ABC host Leigh Sales criticises journalists for being activists and crusaders, blaming it for lack of trust in media

ABC presenter Leigh Sales said the public is ‘losing interest’ in the stories the media is telling, blaming some journalists for being activists and driving their own agendas.

Leigh Sales delivers the 2023 Andrew Olle Lecture in Sydney on Friday.

ABC presenter Leigh Sales said the public is “losing interest” in the stories the media is telling, blaming some journalists for being activists and driving their own agendas.

Delivering the annual Andrew Olle media lecture in Sydney on Friday night, she said she had recently been avoiding the news and claimed too often comments used in reports were “taken out of context and weaponised by ABC haters on Twitter (now X)”.

The former host of ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30 told the audience: “When I took six months of leave last year, stepping out of the news cycle for the first time in 30 years, it gave me time to reflect and that time will help me better understand why exactly the news is at risk of turning me off.”

Speaking to a room largely full of media representatives at Doltone House Hyde Park in Sydney, she said “too often too many journalists at all media organisations are abandoning values espoused”.

“One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders,” she said.

“They enjoy their heroic status of the tribes on social media or their own subscribers.

“At the ABC we ask questions of people in power, but we hold power ourselves and so we should not be afraid to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves too.”

Sales outlined her own journalistic values during her address including “logic, accuracy” and “setting aside your own opinion in reporting, being open minded and non judgmental”.

Sales said during the speech – which she conceded took her months to write – that the “hardest time in my entire career was during Australia’s same-sex marriage debate”.

“I love my LGBTQI friends and how important this issue was to them,” she said.

“I was conflicted between my belief in the necessity of impartial journalism and my belief that my friends deserve the same rights as men.”

Despite Sales’s comments on Friday about objective journalism, in August she instructed staff at the public broadcaster that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a “one-page document” and gave them tactics to quash any arguments contrary to this.

Sales also said during her speech she had been inundated with people contacting her during the Covid-19 pandemic to “thank me for asking politicians and experts whether the harsh lockdowns and border closures, especially deep into 2021 are warranted and proportionate”.

She said she had “disillusionment with the news” due to behaviour by some in the media.

“When I see reporters whose work somehow always lines up on one side of an issue that’s complicated I know I’m seeing activism,” she said.

In June last year Sales stepped down from her role as host of 7.30 after 11 years.

Sales has been hosting the Australian Story program and she had led the ABC’s Newsreader podcast, alongside News Breakfast TV host Lisa Millar, which analysed the drama series each week.

She also recently wrote a book called Storytellers.