When celebrated journalist Peter Manning died in late September, he left behind an enduring legacy as the man who crafted the ABC as we know it today.
The likes of Foreign Correspondent, Landline, Lateline, and Radio National Breakfast all owe their existence to Manning. Despite all of that, he is best known for his contribution to the nation’s premier investigative journalism program, Four Corners.
Manning led the program from 1985 to 1989, through what is widely credited as its golden age. Just last year, he won a Walkley Award for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism.
Speaking to Crikey, Manning’s former colleagues paint a picture of a man who was deeply invested in what he saw to be justice. Jonathan Holmes, Manning’s predecessor as Four Corners executive producer, told Crikey that the budgets when Holmes took over were “appallingly low”, and the Four Corners team struggled to afford to travel for stories.
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Around 1982, he says, came a turning point for the program, which laid the foundations for Manning to take it to the highs it was best known for. Four Corners was shortened to a half hour, and its budgets increased, while the ABC took what he says would be an unusual step today of bringing in an international recruit.
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“You’d never do that now — bring in someone from outside the country. You might bring them in to be managing director but not to be the executive producer of Four Corners,” Holmes said.
Manning’s unrivalled contact book led him to bring in journalists that would go on to become greats in their own right: Kerry O’Brien, Andrew Olle and Chris Masters, to name a few.
“He knew everybody in the business.”
Indeed, Masters and Manning, in Holmes’ retelling, came of age over the 1983 program “The Big League” — an investigation into the misappropriation of Balmain Leagues Club funds from administrator and former Tigers prop Kevin Humphreys. Humphreys would lose his job as chair of the NSWRL, and a Royal Commission was formed which saw a chief magistrate sent to prison and then-Premier Neville Wran investigated. The scandal was one of many corruption scandals of the time, some uncovered by Four Corners, that saw the establishment of anti-corruption commissions in Australia.
But then it changed. Four Corners, in what Holmes described as an attempt to keep up with increasingly strict production turnarounds, first moved to an alliance with Fairfax, where the likes of Adele Ferguson and Nick McKenzie — now both celebrated investigative journalists in their own right — and then later Jo Puccini, moved to a model where an investigative unit had a brief to publish on whichever platform best suited the story, which may not necessarily be Four Corners.
While Holmes said this was not necessarily a bad thing per se, one of the downsides was that it dispensed with the benefits of the famously tight-knit Four Corners team, known to be hermetically sealed from the rest of the national broadcaster while working on a story.
“Reporting a Four Corners story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in television,” he said.
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Four Corners as it sits today is a markedly different beast to the one Manning inherited, and at the time of writing exists in the wake of the Mahmood Fazal saga. The former Mongols bikie club member-turned-Four Corners reporter was sacked in May after a protracted set of scandals, including allegedly demanding secret payments to work on an unapproved independent true crime podcast, allegedly passing on demands from the Alameddine crime families to a producer of YouTuber friendlyjordies, and having a number of historical stories for Four Corners and Background Briefing removed or altered over concerns over accuracy and sourcing.
On Manning himself, former stablemate Chris Masters describes him as a “rare beast … he had that over-the-horizon radar” which led to a particular type of journalism, one which encouraged taking risks to truffle out game-changing pieces of reporting.
“He just had great journalistic instincts for where good stories were. He kind of smelled them, you know? Him sending me to do the Rainbow Warrior (story) is a terrific example of that. I have to admit, I didn’t see it, but he said ‘no, go and have a look’,” Masters told Crikey.
Masters’ report on the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, an international exclusive revealing the 1985 bombing in Auckland had been committed by the French secret service as an act of terrorism, won him a Gold Walkley and fundamentally changed the foreign policy direction of New Zealand.
“I don’t know that we take those risks anymore,” he said.
“Can you imagine somebody saying ‘head to New Zealand, there’s been a bombing at Marsden Wharf, just have a look at it?’
“I think we really miss those journalistic skills at the editorial and middle management area, and he was fiercely supportive — I think we miss that as well; the executive producer who really was grounded among the journalists and defended them.”
On Manning, Holmes described him as a fierce social justice advocate, and an equally fierce backer of his staff.
“People liked working for him. He had that combination of high expectations but solid backing that people will die for.”
“He really did change our attitude to what ABC television was about.”
Holmes said Manning, who penned a book in 2004, Us and Them, about the treatment of Muslims in the Australian press, said he felt “very passionately about the Palestinians in particular, and the Muslims in particular, more than most Anglo journalists at the time”.
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Holmes said Manning clashed with David Hill, managing director of the ABC from 1987 to 1995, over the broadcaster’s coverage of the Gulf War in particular, as well as with Jana Wendt on Israel-Palestine.
“He always saw himself as a champion of the underdog, and Muslims in Australia and Palestinians (to him) were the underdog.”
Four Corners today is under the leadership of Joel Tozer, who took over as executive producer in December from Matthew Carney. Tozer led 7.30 since mid-2022, and previously worked on Nine’s 60 Minutes.
While the program has changed over the years, there remains no shortage of Walkleys and plaudits for the current Four Corners team: Tozer is a multi-Walkley winner, while the program remains a frontrunner for the Gold Walkley most years, having won the award in 2025, 2022, 2020 and 2015.
Four Corners was last week nominated for five Walkley Awards, and swept every single nomination available for the category of current affairs television/radio reporting (long). This includes for Collision, an investigation into brain disease in young AFL players, as well as its coverage of the Bondi terror attack and an episode on police misconduct.