Jackson will find her voice

Thr first thing to strike you when Media Watch resumed on ABC television (9.15pm, Mondays) on March 7 was that David Marr wasn't the presenter. The second was that the studio set was different. Marr's successor, Liz Jackson, greeted us with the suggestion that it was about time a woman hosted the program. Actually, if Janet Albrechtsen - now on the board of the ABC - had been accepted after undergoing a MW screen test three years or so ago, Jackson might not have been able to say that. As it transpired, we had three years of the broadcasting-wise Marr, mischief-driven and with a nice line in barely concealed sarcasm.

It's difficult to follow an outstanding presenter. Richard Ackland had this problem when he followed the original presenter, Stuart Littlemore, at MW, not least because Ackland had no television experience and had been a Littlemore critic. In truth, it may be more accurate to say he was a critic of MW's tone under Littlemore and his executive producer, David Salter. Ackland overcame his problem by improving. Week on week Ackland gained confidence in front of a camera, to the point you no longer missed Littlemore. Ackland was, of course, to cap his tenure by producing that confidential Australian Bankers Association memorandum all about how radio 2UE personality John Laws would stop attacking banks if the association would pay him handsomely enough to do so. Justifiably, Ackland received a Gold Walkley for his efforts. Laws, you'll recall, did stop attacking banks.

Anyway, Jackson began with a story about a former US Green Beret, Jack Idema, who has featured in numerous programs - including on the ABC - as a terrorism expert. MW pointed out Idema was a shameless self-promoter who'd spent three years in jail for fraud. Yes, television should be careful about the "experts" it selects and a bit more disclosure wouldn't hurt. But then, lots of people who get on television aren't, as the scribe's mother used to say, any better than they ought to be. Without reiterating the details, what the Idema segment most precisely did was to reinforce that Jackson isn't Marr. Several subsequent items have had the same reinforcing effect, though you can assume Jackson is well aware of it. The day before the March 21 MW went to air, a Jackson interview, conducted by David Dale, appeared in Sydney's The Sun-Herald. It included this from Jackson: "I know I write with a very spare style in my scripts. I think I'm going to have to make my style a bit more florid, a bit more opinionated." It's a remark that strongly suggests Jackson, 54, is still evolving and is conscious of it.

The scribe would suggest the best of Jackson is yet to come and that viewer patience will reap a reward. Presenting MW - even without Marr's shadow - is a difficult, over-scrutinised job. When you reflect on it, MW is almost an excessively ambitious project. It seeks to correct and educate an industry that, presumably, is already doing its best. Thus there's little scope for MW to get it wrong. The presenter of such a program needs, above all, authority. And you can't be authoritative without confidence. Confidence is like happiness and butterflies settling on your shoulder. It just happens. You can't command it.

Whether Jackson really needs to be "more opinionated" - particularly about daily print journalism, which she hasn't practised - might be open to dispute. There's little point in forcing yourself to have an opinion if, deep down, you're not absolutely certain you've got one. Nor is there much purpose to expressing a premature opinion that transpires as erroneous. Perhaps it's best to let a style evolve of its own volition. Littlemore was sardonic, irritable and sometimes vengeful. Ackland was revelatory, blunt but likeable. Paul Barry favoured a stark mixture of the smilingly flippant and the woundingly serious, as with an uncompromising MW interview he once conducted with the chairman of the ABC, Donald McDonald. All the above characteristics still leave Jackson with plenty of scope, plenty of tonal space in which to evolve. There must be dozens of ways to present MW that haven't even yet been thought of, leave alone tried.

To return to where we were: it's difficult to follow an outstanding presenter. Perhaps last Monday's MW instalment most suggested Jackson, previously at Four Corners for a decade, will eventually escape Marr's shadow. She enjoys at least two auspicious elements. MW's experienced, often-courageous executive producer, Peter McEvoy, agreed to stay on after Marr's departure. And the program is pre-recorded, so Jackson can fiddle with the footage until she gets every shade of nuance and detail just right. The scribe, incidentally, wishes Jackson well in that last endeavour. He fiddles obsessively with this column each and every week. Unfortunately, he has never yet quite managed to get it just right.

Just space to say an affectionate farewell to Karol Jozef Wojtyla, John Paul II. The scribe, sometimes in the company of David (D.D.) McNicoll, covered the Pope's January 1995 visit to this country. It was a visit during which John Paul II received an extremely healthy media run.

On his last day, with a plane waiting to whisk him away from Sydney airport, assorted journalistic types who'd covered the tour were herded into a designated media area in a hangar. The Pope, in pouring rain, suddenly walked over to the enclosure to deliver a specific media message. The scribe can't remember his exact words but they were along the lines: "Thank you. I speak to them through you." He was an impressive man.