Sarah Ferguson on her worst interview: ‘He was just rude, not interested’

This story is part of the August 4 edition of Sunday Life.See all 15 stories.

Sarah Ferguson and her friend, the late, great journalist Liz Jackson, used to have a pact. It was called the “never confrontingly ugly” agreement, and it was struck between the two prize-winning journalists as a way of ensuring they were just-presentable-enough to appear on camera from a war zone, or a disaster zone, or hanging off the back of a donkey cart, or any other spot the foreign correspondents found themselves in.

“It was all right to look a bit rough and ready if you were bouncing around in the Pakistan floods, as Liz was, but the bar was ‘never confrontingly ugly’,” Ferguson explains.

Chortling, she immediately recounts an occasion where, in her estimation, she failed to clear the bar. It was March 2022, and Ferguson was reporting from the frontlines of Ukraine, under siege from Russia, from a train heading grimly towards Kyiv.

“I look like I’m 130 years old,” she says. “But I’m like, ‘How can I mind this? I am not entitled to mind this! I am going into a war. I am surrounded by suffering.’”

This anecdote is typical Sarah Ferguson. It is self-deprecating, but it is set somewhere far-flung and is directly related to one of her many diverse intellectual interests – in this case, her twin fascinations with European history and war reporting.

Ferguson, 58, is a person who moves towards the action. That’s why she has won five Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, five Logies, two AACTA awards and a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, among others. This year she is up for the Logie for Best News or Public Affairs Presenter.

Ferguson and I are having lunch at Next Door in Sydney’s Double Bay. She is casual in a pink shirt and minimal jewellery. She laughs freely and often – especially when she relays an anecdote from 2008 when legendary former Channel Nine CEO David Gyngell was trying to convince her to stay with the network (Nine is the publisher of this masthead).

He told Ferguson she could have a career like the former CBS correspondent Lara Logan. “Gyngell said, ‘You could be like her, flying into war zones. I mean, you’re not plug-ugly!’” she recounts.

She laughs and then begs, “Please don’t make that the headline. Because Gyngell was such a good guy, and I wasn’t hurt. It wasn’t unkind.”

Ferguson has come from the gym and has sore thigh muscles, so I suggest a restorative array of proteins and carbohydrates – pork, veal and ricotta meatballs, fresh curd with marinated peppers and charred sourdough, ceviche of coronation trout, and tuna carpaccio. We drink sparkling water – Ferguson is on air tonight.

It has been two years since she took over from Leigh Sales as host of the ABC’s 7.30. Ferguson came to the role with great experience as both a veteran Four Corners reporter and maker of long-form series including The Killing Season and Code of Silence. She had already filled in when Sales went on maternity leave in 2014.

It is intimidating interviewing a Gold Walkley winner. I should ask her what she would ask herself, if she were in my position. Instead, I ask her how she extracts something new or surprising from wily, media-savvy subjects.

“It’s all in the preparation,” Ferguson replies. “I want new things, but I also want an experience, so I’m always balancing the nature of the interview against the style of the interview. It’s not just about asking the right questions, it’s about a certain theatre that attends live television.”

Ferguson has received her share of brickbats from all quarters. In 2018, she was criticised for “platforming” the extreme-right provocateur and MAGA muse Steve Bannon when she interviewed him and posted a photograph of the two of them together. And in 2021, Fox News, owned by Murdoch-controlled Fox Corporation, complained to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) about Ferguson’s two-part Four Corners story, Fox and the Big Lie.

More recently, the ABC Ombudsman backed her over an interview with an Israel Defence Forces spokesman that received 52 complaints from viewers.

Ferguson disagrees with the idea that interviewing someone is “platforming” them but says she is “more thoughtful” about the extremes of debate in the post-Trump, post-truth media landscape. “The nightmare scenario for me is the end of any shared zone, the idea that there should only be one source of information,” she says.

Recently freed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tops her list of interview targets for 7.30 and she would also like to get Boris Johnson and Benjamin Netanyahu on the show. Her least favourite interviewee? Actor Ben Affleck “is quite high up on the list” she says. “He was just rude, not interested, going through the motions.”

“I have never met another journalist with the same ability to get to the heart of the matter fast,” Ferguson says of her husband, Tony Jones.Credit: Nicholas Wilson

Ferguson has been married to fellow award-winning journalist Tony Jones since 1992. They met when Ferguson was embarking on her career, working as a freelance producer in Paris. Jones was a foreign correspondent, and when they laid eyes on each other at Charles de Gaulle airport, it was a coup de foudre.

The pair are competitive but also collegiate. Jones helps her prepare for interviews and sometimes even with contact negotiations. But, she says, there are things “Tony thinks I should tell him and I don’t”.

Like what? “About some of the people I speak to,” she says, cryptically.

She laughs about the year she was nominated for four Walkleys. She missed out on the first three, “and the fourth time, the Walkley went to Tony Jones”. She took a minute to herself, then she celebrated with him.

“I have never met another journalist with the same ability to get to the heart of the matter fast,” she says of her husband. “He sees through to the heart of topics with incredible alacrity. It would be very hard for me to do my job without him.”

The couple share three boys – Jones’ son and Ferguson’s stepson, Felix, and the two boys they had together, Cosmo and Lucien. All are adults now, in their 20s and 30s. Felix is living and working in China, and the younger two have just moved back from Canberra, where they were studying, and are living together in Sydney.

“Having children is lovely and being a working mother is so hard – that period of school and all the micro-anxieties that are there for a mother.”

SARAH FERGUSON

“It’s so cute, I want to die! The reward of this period of time… I could honestly just cry into our plates,” she says of her sons.

“Having children is lovely and being a working mother is so hard – that period of school and all the micro-anxieties that are there for a mother. So when they grow up and they’re doing their own washing and they’re okay, they’re good people, it is possible to love them even more.”

Now they are empty nesters, Ferguson and Jones spend more time together at their holiday place on the NSW south coast. “We muck around, we walk a bit, we cycle a bit. It’s so beautiful.”

I ask about the menopause. She says her physical symptoms weren’t too bad but “it’s more to do with sense of self,” she says. “That is so radically altered. It’s a massive shift.”

As time passes, the thing that haunts Ferguson is what she calls her “scant knowledge”. “I wish I’d understood when I was younger that what you need is knowledge. Now I think, ‘I might never learn Russian!’ All the things I could have learnt! All the things I don’t know!”

She also wants to travel more, a lot more – to Petra, Jordan, Iran, and “to the top of every single mountain there is”. As for the future, Ferguson is unsure, but says “I want to keep making films. I love making television, I love cameras, I love editing, I love music, I love structure.”

“I love the joy of being in an edit suite with a scene that’s working. That’s really wonderful.”

Mastering a new language might have to wait. Or perhaps not – if anyone can do it all while also studying Russian, it is Sarah Ferguson.

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