![]() Packer agreed to pay on the condition that he would come as well. In 1975 Stone and camera operator Brian Peters were offered the chance to board a medical supply ship bound for strife-torn East Timor, but the organisers needed $6000 to fund the mission. ![]() The experiment was a disaster and Stone was shifted sideways. His belief was that Australians were ready for a broader national view than the parochial diet of crime and road accidents. But, shortly before he started at Nine, Packer died, leaving his inexperienced 36-year-old son, Kerry, in charge of a network at an all-time low, trailing Seven and Ten.Īppointed News Director, Stone launched the short-lived “National” News Bulletin co-hosted out of Sydney and Melbourne. Tired of the stultifying bureaucracy and censorship at the ABC, Stone was ready for a change. Boring Australia now looked like a very attractive place to raise a young family.Īfter his spells with the Daily Mirror and the ABC, Stone was hired by Frank Packer to co-host Federal File alongside veteran political journalist Alan Reid. But by 1960, when he joined United Press International’s United Nations bureau, Stone had become deeply alarmed by the military madness and McCarthyism gripping the United States. Growing up in the mid-west, Stone thought Australia was the “least newsworthy country on earth”. ![]() It was not the career path the young Gerald Stone had contemplated when he started work as a copyboy on the New York Times in 1957. If you had Gerald’s support you could go to war.” He had a ferocious temper but the loyalty was amazing. He would excuse anything except inaccuracy and unethical behaviour. ![]() He was always clearly commercial with a special skill for a colourful phrase or headline, but always with real class. Martin says there are insufficient superlatives to describe Stone’s impact on television journalism: “Gerald was light years ahead of all of us in his instincts for a good story and the best way to present it. But by breaking big national and international stories, the program steadily improved to become a ratings monster and turned respected journalists including Jana Wendt, Richard Carleton, Jeff McMullin, Jennifer Byrne and Mike Munro into television stars. The first episode was universally canned as an expensive flop. “With masterful timing, he suddenly switched from berating me to breaking the news I had just been given the most coveted job in television journalism, declaring: ‘ I don’t give a fuck what it takes. ![]() I was confronted by every weakness in such minute detail I began to think I was about to be fired,” Stone says. “He called me into his office and started reminding me how badly I had let him down over the years. In his book Say it with Feeling, Stone says he still has no idea why Kerry Packer chose him to launch the Australian version of 60 Minutes in 1978. It was this journalistic pedigree and his commitment to accuracy and ethics - together with hitherto unheard-of salary packages - that helped Stone recruit respected reporters Ray Martin, Ian Leslie and George Negus to the inaugural 60 Minutes. Working for the Daily Mirror in the 1960s he covered the Freedom Rides led by Charles Perkins, scored a major scoop in the scandalous and baffling Bogle-Chandler murders, covered Royal tours and was embedded with Australian troops in Vietnam during their first clash with the Viet Cong.Ī year later he published his book War without Honour and in 1967 joined the ABC’s This Day Tonight delivering ground-breaking television reports on “draft dodgers”, the plight of sex workers, police corruption and the shame of Australia’s “invisible poor”. While best known in Australia as the “Godfather of 60 Minutes”, Gerald Stone had carved out a significant reporting career in the United States and Sydney before his surprise appointment as founding producer of the Nine Network’s flagship current affairs program. Biography Gerald Stone By DAVID BROADBENT ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |