Real heroes and media heroes

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a turbulent time in Australia’s history with Vietnam seen as a controversial war (1962-72) and a conservative society undergoing dramatic change. It was simply un-cool to serve in uniform. Popular films and rock songs reflect this mood:

In 1971 the controversial US movie Dirty Harry, actor Clint Eastwood plays an unorthodox police officer pursuing a psychotic killer, Scorpio, who wears Army boots, a peace badge as a belt buckle and is a trained sniper. The inference, though never spelt out in the film, is that Scorpio is a Vietnam Veteran who enjoys killing.

Australian rock band Cold Chisel, fronted by Jimmy Barnes, had a massive hit in 1978 with a song titled “Khe Sanh”, about an Australian Vietnam Veteran, ignored and disillusioned:

How there were no V-day heroes in 1973
How we sailed into Sydney Harbour
Saw an old friend but couldn't kiss her

However, by 1985 the mood had changed. Barnes’ solo smash hit “Working Class Man” has a Vietnam Veteran as a man of strength:

He believes in God and Elvis
he gets out when he can
he did his time in Vietnam
still mad at Uncle Sam
he's a simple man
with a heart of gold
in a complicated land
oh he's a working class man

In the late 1970s, a clever newsman Gerald Stone, a former US Army artillery officer and famous war reporter in his own right, probably sensed an Australian society needing strong masculine heroes to fill the void with a “media tough guy”. Stone recruited three journalists, Ray Martin, Ian Leslie and George Negus.

As canny Mark Day, a newspaperman of the old school, observed:

I guess we can blame Gerald Stone and George Negus for the emergence of the celebrity journalist - at least in Australia.

Stone was executive producer of the Nine (TV network) clone of CBS’s “60 Minutes” when it launched here in 1979 with the premise that the reporter was the story.

George, along with Ray Martin and Ian Leslie were sent into war zones, deep jungles, and dark places in search of ripper yarns, and the cameras tracked them tracking down the story.

George, coat slung over his shoulder, embraced this role with a particular gusto, adding his idiosyncratic commentary into which he wove his personal beliefs.

It wasn’t long before George was a bigger celeb than any of the news makers he pursued, even after being savaged by the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

George Negus was dubbed the Balmain Cowboy after a tough working class inner Sydney suburb because of his macho image: he was a school teacher who dabbled in journalism and later became a press secretary to a politician.

Rival Australian television networks, in a game of one-upmanship, have inadvertently brought the notion of the warrior-as-reporter to the surface. A famous case involved veteran Nine Network reporter Jim Waley, wearing a the flak jacket in Iraq in 2004 as opposed to his competitor Adrian Brown of the Seven Network who did not. Both were just metres away from each other in Baghdad.

Channels Seven and Nine were at each other’s throats over the Holding rescue story, both claiming that their news helicopter found him first.