Fair-minded, down to earth and unusually gifted: George Negus dies at 82

George Negus, who has died at the age of 82, belonged to the nomenclatura of Australian television current affairs journalism.

He first came to prominence as a member of the team that produced the groundbreaking nightly ABC TV current affairs program, This Day Tonight. That team was made up of others who were also to become household names: presenter Bill Peach and reporters Peter Luck, Gerald Stone and Mike Willesee.

The program became a burr under the saddle of senior ABC management. On its second day it broke the story that the then chair of the ABC, James Darling, was not to be given a third term. The story incurred the chairman’s displeasure. The fallout went on interminably, a rehearsal for many tumults that were to follow throughout TDT’s 11-year existence.

This kind of fearless, sometimes irreverent, public-interest journalism was meat and drink to Negus. He practised it from both sides of the chasm that traditionally separates journalists from political staffers.

During the term of the Whitlam government, he became press secretary to the attorney-general, Lionel Murphy. He leaked to the media Murphy’s plan to raid the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1973 because Murphy believed the agency was withholding from him information about domestic terrorism.

However, it was as a television journalist that Negus made his name. In 1979 he joined the founding team of the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program, alongside Ray Martin, Ian Leslie and, later, Jana Wendt.

In 1992 he became the founding host of ABC TV’s Foreign Correspondent program and worked there until 1999. He developed a reputation as a well-informed and courageous reporter specialising in the Middle East. In 2004, he published a bestselling book, The World from Islam: A Journey of Discovery through the Muslim Heartland, in which he defended Islam against the stereotype that it was inherently violent.

In 2005 he became host of the SBS program Dateline, which also had a foreign affairs focus, and in 2011 began hosting 6.30 with George Negus on the Ten network.

In 2012, Negus and a fellow panellist on the Ten network show The Circle, Yumi Stynes, became embroiled in a controversy concerning remarks they made about Ben Roberts-Smith, many years before he was found by a federal court judge to have committed war crimes, a finding that is now on appeal.

There was severe public blowback on Negus and Stynes, who then apologised to Roberts-Smith. They in turn received apologies from Australia’s major newspapers for misconstruing the original remarks.

In 2015 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to media and environmental conservation.

Although he acquired a knockabout image, he was described by two women who worked with him as disarmingly approachable.

Nehida Barakat was the senior producer for the ABC’s 7.30 program in about 2000 when Negus stood in as the summer presenter. She was apprehensive when he rang to discuss an intro she had written. “This gentlemanly voice asked: ‘Would you mind if I changed just a couple of words?’”

Nicole Chvastek, who worked with him at Nine, said he was a big star who generated an air of excitement, a mixture of the intelligent, well-travelled journalist and “a sort of approachable larrikin everyman”.

It was his down-to-earth approach to storytelling that viewers related to so readily. This, coupled with unshakeable fairmindedness on the issues he reported on, marked him out as an unusually gifted journalist.

He is survived by his partner, Kirsty, and two sons, Ned and Serge. The family released a statement saying he had “passed away peacefully surrounded by loved ones after a gracious decline from Alzheimer’s disease, all the while with his trademark smile”.