Nov 2000 Volume 81 Number 11 "serving the protectors"
Never Too Many Police Stories
By Brett Williams

Leigh McClusky knows her audience wants coverage of police stories to be up close and personal. And that means reporters in the back seats of patrol cars, as cops chase offenders, make their arrests and lock up criminals.

“It allows people to see that they are actually humans under the uniform,” says the popular presenter of Channel Seven’s Today Tonight. “It helps take away some of the mystique, and people love to see it. People always want to see the inside of what really goes on.

“The audience is, by nature, very similar to the public - we are voyeurs. And people also like to see the bad guys 'get got’, and the good guys get helped.”

So, for Today Tonight, McClusky would naturally love to present more on SA police at work. To her frustration, however, the programme hasn’t always found SAPOL a willing partner.

She says those with the power to approve police involvement with the press harbour “an unhealthy distrust”. She has even known the programme’s requests for police involvement in “good-news stories” to come up against resistance.

“I have been amazed by the approach you get back,” she says. “I don’t know whether the people we go through think we’re going to exploit the police; that we’re going to turn them into circus animals doing party tricks.

“We’re not asking people to do anything they wouldn’t normally do in the course of their duty. That’s not our role.

“I think it’s unfair for people to presume that, because we’re commercial television, we’re moral cowboys.”

But McClusky maintains the strongest of respect for cops - and their plight. She sees police work as one of the community’s toughest jobs, and cops as not “paid a terrific quid”.

The dilemma of day-to-day encounters, in which police are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, has never escaped her notice. She sympathizes.

“We want lots of them out there looking after us,” she says, “but we don’t like being nicked for speeding. So they’re virtually in a no-win situation. It would not be an easy predicament to be in.”

McClusky suspects that, outside police circles, few understand the job, or its “stresses and strains”.

And police life is a subject on which McClusky can herself speak with some authority. She spent some of her earliest days in journalism on police rounds for The Herald newspaper in Melbourne.

Through the early ’80s she worked as women’s editor for the Ballarat Courier, and as a news and features writer for Australian Associated Press in Sydney. In 1985 she joined the ABC’s The Investigators as a researcher, but later worked on the programme as a reporter and presenter.

After a brief term with Nine’s in 1989-90, McClusky moved to SA to front the ABC’s The 7.30 Report.

She joined Seven in 1995 to present which, in Adelaide, now enjoys ratings dominance over its rival, A Current Affair.

A recent reunion of former Herald journalists in Melbourne reminded McClusky of her past interaction with police. “That was the old system,” she says, “where you would end up at the Police Club in the wee small hours. You were working funny newspaper shifts, and that was the place where you’d catch up with people.”

She has, since those days, seen police as “no different” from the people they serve. “Why wouldn’t they be (the same)?” she asks. “They’re nice people who like to go and see their mates and unwind the same way most of us do.”

And as a morning talk radio host in Adelaide, McClusky knows well her callers’ views on SA police. She says they continue to express “overwhelming respect” for them.

But does she believe in hearing cops’ objections to press coverage they feel misrepresents them?

“If somebody thinks they’ve been wronged,” she says, “we’re happy to take that on board. There’s no point (police) going away and stewing on it. That doesn’t fix it.

“We make mistakes, as do the police. It’s not like we’ll do something, and then walk away from all responsibility.”

Also of benefit to some police might be McClusky’s critique of their work before the cameras. Too many officers, she warns, put viewers off through their overly formal speech and sheer tenseness.

She insists that rigid style fails to “create a relationship” with the audiences to whom police most often make their appeals for help.

“They could be a bit more human,” she says, “and I’d be intrigued to see whether people would not then feel so intimidated and scared about ringing.

“I just think the police are doing themselves a disservice.”

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