence of Ukraine against Russia I get lots of people on social media saying ‘but your country supported 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 the order I think is in the interests of the West- in the interests of the strong as well as the weak.
Let me let me stay on the United States. You covered… you travelled around the United States a lot, you did everything from the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina. So all the really exciting uplifting stories.

Leigh Sales
And then the Academy Awards and all the kind of American fluff that you associate with that posting as well.

Michael Fullilove 
Okay, well we can talk about the Academy Award another time but when you were getting out into the Rust Belt, into the suburbs, into the rural areas… tell us did you start to see the seeds of the dissatisfaction, the decline in working conditions that would lead members of the white working class over time to go further and further to the right and end up in the camp MAGA.

Leigh Sales
One hundred percent. And it’s actually been one of the… because I love America and I've found it a sad thing to watch to go ‘God this was so obvious that this was where this was going’. And that people were being left behind and that there was discontent brewing 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 some of what was going on, free trade and so forth and 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 counterintuitive because obviously I was learning more all the time. But, you just realize 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 watched and 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, 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' 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 ‘we're 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 almost two decades, I've been back obviously, but I do wonder whether there's still that strong sense of 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, 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 it seems like possibly the most boring US president election going back to maybe the 1960s.

Michael Fullilove
Boring is not necessarily bad.

Leigh Sales
Exactly, but that was fascinating because we're going to like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, classic swing states. Particularly I remember being in Ohio and talking to a guy who was a union organizer and it was a classic town where you know Granddad had worked in the local industry, Dad had worked there, they'd had good jobs, the family's kind of affluence had improved all the time. Then suddenly, 2004 election things were starting to bite with the economy. Also, it was the era of Fanny May and Freddy Mac and you know we will start to discover over time the extent of corporate corruption and so forth.

So, average Americans were starting to find actually life's getting a bit harder and we were told that this free trade stuff would actually improve our lives. But turns out now, 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 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 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 Trump's rise.

Michael Fullilove 
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.

Leigh Sales
No, it makes you wish for a boring one, doesn't it?

Michael Fullilove 
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. Basically a very strong foreign policy president, good for Australia in many ways.

Leigh Sales
Which you'd expect because of his length of experience in foreign policy.

Michael Fullilove 
Yeah, all that stuff… great team around him. But, he looks his age. Trump is only, I think four years younger. 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's very hard to look away from Donald Trump. How would you assess both of them as media performers and in particular, why is Trump such good media talent?

Leigh Sales
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 often the way I kind of have had to assess people. And I must admit that even though you know, we would have obviously liked to land Trump, I was relieved to know that we did not land Trump in the era in which I was hosting 7:30 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 kinds 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 betrayed in his face, like ‘Huh? What? What are you talking about?’

Michael Fullilove 
He was a bit of a ham in that interview actually.

Leigh Sales
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, 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… 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 kinds of people extremely difficult to interview because of the fact that, as I said before, I'm someone who relies on reason and logic and facts. 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 Bob Katter, or someone like that, who's more Trumpy in their vibe, I find them very difficult. It's like swatting a fly, the flight landed here and you kind of sweat but then the flies buzzed off over here. And so, I find it extremely difficult to have a productive interview with someone of that nature.

And so, 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 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 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 doing it tough.

I'm reminded as well, my late father, who once said something to me about Kevin Rudd. He said, 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 liked 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.

Michael Fullilove
We're talking about interviews, you said you don't like those interviews where you're swatting, where you're swatting a fly, what are the interviews you really enjoy then?

Leigh Sales
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 Lateline. 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 Micklethwait, who used to edit The Economist, Bloomberg now, was one of my favourites. Simon Sharma. You know, obviously, Christopher Hitchens, Matthew Parris. These guys who’ve had those kinds of topflight British educations, where they can illustrate things using history, pop culture, regular culture, current events, and so they're just gigantically engaging. And so those are the kinds 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.

Michael Fullilove 
Alright, and when you sit back and think about all these great and good people that you interviewed? What sort of conclusions do you draw in general? I mean, these are extremely powerful, influential people. I mean, in general, when they entered the room did the temperature change? Did you feel that they were sort of Supermen and Superwomen? Or did you often sit there thinking, actually, if I didn't know that this person was a foreign minister or president, I wouldn't have guessed it.

Leigh Sales
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 it's warranted or not. 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 Hillary 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 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 make 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. Nothing she'd ever been in 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. Everyone in the room within about one minute fell in love with her as like she just radiated light. And she… I thought to myself, I just saw why you're a movie star. Like you have got so much charisma and it's just oozing 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 he was impossible to make small talk with and I realised 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. And then other people you know, Hillary Clinton is quite chatty. David Cameron, Tony Blair, that polite Britishness. Boris Johnson, as you'd expect, I mean, who you've also met, kind of shambolic and chummy. You know, all of that. What you see is what you get sometimes, you know, with these people too.

Michael Fullilove
One of the biggest interviews we did recently was with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. We did that in October 2022.

Leigh Sales
And how did you find him? I haven't done him.

Michael Fullilove 
Well, first of all, going into it I had enormous respect for Zelenskyy’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.

Leigh Sales
I thought he'd be living in exile in an apartment in Paris, for sure. So full props to the guy.

Michael Fullilove
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 Zelenskyy came on. We had a big screen, he was coming from zoom- via zoom from, from the presidential palace in Kyiv. We're having this conversation and 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 Lowy lecture.

Leigh Sales
Oh, so he'd done his homework.

Michael Fullilove 
He had done his homework. And afterwards, I said, to my colleagues, did we give him that Merkel, quote? Because it was a perfect Merkel quote, was something she'd said about Russia. And we hadn't given it to them. And what I realised was that even though they had missiles falling around their heads, someone in a bunker in Kyiv is spending two hours on the Lowy 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 tradecraft that you don't get often from the White House, or the Élysée Palace or the Lodge. But here you're getting it from a wartime leader who's making life and death decisions every single hour.

Leigh Sales
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 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, Leigh, it's so nice to see you again. Now, tell me. How's your baby? I hear having a baby. And I was just imagining it in the lift on the way down that someone probably said to her this is Leigh Sales. You met her in Melbourne three years ago. She's had a baby. Give it a quick sort of…

Michael Fullilove
It’s the body person from Veep.

Leigh Sales
Exactly. That's right. Gary, quickly in the ear giving me the information. But yeah, that's impressive the homework being done like that.

Michael Fullilove 
Yeah. All right. Let me ask you one more question about foreign correspondents. Obviously, we can get news now from anywhere in the world via the internet. You can tap the New York Times or The Washington Post, or the Jakarta Post or whatever it is. And yet still, 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. 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 corro’s on the beat?

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove
What are the limitations to that foreign correspondents operate under?

Leigh Sales
Okay, I think it's important, particularly in locations with which Australia has, you know, important links or interests, right. So United States, UK, in our own region, and so forth. 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 AUKUS. If you read, say the New York Times coverage of AUKUS, 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 kinds of issues, that the limitations are, firstly, correspondents who stay in 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 Currie and Laura Tingle and so forth.

Michael Fullilove 
You wouldn't get a seat in the White House press room?

Leigh Sales
No, 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. BBC had a hard time getting access.

Michael Fullilove 
Yeah.

Leigh Sales
So if the BBC is not getting a look in, you know, ABC really kind of struggling. So that was a tricky thing to try to find ways to get around that. In fact, something I used to do actually, being here at 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.

Michael Fullilove 
We're happy to be of service Leigh.

Leigh Sales
I’m glad.

Michael Fullilove 
Let me come from overseas back to Australia and ask you a question about how the Australian media is doing. You gave the Andrew Olle lecture last year, and you stuck your neck out and you made some strong arguments. And one of them was that you were critical of some of your journalistic colleagues who were who was starting to behave as much like activists as they were, like journalists. So tell us a bit about that argument.

Leigh Sales
So I just think that there is an increasing trend towards opinion creeping into journalism across media organisations. And 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. 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 going to, 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, this argument towards I guess, incorporating your lived experience into your work.

Having a diversity of lived experience is super important in a newsroom, because that helps you see stories that other people might not spot. 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's a question in journalism about whether you should park your opinions at the door. But nonetheless, that's where the debate is

Michael Fullilove
How does that link to social media because I noticed you've kind of disengaged over the years from social media. You were a big user of Twitter when it started, and then you sort of became a bit more distant? And I think you jumped off it a couple of years ago.

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove 
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.

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove 
To disclose your opinions and to reach judgments and to broadcast judgement.

Leigh Sales
I think the other thing people find hard to do is not to react to people. Like say, someone says something that's inflammatory to you about a report you've done or 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 friend, the late Mark Colvin, who was your friend as well, we used to talk about this a lot, because he was a very active Twitter user too. And so 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 behaviour, because it influences, as well, the way people think of you, your authority and so forth.

Mark was fantastic. What I loved about Twitter in the early days was what Mark was doing with it, which was, he read so widely that he posts 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 yeah, I jumped off it. But 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, very careful about that. And also, just to keep in mind, like, who do you think needs to hear your opinion? Who do you think cares? I just find that tricky sometimes to like, why do you think we need hot take 151 on you know, X Y Z story? It's just yeah… go and do some stories.

Michael Fullilove 
So now that you're not a young Foreign Correspondent in Washington, but you're sort of éminence grise 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?

Leigh Sales
A bit of both. I'm super cautious as well about… I never want to be one of those people's whose like “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. Certainly, obviously, the gender balance has improved gigantically over the time, you know, that I've worked in newsrooms is much, much more, you know, recognition of that. And just general understanding too, of the importance of diversity in newsrooms.

I'd like to see more class diversity and people understanding the need that… a lot of people come into it now, who've 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 a copy girl, and then work their way up. And that means you got a different cohort of people through work and people that came from working class backgrounds, rather than, you know, mums a doctor, dads a lawyer and I went to an elite Sydney private school.

Michael Fullilove 
Ideological diversity as well?

Leigh Sales
Yeah. And I think that partly comes from the economic diversity, 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. And then I think… so there's some positives in that kind of sense. 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. It could be going out live to the other side of the world.

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 this 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 other cables into your phone into the phone jack, and then you would hear that 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 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 on our digital recorders into the laptop and it's back. No need to be anywhere near a phone line. And then you think that sounds primitive now me explaining that compared to what we can actually do now.

I mean, I was broadcasting out of my own bedroom alone during COVID for some episodes of 7.30.

Michael Fullilove 
Also in the think tank world, what you say reminds me of something Owen Harries, a mutual friend of ours, once told me. Which was that, when he was first writing for Foreign Affairs, he was an academic at the University of New South Wales. And he would type this article, send it to New York and like three months later, he'd get a letter saying, Professor Harries we've decided to publish your article. Whereas now, as professionals who interact with the media, we can have constant discussions and emails you can be publishing things. It makes it much more feasible to be to be an international analyst while you're living in Australia.

Leigh Sales
Or you're producing your own content. So say, for example, in the early years of the Lowy Institute to my great benefit, when you had great people coming through, you'd ring me go, well David Petraeus is coming do you want to interview him on 7.30? Or whatever. Boris Johnson here, do you want him for 7.30? 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 democratisation of the media, and they're not, 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, you know, like 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 fine.

Michael Fullilove 
Alright. Let me finish with a couple of final questions. First of all, given this as an international podcast, I know you love watching world affairs. 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?

Leigh Sales
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 most of the New York Times ones about American politics, and I don't listen all the time, but I'll tend to think oh, okay, well its Super Tuesday, so I’ll whack that on 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, if I could only read one thing every day, I'd go to the Atlantic. I've always read the Economist. They would be the things that I mostly go to. Oh, the BBC website I glance at, CNN 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 you they'd rattle through, I read The Times, and we'll say my bias is just towards the American publications.

Michael Fullilove 
And what about fiction and TV and movies and stuff like that about politics and foreign policy and spooks?

Leigh Sales
I mean, I love all of that stuff. If 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. 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?

Michael Fullilove 
No.

Leigh Sales
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, and it's about these two Russian agents living in deep cover in suburban Washington. It was really fantastic too.

Michael Fullilove 
I take your recommendations with a handful of salt to be honest.

Leigh Sales
Yeah, they’re my two favourites of recent times I'd say. I just did watch actually, Scoop which is the thing about news night securing the interview with Prince Andrew.

Michael Fullilove 
Yeah, where the producer is the star, not the host.

Leigh Sales
The producers always the real star. 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 swanning around in the office with a designer dog the entire time which they portray Emily Maitlis as doing. Which, I asked a mate 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 liberties there. But just the kind of… 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 private secretary… that was all very, very true to what it's what it's really like.

Michael Fullilove 
Well, just to do the other side of the Sales Fullilove book club. I've been recommending to you for many years Slow Horses, and you've ignored that recommendation.

Leigh Sales
Yeah I have, I know.

Michael Fullilove
Both the books and the TV show are brilliant. But the other one… as you know, I'm writing a book on JFK at the moment. And a couple of years ago, Fred Logevall, who's a historian at Harvard, wrote this absolutely magnificent biography, just called JFK Volume 1, 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 him for. So, I recommend that.

Leigh Sales
See, I find this fascinating because an admirer, you know, that because you also did an FDR book, these these giant figures, you sometimes feel like… Oh, I should say ‘one’ sometimes feels like, is there possibly anything more to say about JFK or about FDR? And what's kind of exhilarating is when someone right to take where you go. Oh God! That's fantastic. I hadn't thought about like… remember my friend Julia Baird writing a book about Queen Victoria. I was just thinking, what new can there possibly be to add on this person? But there is.

Michael Fullilove 
And I also find that it's such an effort as you know, as you've written many books, it's such a big effort, you have to have a person that you find appealing and attractive, you have to have a big, big story.

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove 
And again, to go back to Owen Harries, who was a mentor of mine. I remember Allan once giving me some advice. And that is, Michael, if you're ever going swimming, swim in the deep waters, not in the shallows.

Leigh Sales
Yeah.

Michael Fullilove 
And so it's better to take on a huge topic or a big figure, like a very important president and try to come at that from a new angle rather than taking some sort of obscure figure on the margins.

Leigh Sales
Well because you're going to be living with them for a long time. 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, oh… I hope they're going to sustain it, or this is a bit interesting, but I'm not sure about the whole thing. You’re going to struggle. So, it's good advice, unsurprisingly, from the great Owen Harries.

Michael Fullilove 
Leigh 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 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.

Leigh Sales
I put some makeup on, I made an effort to look nice for you. I've done my homework like Zelenskyy.

Michael Fullilove 
So, thank you very much for joining us for this episode of The Director's Chair.

Leigh Sales
Thank you very much for inviting me.