Hugh Riminton: journalism saved me from alcohol and depression

The veteran foreign correspondent says journalism saved him from alcohol and depression.

Veteran journalist Hugh Riminton. Picture: John Appleyard

He loved working at CNN, but for Hugh Riminton, the network was brutal and failed to learn lessons from the treatment of soldiers in war zones.

The foreign correspondent, who covered the Iraq war for the Nine Network and is now a news presenter for Ten, said the cable network, one of the biggest employers of journalists globally, was a great institution but “brutal beyond belief” with its staff, which included Australian correspondents Stan Grant and Michael Ware.

“I loved working with CNN — it was an enormous privilege. I have fantastic friendships to this day with the people I worked with. But I do think they’re just brutal beyond belief in the way they run this staff,” Riminton told The Australian.

“They need to grow up a bit at CNN. A lot of the people who are making these decisions ... have never been in the field, you know their life as you sit in Atlanta and make these decisions about people.

“Plenty of military forces have come to understand that you can’t leave people under fire forever without giving them a chance to regroup. Even back in the first world war they’d rotate people out of the trenches.”

The Australian approached CNN in Hong Kong for a response. It declined to comment.

Riminton has written a book about his experiences as a foreign correspondent, Minefields, detailing his time in London for the Nine Network, covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indian Ocean tsunami, as well as, closer to home, the Port Arthur massacre and Thredbo landslide.

A young Hugh Riminton reports from the world’s troublespots.

He reveals that he was a teenage alcoholic growing up in New Zealand and attempted to take his own life when he was 15 and battling depression.

“I was very much a lost teenager. I was drinking before going to school. I was depressed, I think quite severely suicidally depressed, dangerously depressed and I had other mental health manifestations.”

“And the reason I put it in the book was I do feel that there’s a duty — to some other 15 year old who might be out there, including my own kids I suppose — to say to them ‘Look, you may be feeling a little lost at some stage, but don’t underestimate how great your life might be. Don’t do anything rash’.”

Journalism proved his salvation but also nearly burned him out and cost him two marriages, one to ABC presenter Kumi ­Taguchi.

He said he was saved from his teenage woes by his career.

“Journalism got me in its thrall,” Riminton says from a table and chairs he has set up on the edge of the Ten news set in its Sydney base of Pyrmont. I’m the only journalist in the world who’s been saved from alcoholism by journalism. I’ve seen plenty go round the other way.” After starting out in regional radio in New Zealand, Riminton’s career took him to radio in Perth, the Derryn Hinch TV program in Melbourne, National Nine News in Melbourne, then as a foreign correspondent for the network based in London. He hosted Nightline for Nine before joining CNN in Hong Kong and returning to Australian to join the Parliament House bureau in Canberra for the Ten Network, where he is now a newsreader.

The book details Riminton’s brushes with death on the road, including walking into a field of crops in Central Somalia to do a piece to camera only to realise it was a minefield, and being saved from being necklaced in South Africa by the hated security forces of the apartheid regime.

“I believe journalists should risk their lives to report on people risking their lives,” he maintains.

Is that brave or just crazy brave? “No, I think that’s entirely honourable and proper. You’ve got people living on the ground, Iraqis or Afghans or whatever, they’re risking their lives every day. You can’t report that from a comfy chair somewhere safe. It’s improper.”

It still rankles with him that Channel Nine pulled him and a crew out of Baghdad at the last minute. “They lost their nerve and I felt that it was an appalling decision, a really painfully wrong decision.

“But if you are there to do that job it’s what you want to do. You’ve been prepared for it. You trained for it. You’ve got the resources to do it. You should do it. And CNN has that attitude. And that’s what I liked about it.”

Riminton says the time he spent at CNN from 2005 to 2009, based in Hong Kong, was the “purest pleasure”.

But he maintains that CNN “burned people out and they did it unnecessarily.

“And I really feel that that’s partly a complaint I suppose from me, because they didn’t allow me to rest at all.

“I was both anchoring a show which started at 4 o’clock in the morning and being sent around the world, and say you flew in at midnight and then the other producers of the show would expect you on the newsdesk at 4am.

“My real anger about that — it’s not about me, it’s about Michael Ware, who is the great Australian correspondent. He was with Time magazine and CNN hired him in Iraq.

“Michael is one of the greatest Australian journalists of all time. He deserves absolutely to be in the pantheon. And he is super. And an unbelievably courageous reporter.

“And they knew they had gold with Michael Ware and they used him and they used him.

“He spent six years, essentially constantly in a war zone. Now Special Forces soldiers aren’t asked to do that.

“But they kept it on him until his mental health completely collapsed. He was begging to be taken out. And I think they destroyed his mental health. He’s better now. But it’s taken a long time of recovery for Michael. And I really feel some anger against CNN on his behalf.

“And Stan Grant also suffered a breakdown. He’s written about that.

“He ascribes it to the weight of his understanding of the terrible things that had happened to Aborigines and that that was weighing on him and that that led to his breakdown.

“But I don’t think if you read his book Talk to My Country you can ignore the fact that he was also being worked 20 hours a day, week in, week out.’’

He has spent his entire career in commercial media, including starting out at a music station in Christchurch in New Zealand that employed 13 journalists to report on a town of 300,000 people in New Zealand.

But he accepts that a career such as his is no longer possible in the commercial world, possibly only at public broadcasters.

In the book he details a theory about how to get unpalatable world events such as famine in Africa on to the evening news.

He calls it the “champagne cocktail” theory of war reporting, named after a drink that allows the “highest amount of alcohol the body can take without rejecting it as poison”.

“I started to learn that if I wanted to get my stories of really horrific events told, I couldn’t give people straight shots of vodka. The real harsh reality of it. But there’s no point in softening it down to the point where it’s a light beer. I had to find the right mix.”

The sugar, as he puts it, that allowed him to get those stories on air, were “human stories”.

People? “People.

“They’re getting something which is close as you can possibly deliver to them — the unvarnished truth about circumstances going on in the world.

“So that’s the champagne cocktail theory of reporting news from awful places.”

It is a technique that has seen him witness the full horror of the world, so that we can watch from the comfort of our loungerooms.