Just minutes into arriving at the Brisbane home of Queensland news editor and veteran journalist Michael McKenna, I notice a poster framed on the wall of his office. My attention is hooked by the words inked across it: “Tell it like it is.” I ask Michael about it, a relic he says of his time in the US as a foreign correspondent, and one which he keeps because he likes the message behind it. We circle back to it a little over an hour later, as the veteran journalist explains to me his passion for journalism across his vast and storied career so far. “I live and breathe by that. Forget about all the spinners. Forget about the pressure from your bosses…just tell it as brutally, honestly as you can and if you do that you can sleep at night.” In the hands of others, this phrase might seem trite or even a rationalisation for rudeness, but for a seasoned veteran of the news industry like Michael, they really matter, and they really mean something. Michael emulates the hidden gems of good journalism: simplicity, accuracy, doggedness, detail and shining light in dark places.
Take this as an example. How do you expose crimes against humanity by the world’s largest government when your actions are being carefully managed and the people you’re talking to are being coached to avoid sharing any embarrassing information? For Michael, a carefully curated media trip to Guantanamo Bay in the early 2000s while working as a Los Angeles-based US correspondent offered him the opportunity to see if his suspicious that the Americans were keeping children in indefinite jail were true. “It’s an extraordinary place. It’s a classic American base. I mean, they’ve got KFC, they’ve got movie cinemas, it’s its own little city. But right in the middle of it is this is this jail where they are holding people for five, ten years, ultimately without charge,” Michael says. The now Queensland editor for The Australian newspaper prepared extensively for the trip, researching the disappearance of children around the world including in Canada and forming a view that they were being kept in the notorious Cuban-located US military base which had imprisoned and tortured alleged terrorists after the 9/11 New York attacks.
McKenna’s “Feeding The Chooks” weekly political gossip column plays on a smart pun on both the (inappropriate) phrase popularised by former Queensland Premier Joh-Bjelke Peterson and the name of longtime premier Anastacia Palaszsuk, whose surname in her native Polish is pronounced Pa-La-Chook. Despite not taking itself too seriously the column is weekly gold for insights in the factional disputes behind Queensland main political parties, and Queensland politicians and public servants apparently can’t get enough of it.
After a sanitised tour of the jail – they were “there to write a puff piece” – Michael sat down with the officer in charge and interviewed him, engaging him on topics without canvassing the issue he had really come for – the possible presence of children in the jail. “He earlier agreed that he was going to do a picture with me,” Michael explains. “I didn’t want a supplied photograph; I wanted my own photograph. And I said, ‘I want to go up on that hill, and I want to take a photograph of you with the base in the background.’ It was going to be a good photo.” The other reason, Michael explains, is that the officer’s media minder, a major who would interject and coach the officer on his answers and who would prevent him from answering any difficult questions, happened to be “an entirely unfit human being”, in Michael’s words. When the interview ended and Michael walked the officer up the hill to do the photograph, he suddenly had the perfect opportunity to grill him with questions about the children, without the major present. “When I got up there, I turned the tape recorder on. I said, ‘I’ve just got a couple more questions.’ And I said, ‘You’ve got young people in this facility don’t you?’…And he caved and said ‘yes’.”
I love this story because it perfectly shows why Michael is so respected in Australian journalism and reveals something about his character as a journalist – the ability to think quickly on his feet and get past the fluff. Getting around the minders and the obstacles is “half the trick”, Michael says. “A lot of these people, they just want to be candid anyway. He (the prison officer) had no problem talking about it in the end, I probably didn’t even need to go up on the hill, but I just didn’t need that guy interrupting.” Part of that is really listening to people when they speak. “I think the more you listen – and I sound like a parent – but the more you listen, particularly as a journalist, the more you’ll get out of the story.” Michael is full of nuggets of journalistic gold, more of which I’ll get to, but first I wanted to explore the experiences that shaped Michael into the journalist and editor he is today.
Michael was born in in Sydney and grew up in Brisbane. His father, a pathologist, was engaged in public life through the Queensland Cancer Council, and before that, a “very active” member of the Labor Party in Sydney. For balance, Michael adds, his mother is a diehard conservative, deeply rooted in the Liberal National Party politics and a “huge fan of Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson.” “So there was a lot of very interest dinner table discussions,” Michael says wryly. “It was all usually quite calm, sometimes not.” Growing up Michael would watch the 7pm ABC news bulletin, loved to read non-fiction books and became hooked on becoming a journalist after watching 60 minutes on the TV on a Sunday night. After finishing school he applied for university and got accepted to study politics and Russian literature – “God knows why, that was my idea.” Michael had a friend who was a copy-boy at The Daily Sun, a now-defunct Murdoch owned paper in Brisbane, and learnt through him that a job was going to be advertised at the paper. He rang up the editor’s secretary and told her he’d love to apply, but was going overseas the next week and so could he come in today and see the editor. “It was a complete lie,” Michael says matter-of-facty. “Terrible thing to start a journalism on a lie,” he adds wryly. The editor took him and a few weeks later told Michael he knew the overseas trip story was a lie but he liked his gumption and determination.
McKenna is one of the Australia’s most experienced journalists and editors and a political hound who regularly breaks exclusives on the inner workings of the Queensland government.
And so, Michael became a copy boy, “the lowest person on the food chain” responsible for running journalists’ yarns from their desks to the compositors who put the paper together. It also meant Michael was nameless, known solely as “copy” for the first year of his time at the paper, which he says taught him humility. Michael explains how the process producing the newspaper worked in the 80s, starting with him running sheets of paper down the four-story steel stairwell to the compositors: “Then the bromides, which is the sort of reverse negative, would copy the words out onto this ruler wide stream that would come out of this machine, and then they would cut it up and jigsaw puzzle the pages together. Then it would be photocopied or put on the presses.” Michael was good enough to advance to a cadetship and get the auspicious job of typing up the paper’s television guide, tide times and boat arrivals. He found ways to make the job interesting. “When I was doing the television guide, if I was trying to sweet talk a young woman, I would say ‘look at the movie the week tomorrow. And their name would be, it’d be ‘Gone with the Wind starring so and so’ who I was trying to court.” It never worked.” The menial work taught accuracy – “because you can’t stuff it up unless you put your wannabe girlfriend’s name on it” – which led Michael to his first real reporter round covering courts, and where he found his calling, because he just so happened to be covering the Fitzgerald Inquiry.
“I just came alive,” Michael says of the experience covering the inquiry. Then, aged 21, Michael moved to London for a holiday and ended up working at a wire service covering courts. “And that’s when I learned to how to be competitive journalist,” Michael says. His London experiences in his early twenties included interviewing Freddie Mercury’s parents after he died while working for Piers Morgan, door stopping Margarat Thatcher after she quit the Prime Ministership, and covering the Birmingham Six case in court. The intensity of the job bordered on obsession with Michael working night and day, six days a week. “It was like an infatuation; it was so exciting. I really loved it.” But after a few years Michael “was a bit burnt out” and decided to travel America, freelancing for a couple of years before returning to Brisbane to study economics and politics at the University of Queensland. He landed a part-time gig on the Sunday Mail and began doing investigations, including breaking a yarn on federal Labor minister John Brown after Brown had been given a million dollar unit on the Gold Coast by a Japanese developer who Brown had secured meetings for with Australian politicians.
From there Michael moved to Canberra, covering Howard-era federal politics in the press gallery with the likes of Phillip Coorey, Laurie Oakes, David Penberthy, Annabel Crabb and Andrew Probyn. Travelling Australia during an election campaign was exciting. “That really teaches you how to be a journalist,” Michael says. “You’re on the road, you’re travelling night and day, you’re going to events, you’re filing, you’re filing some more, then you go out, have a few drinks, you probably have a few too many drinks, and then you get up in the morning and you’re on a four o’clock plane and constantly trying to burst the bubble in political coverage.” After Canberra came sunny Los Angeles as an American correspondent and the Guantanamo Bay story, among others including the Challenger shuttle explosion.
Michael in his office in Brisbane at The Australian newspaper.
Michael is now the Queensland editor for the national newspaper which means his days stretch from early morning to eight o’clock at night, organising news coverage for the entire state, talking to sources, investigating stories himself and making sure his team are on track. I think the hours must be exhausting but Michael says he loves it and exudes passion in the way he speaks about his sources and the stories he’s broken recently about lobbyists with close ties to the Queensland Labor government. A typical day for Michael starts with reading the news and listening to the radio, then talking to his key reporters around eight o’clock, before morning conference where he lists about seven to ten stories for the paper’s editors and Chief of Staff. After a brainstorming session he goes back to his team to implement any ideas or changes, and then around 2.30pm there’s another afternoon conference. At around six p.m., they choose the front page story for the next day’s paper. “And then all hell breaks loose, because you’ve got to start writing the thing, you’ve got to start writing it to length, the editors may not like the way it’s written, or they want it to be harder, or they want more emphasis coming on an element in the story higher up in the copy.” This goes until seven or eight o’clock while headlines are being worked out, copy filed, and finally the button is pressed on the final copy. “Then we can all breathe for a little while…and then we start it all again.”
It’s a long day but Michael says that “if you want to be in this business, particularly in an editing role, and you’ve got the responsibility of your reporters, but also their stories and the people they’re writing about, you’ve got to see it from the beginning to the end, until it’s on the page.” There’s always a balance between original investigation and covering the latest news developments, such as press conferences, and Michael gives his reporters what he calls ‘concept days’ to think deeply about their area of reporting and come up with original ideas and angles on stories. Politicians “don’t always tell the truth, there’s always hidden agendas…There’s a lot of motivations you don’t know about.” There’s the theatre of politics but going deeper is where the real stories are – “a lot of the rest is just a pantomime.” Michael’s advice to any journalist covering a beat is to “have their own projects, their own story ideas, where they can look at and think that ‘this story is unfinished…so I need to make contacts, to phone around on it, I need to put in an FOI or RTI, I need to go to publicly available documents and source them to try to get that story’. And invariably, it works out.”
Michael gives the example his own reporting with his colleague, senior reporter Sarah Elks, getting behind the curtain of Queensland politics to expose Labor government links with lobbyists. Through their meticulous investigation they revealed that three Queensland lobbying firms had effectively run Anastacia Palaszczuk’s 2020 election campaign, in the process getting exclusive access for their clients to the highest levels of government and earning them favourable approvals. Between the three lobbying firms, they had 70% of the meetings with politicians and bureaucrats over a one-year period, an extraordinary privilege over rival firms. “This was a story about standing back and seeing something was going on,” Michael says, explaining that many journalists had seen these lobbyists present during the election campaign but hadn’t asked the hard questions he and his team explored. The result was an inquiry by Peter Coaldrake, who coined the term dual hatting to describe the lobbying practise and said that the existence of these people and their influence on government presented a grave risk to democracy. A raft of legislative changes followed, banning this kind of lobbying in Queensland.
Michael and senior reporter Sarah Elks exposed close ties between lobbyists and the Queensland Labor government which led to new laws being introduced to ban the practise of ‘dual-hatting’ in Queensland.
When I ask how Michael and his team exposed the series of stories on the lobbyists’ influence, he explains: “Sources are a really important part of journalism…Sources are the ones that often give you the best stories because a lot of the shenanigans in politics or bad behaviour, they’re not documented deliberately. It’s about having people telling you things, finding people who know what’s going on, and then convincing them, persuading them to tell you things.” Michael has a method which is gold for any aspiring or working journalist. He gains a deep understanding of the political party he’s exploring, learning who the various factions are, naming the players involved, and then talking to them. “You’ve got to work out who’s who in the zoo,” Michael explains. “To young journalists – find a reason to talk to someone if you want to talk to someone…even if it means nothing to you, find a reason to make contact, to strike up a conversation with them. And then you just start working in from there.” The most important thing is to be aware of their agenda. “You can’t be used by them,” Michael cautions. “You’ve got to remember that in politics, for instance, the Labor Party, the factions, they fight harder against each other than they do sometimes against their political rivals the LNP.”
Being observational and keeping an independent mind are also crucial features of political reporting. Look at what people do rather than listen to what they say, Michael says, sharing the example of the story he broke on Anastacia Palaszczuk facing an internal coup and ultimately quitting as premier, a yarn that started with Michael observing the premier’s actions in state parliament one day. Michael was sitting in the gallery and watching proceedings when the opposition leader, David Crisafulli, fumbled his words and was met with a roar of laughter from the government side. “And there was Anastacia Palaszczuk looking straight ahead. She didn’t turn around…She didn’t share a joke with anyone sitting on either side of her or behind her. And I thought, ‘you’re isolated.’” Pulling all the factors together, including Palaszczuk’s waning popularity as premier, Michael began asking questions and a source soon told him “she’s in the kill zone”. Michael was first to break the story.
With a state election in October, I ask Michael what his paper’s approach will be to covering the campaigns, and he offers clues as to how news media goes about their coverage in an organised way. The big stories feeding into the October Queensland election are Steven Miles’ rise to state premier in an effective coup against Anastacia Palaszscuk, and the question of whether this will restore Labor’s hopes of an election victory on the one hand, or whether the LNP through David Crisafulli’s policy-lite approach will be enough to secure them an election after a decade of Labor power. Michael and his team will also ask the tough questions around policy and the budget. Energy policy, the repayment of ballooning government debt, regional issues and the backroom factional brawling of both parties is all relevant to consider in an upcoming political campaign. It’s an enormous amount to cover. “It’s a lot of fun though,” Michael says cheerfully.
Michael’s international exclusive on kids being kept in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
I’ve left my favourite nugget of gold until last, and this is Michael’s approach to cultivating and maintaining source relationships. “Because I’m curious, and I like people, I call up people for no reason. But there’s also a reason for that,” Michael says. The Queensland editor calls people every week, sometimes once a day, just to say hello and ask how they’re going. He offers the example of Robbie Katter in Mount Isa. “He knows what’s going on, he has a really got idea of what’s going on in western Queensland, that’s a vast area that I have no hope of knowing what’s really going on.” Michael’s approach is simple. “I like him, I ring him up, and we chew the fat, and I find out about things. But I also ring up people I don’t like or I don’t trust, and I call them. Again, same questions, just conversations.” The key is that it’s not purely transactional; it’s about genuinely wanting to build relationships. “I make connections with all these people, everywhere. One, because I’m interested and it’s fun chewing the fat with people, finding out. These are all people who are often so unlike me, or I’m unlike them, but we’re having a talk about stuff and it’s interesting. But also, when the heats on the story, they’re gonna pick up the phone to me because I have a relationship with them.” Michael will always pick up the phone to confront someone about a difficult story, and will call a source the day after a big story breaks to continue the conversation. “My only battle is to get the information,” he says. “I will ring them up every single time and say, ‘you may not want to talk to me, but is there anything wrong with this story? Is there an issue that you want to explore. Is there another side that you need to tell?’”
“I love news,” Michael says. “Journalism is one of the best ways to just experience things. And I love experiencing things. I love meeting interesting people.” He cites an upcoming semi-regular visit to Cape York as something he’s looking forward to with the chance to visit the indigenous communities there. That’s the other great part of the job. “I just never really know what’s going to happen. I mean, I start my day in the same way every morning, and I finish it in a different way every evening.” He’s happy to work to sometimes ridiculous deadlines, which can include being told by an editor to write 1000 words in 15 minutes, explaining that “you just have to steal yourself” in those moments and get it done. Curiosity and the commitment to tell a story well are essential character traits of a good journalist. “I’ve got a really clever, smart, energetic team,” Michael says. “When you’re together and you’re covering a story and doing it accurately and with empathy and framing it in the right way to make sure that people understand what it’s about – then you just feel really invigorated.” Michael is insatiably curious. His regular practise is to flick to the back of his notebook and jot down words and ideas that strike him during a press conference or interview, a “really simple but effective trick” to jolt his memory about important details other journalists might miss if they’re not paying attention. Done well, and it’s possible to do what Michael loves doing: telling it like it is.