The Sunday Telegraph, Edition 1SUN 12 AUG 2001, Page 095 By: Nathan Vass
Anthony McClellan's business is managing other people's crises. Nathan
Vass reports. “The people I work for are not professional targets, like
politicians'' At the height of the Trinity Grammar School scandal,
crisis manager Anthony McClellan received 200 phone calls a day from
various journalists. McClellan was called in to help deal with media
demands after The Sunday Telegraph broke the story of allegations of a
small group of students sexually assaulting each other. Trinity's
reaction was typical of how modern organisations respond to trouble. In
the past, the first phone call was to the lawyer, the accountant or
maybe even the medical specialist. Now, when trouble is brewing, they
frequently call for a media manager to help them cope. “An
organisation's reputation is its key asset,'' says McClellan, who
refuses to discuss his clients' private or business details. McClellan,
51, with 25 years in broadcast current affairs journalism behind him,
has “managed'' the media in some of the biggest headline-grabbing news
stories of recent years. His AMC Media has helped Trinity Grammar, and
former 2UE boss John Conde during the cash-for-comment controversy. His
years in the media help him formulate strategies such as telling
clients to do one-on-one interviews, rather than facing a press
conference, “where journalists feed off each other''. This was the key
to his handling of the Trinity scandal, when headmaster Milton Cujes
conducted up to 20 individual media interviews in one day. It has been
a dramatic career turnaround for McClellan. By his own admission he
fostered foot-in-the-door journalism through senior roles at A Current
Affair, Sixty Minutes and Witness, and is now handsomely paid to keep
former colleagues at bay. “There is an inequality in the power
relationship between the media and the people they report on,'' says
the triple Logie winner for current affairs. “I thought I knew the
media was powerful when I was at Sixty Minutes, but I probably didn't
appreciate the full extent of the inequality. “The ferocity of the
media spotlight changes people's lives. It is unexpected, it is
unrelenting and unforgiving. “In many cases, it is justifiable. But the
people I work for are not professional targets, like politicians.''
About 25 years ago, McClellan was involved in an incident which was to
shape his career. As a keen young journalist, he allowed a stranger to
put a hood over his head, bundle him into a car and drive him to a
secret location. There, McClellan was handed a copy of the top-secret
Beach Inquiry report into police corruption in Victoria. The car then
drove off, leaving him in a side street, the dynamite report in one
hand, tram fare in the other. To his amazement, on legal advice his
employer, ABC TV's This Day Tonight, would not run the story.
Frustrated, he moved to Nine's A Current Affair, where owner Kerry
Packer agreed to air the sensational story. It kick-started a career
which saw him broker two of the most lucrative deals in Australian
media history -- Sixty Minutes' interview with Lindy Chamberlain when
she was released from jail and Witness's interview with Stuart Diver.
McClellan, a defender of “cheque-book journalism'', concedes he now
acts for the very people he once “went after''. “I have no regrets, we
all change,'' he says. “ Just like they have a right to have a lawyer
if they appear in court, people have a right to representation in the
media. ENDS(edited)