For Mal Walden,  one of Australia's most respected news presenters, the world of news changed forever one day in 1977.

By CESIRA COLLELUORI

HE’S unsure about the day but he knows it happened in August 1977. A quick check reveals it was the 16th. CBS Evening News, then considered the doyen of American TV news broadcasters, led its bulletin with an eight-minute story on the Panama Canal treaty.

“It was a very worthy piece … but it was the night Elvis Presley died,” says former Network Ten newsreader Mal Walden.

The opposition channels led their news bulletins with the death of Presley, which became a ratings bonanza. According to Walden, that was the wake-up call to the world that “personality out-rated politics”.

But while America was only just beginning to realise the pull of celebrity, Walden says Australia had cottoned on a few years earlier.

It was 1975. International rock star Eric Clapton had performed in Melbourne the previous night and his fans were outraged by the brevity of his concert, which came with a high price tag. Walden, then a reporter at Channel 7, was assigned the task of interviewing the brash singer. “And [to] every question I asked, he replied ‘scrotum’,” says Walden.

Believing the interview was destined for the blooper reel, Walden asked the singer what he had had for breakfast that morning. Sure enough he said scrotum. When Walden returned to the newsroom, his then boss John Maher told him to “top and tail it”. In other words, get it to air.

Mal Walden on his contact with notorious underworld figure Mark "Chopper" Read - one of many behind the scenes stories in his unpublished memoirs.

“In the ’70s that was unheard of,” recalls Walden, who retired last December after 52 years in broadcasting. “But again, the response was phenomenal. It proved that personalities outperformed the heavy politics,” he says. For Walden, this was the beginning of the dumbing down of news. From that point on the focus was on celebrity.

“And everybody was complaining about it,” he recalls. “But I remember my boss saying, ‘dumb is not necessarily stupid – to entertain is to inform,’” he adds. “We balanced it with serious news, but it was almost like the birth of the celebrity period.”

Walden believes everyone needs a mentor and Maher was his. “John Maher produced the first news bulletin on Melbourne television in 1956,” he says. “The standard and format that he established in the ’60s and ’70s is still the same format that exists today.”

He credits Maher with unearthing the pool of talent that went on to become ratings successes at opposition networks. “[Maher] discovered and nurtured Eric Pearce … Geoff Raymond … Brian Naylor and his successors, David Johnston and myself,” says Walden. “No news editor has discovered so much on-air talent [and] no news editor has ever lost so much talent.”

He is referring to the Channel 7 tragedies that made their own news headlines. In 1975, reporter Greg Shackleton was killed along with his camera crew in Balibo, East Timor. In 1982, four staff members perished when their chopper crashed near Lang Lang, Victoria.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Walden has taken extensive notes and documented some of the stories behind the news.

The Balibo tragedy is one such example. He recalls one night taking a phone call from a woman screaming hysterically that her son was dead. When he realised that her son was reporter Greg Shackleton, he assured her that he was okay.

“I said: ‘Greg has filed a story. His story was on the news tonight. We would have heard if anything had happened to Greg’. She said: ‘No, no, you don’t understand, it’s a mother’s intuition. I know he’s dead. I know he’s been killed,’” he says.

Again, Walden reassured her and promised that management would call her to confirm that Greg was fine. “She was wrong, Greg was very much alive when she rang,” he says. “He was killed the following morning. So it wasn’t a mother’s intuition. It was a mother’s terrible premonition.”

Walden has lived through so many of these types of stories and that’s what he has written about in his memoirs.

 In an industry that has provided him with career longevity, Walden is now nurturing the next generation of news talent at Channel 10. “I’m very fortunate that I come in here mentoring,” says Walden.

The UK-born journalist has come a long way since his radio days. News of JFK’s assassination broke while he was on-air at Warrnambool radio station 3YB. Walden threw out the rule book when he illegally patched into a live US broadcast of the coverage. He immediately knew radio was the best place to break news.

But that changed very quickly. When man landed on the moon in 1969, the world watched in awe as President Nixon picked up the phone to talk to Neil Armstrong. It was the first time that an event of international significance was telecast live to the world. “That’s when I realised that satellites had allowed television to catch up to radio,” says Walden.