Journalist Robert Penfold steps down as US correspondent
Veteran TV journalist Robert Penfold has made the first move towards retirement, stepping down from his job as Nine’s US Bureau Chief after 43 years with the network.
Veteran TV journalist Robert Penfold has made the first move towards retirement, stepping down from his job as Nine’s US Bureau Chief after 43 years with the network.
Penfold, 67, will remain full time in the job until July, when he will take an extended holiday before returning to work on special reports and coverage from Los Angeles.
Nine director of news and current affairs Darren Wick announced the move this morning in an email to staff.
“I leave with many wonderful memories and experiences and I am thankful for the extraordinary opportunities that the job as Nine’s foreign correspondent provided,” Penfold said.
“Not many can tell stories of getting a phone call from the newsroom in Australia asking ‘Can you head out to Windsor Castle to meet the Queen on Wednesday and then on Thursday to Number Ten Downing Street to see Margaret Thatcher?’ They each provided an on-camera message for Australia’s bicentenary. Or being in West Germany when the world celebrated as the Berlin Wall came down.”
Of course Penfold has covered several US Presidential elections, as well as major news events like Hurricane Katrina, and both Gulf Wars.
“I’ll certainly miss the rush to the airport when big news breaks. But it is time to take a breather,” he said. “The job necessarily makes for an unpredictable life and all this can only be achieved with a very understanding partner and my wife Shar has certainly been that, and more, over the last 45 years.
Penfold also served as a correspondent in London. His children, Alexander, Nicholas and Olivia were all born overseas.
“Once a journalist always a journalist, so I am not disappearing altogether. I’ll still be working with Nine on a part-time basis. I am also taking up offers to tutor journalism students here in the U.S. and Australia. I want to tell them about one of the best jobs in the world.”
ROB PENFOLD SHARES HIS LIFE AS NINE’S FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Leaning against the bar of a chic West Hollywood restaurant, the lunchtime Los Angeles crowds barely blink at the handsome stranger with the quiet charm of Cary Grant.
But to any Australian who has watched the television news, he is as familiar and constant as the nightly bulletin itself.
In a tone to do James Bond proud, he introduces himself: Robert Penfold, Nine News.
To his audience, it’s a name synonymous with calm reporting from, at times, a chaotic international frontline.
To his colleagues, that measured delivery and worldy experience has earned him two nicknames: “the elegant veteran” or “the Ambassador.’’
Toiling “from the bottom of the game” in the suburbs of Sydney, to the lead reporting role and managerial position as Nine’s US bureau chief has been no ordinary career climb, his current boss Darren Wick tells NewsCorp Australia in 2015.
“Where he’s been — not just as a journalist but his experience in life — allows him to see a story, put a story in context and write it a certain way. That’s what makes Rob so outstanding and quite special.”
Of course, he is too humble to spruik his TV milestone but it is telling even his network rivals only have good things to say about him.
His former boss, now network news rival, Peter Meakin pays tribute to Penfold as “the ultimate foreign correspondent, a very good foreign correspondent, but he’s not overly impressed by that fact. As the years go by, he just gets better and better.”
It is high praise indeed from Channel 10’s news director who adds: “he’s just a really lovely human being. It’s one of his greatest assets as a journalist — his innate decency just shines through. It’s not just the charm, it’s the fact that he doesn’t over-hype things. He’s very steady, he doesn’t exaggerate, he doesn’t inject too much colour. He’s just very solid and therefore very believable. I can’t think of anybody whose got a bad word to say about him, not that you’re looking for one, but that’s very rare.”
After a newspaper cadetship at Campbelltown’s Macarthur Advertiser, Penfold got his start in television at a station in Tamworth, before rising through the ranks in Nine’s Sydney newsroom — with a cast of “gods” around him.
BLACK AND WHITE (1986)
“These days I get a look of shock from the young reporters when I tell them, even in the 1980s, there were no cell phones, no mobiles. We had a pager. When I got off the plane one time in New York, my pager went crazy. So I had to find a pay phone and they told me I had to go straight to Florida because the Space Shuttle [Challenger] had just blown up.”
FAMILY LIFE (1987)
“It takes a very tolerant family and a loving and adventurous wife to embrace this job. Shar, my wife, loved the idea. Her mother and mine were both appalled at the idea of her coming here while she was pregnant and she just said, ‘that’s all right, I’ll have the baby in America and he can be the President.’ Then they thought she was crazy again when we had a 17-month-old (Alexander) and she was pregnant again and they said, ‘would you go to London?’ She said yes again. We had our second baby soon after we arrived. Our third baby Olivia was also born in London. The second baby, Nick, his birth had a story to it.
I was the new reporter in town and didn’t want to miss a single story. She was very pregnant and we got news that Robert Trimboli, the drug mafia boss, was found dead of a heart attack in Spain. So we all went tearing down there to cover the story and again, I got a phone call in the middle of the night and it’s Shar saying, ‘Rob, I don’t want you to panic but I’m in labour.’ I tore straight out to the airport and said I needed the first flight to London but the first didn’t leave until midday. Then it stopped over in Barcelona, so I called again and said, ‘how are things going?’ and she said, ‘have a listen’ and I could hear the baby crying. Then I just burst into tears and said I was sorry, and she said: ‘that’s okay, we can still be friends.’ (Former Nine CEO) David Leckie sent us a dozen bottles of champagne.”
NORTHERN IRELAND ATTACKS (1988)
“We were up in Northern Ireland. It was nasty up there. At the time, the British SAS had killed three IRA people. Their bodies were taken back and they were allowed to be given an IRA funeral and the British stayed away. We all went to the funeral and halfway through, a Protestant got in the middle of them all and started shooting, throwing handmade hand grenades at (Sinn Fein leader) Gerry Adams. Of course, we were right up the front with Gerry Adams, so all the explosions were going off. You don’t like these things to happen, but if they do while you’re there, you want to have the camera man rolling.”
FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL (1989)
“I got a phone call in (a Berlin) hotel room at two o’clock in the morning. It was the Sydney newsroom saying, ‘wow, isn’t it amazing what’s going on there?’ and ever the good reporter I just agreed with them and said, ‘yeah, what are you seeing?’ I’d been asleep and had no idea what the hell was going on but they’d been watching CNN. ‘To think you’re there when they’re tearing down the Berlin Wall …’ and I pulled back the curtain in my hotel room, because we were staying near it, and there were people running everywhere and all this activity. I just said, ‘yeah, it’s incredible, we’re onto it now.’ Then I rang around the other rooms, woke up the crew and said, ‘there’s a big story happening out there, let’s get out there fast.’”
BALKAN CONFLICT (1991)
“We were in Slovenia, when the war broke out between the Yugoslavs and the Slovenians. We drove down to the location where all the Yugoslav troops were wounded and held up. We got in the situation where a young lieutenant, who spoke good English, came up and said, ‘is that your car?’ and we said, ‘yeah’ because we were there filming the tanks and the wounded people. He said to us, ‘we want you to take my men to hospital because I cannot take them out myself.’ and we said, ‘well, we’re reporters …’ but he pulled his gun and said, ‘I don’t want to threaten you, but I will if you don’t take them.’
The BBC were there as well and forced to do the same. He brought over a wounded man, whose arm was shot up and his head was bandaged. The next time I looked around, he was sitting in our car, so we got in and drove away. We were driving out of one area into another (war zone) with an enemy soldier in the back of our car in military fatigues with armed security guards everywhere. When we eventually got to a hospital, I was holding a white cloth out the window just to let them know we were all okay. These days, you would probably get shot, they are so trigger happy.”
US GUN VIOLENCE
“When I came back to the US the second time, with children who were only 7, 9 and 10, within a few months the one thing I realised that I had failed to them was they if they see a gun in a house, anywhere, they had to just move away from it. I had to do a school shooting soon after getting there and when I started looking into it, I found out there’s at least one child a day who dies by accidental shooting. That’s a warning you never have to tell your children in Australia. It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but they won’t change the gun laws.”
GULF WAR (2003)
“After September 11, which changed the face of America, (camera man) Rich (Moran) and I went back to Iraq and at that stage, within a day of us being there we were hit by a mortar attack. We were up at a fort in northern Iraq, near Mosul, and we were standing doing a piece to camera and all of a sudden, mortars started exploding all around us.
We dived on the floor and we had this security guy with us, who took us downstairs and hunkered down. All the young trainees, who the Aussie (forces) were training, did everything they weren’t supposed to do … ran out to have a look and were all hit by mortar explosions. We had this story right in front of us, of the Australian medics fixing all these Iraqis who had been injured. That was a close call.”
HURRICANE KATRINA (2005)
“We knew the hurricane was coming, so we flew to Birmingham and then we drove towards New Orleans and all of a sudden the cops said to us, ‘you’re crazy, you can’t go in there.’ So we went over to the east a little. The hurricane came in and the hotel we were in, in Baton Rouge, was flooded. We drove in the next day and found the devastation just on the outskirts. Within in a day or two, we’d worked our way in and found a whole group of Australians who had been trapped in there. Luckily, I had a cell phone and they were all able to ring their mums and dads and let them know they were all okay. Some of them we had to put in our car and drive them out to safety.”
HOLLYWOOD LIFE
“My children went to school in Los Angeles, at Brentwood. One of Olivia’s good friends was Lorraine Nicholson, Jack’s daughter. When we would go to the school play, I’d have Jack sitting in front of me, Arnold Schwarzenegger behind me. At the annual fundraiser, it was $20 a ticket for this concert but they didn’t want too many people to know about it. On the night, we turned up and the line-up was parents of some of the children there: Jackson Browne was the warm-up act and headlining the show was Crosby, Stills and Nash. At the graduation, Schwarzenegger gave a speech and when Lorraine was called up on stage to get her diploma, Jack raced up and shouted out ‘yahoo!’ and gave her a big kiss. Now if I had done that for Olivia, I would have been arrested.”
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