When Linton Besser won the coveted role of ABC Media Watch host, he was keenly aware he was taking on a TV program with a highly engaged audience and a storied 36-year legacy.
“I didn’t want to break it,” the former foreign correspondent and investigative reporter says.
“It does have this loyal following, and over decades it has built an identity. So I didn’t want to lose the audience which had expectations of the show.”
Mario Christodoulou, the new executive producer, and Besser took over from the show’s longest-serving presenter, Paul Barry, and previous executive producer Tim Latham. Barry and Latham stepped down last year after 500 episodes and more than a decade together.
Besser and Christodoulou – formerly of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age – approached the new gig as they would any other journalism round, hitting the phones and speaking to as many people in the industry as possible. They met media executives and editors across the landscape from commercial TV to the Murdoch tabloids.
“We try and be as fair as we can to everyone because the person who’s tipping you into a story this week might be the subject of your story next week,” Besser says.
The 48-year-old describes Christodoulou, a fellow award-winning investigative reporter who was part of a team which won a Gold Walkley in 2014, as a “formidable journalist” and “one of these super brains walking around on legs”.
“Mario is a great foil to me,” he says. “We’re very yin and yang.
“He’s got a wonderful devil’s advocate in him and he will hold me back and I will push him.”
‘Fearless’ and award-winning
Something clicked, because the 15-minute Monday night program delivered a series of scoops in 2025, with Besser’s entertaining mixture of warm presenting style and sharp analysis generally well received.
The former Media Watch host David Marr (2002-04) knew Besser as a young reporter in the Herald newsroom and says he was “furious” when he realised how good he was on TV.
Marr: “One minute he’s a promising kid at the SMH, the next he’s a lion on Media Watch. Oh, the pleasure he takes in mauling his prey. Wonderful.”
News Corp’s ABC-critic-in-chief, Chris Kenny, predictably delivered a back-handed compliment, saying that at least the new program had lost its “supercilious smugness and British accent”. He described the new host as “a journalism insider” with a “Green-left bent” who wins awards and claimed his main target was News Corp.
Kenny was right about the awards. Already armed with four personal Walkleys, Besser and the Media Watch team picked up two Walkley nominations in October, one for commentary and one for explanatory journalism.
Last month they took home one of those awards, for commentary and critique, on three stories: two exposed uncomfortable dealings inside the ABC and one lighter piece revealed the deception in a Channel Nine property show.
The Walkley judges said the team “quite remarkably – and fearlessly – revealed the ABC chairman’s ill-judged serial intervention in radio programming to facilitate an old acquaintance’s self-promotion”.
The program detailed how Kim Williams had intervened on behalf of the 1980s star Austen Tayshus – real name Sandy Gutman – on no fewer than five occasions when the touring comedian wanted to get an interview on a regional ABC radio station.
On one occasion when Gutman forwarded the chair an email chain between himself and ABC producers, Williams complained to their managers that ABC staff were “often arrogant with talent”.
It was, Besser said, a “grave lapse of judgment” by the chair. Williams told the program that “on reflection that was inappropriate”.
The managing director, Hugh Marks, who had only been in the job for a month, reminded Williams that his role was to be a “wonderful advocate-in-chief” while pointedly adding the chair was now “very clear” about his responsibility.
“That was really tough,” Besser says. “I don’t think I slept at all that week. We criticised Kim, I think, pretty strongly. And I’ll say this, it’s a measure of his character, he has never complained. He’s had coffee since and he did nothing to stop us. In fact, he helped us investigate the story about him.”
Besser says Williams respected that Media Watch had a job to do, and his attitude was “pretty extraordinary, really”.
Williams kept his job, but the subject of the other award-winning story about the ABC, Andrew Greene, at the time a defence correspondent, did not. He resigned in August.
Media Watch reported that Greene filed a story about a German shipbuilder without disclosing that he had travelled to Germany courtesy of the company, which was hoping to win lucrative Australian navy contracts.
Greene’s editors did not know about the trip until contacted by Media Watch.
‘Are we threading the needle?’
Besser says there is “lots of awkwardness” in investigating other journalists, in particular ABC colleagues, and he tries to mitigate it by being as transparent as possible.
“If it’s someone I know well, I’ll say straight away, ‘This is a work call’,” he says, acknowledging that as a reporter he has made “many errors” himself.
“I try and be very open to, you know, what is the other explanation?
“A couple of times this year I felt really badly for people who I think are good people that made errors, unfortunate errors,” he says.
One of the joys of the program are the tips that come in: from media workers at every organisation and from the public, and of course from people who have been wronged by the press and feel powerless.
Besser says the viewers pay close attention to how a story is reported across different outlets and they are often keen to share their insights.
“On our last show we made a little thank you to the viewers because they’re amazing, and people are so sharp,” he says.
The Media Watch week starts on Wednesday. By Friday they need a fully formed script because the graphics team needs time to compile a graphics-heavy program. Work continues through the weekend, and Monday morning is a rigorous factchecking process before a read-through of the script to gauge for tone: “Are we threading the needle the right way?”
Besser says he tackles contentious issues by being straight down the line.
“There are members of the press who go to either extreme, and then they win great fans at either one of those ends, but I fear they lose credibility in the middle,” he says. “I think that would be deadly.”
Sean Nicholls worked with Besser at the Herald and was more recently his boss as editor of the ABC’s investigations unit. Some people were surprised an investigations reporter had been chosen to host his first TV show, but Nicholls believed it would work.
“I’ve worked with Linton for 20 years,” Nicholls says. “He’s a forensic investigative journalist. So I’m not at all surprised that he’s applied those skills to his work at Media Watch.”
