A journalist's self-destruction - David Marr's interview with Chris Hedges on ABC’s Late Night Live

In 23 minutes, David Marr, one of Australia’s best minds and best journalists, broke with the decades-old traditions of the ABC’s loved Late Night Live current affairs programme, trashed his own reputation for facts and context and deprived his listeners of the opportunity of hearing from an award winning, journalist and thinker.

David Marr has been writing, editing and broadcasting for a very long time. I’ve been an admirer since my late teens in the early 80s! 

He's built a gigantic reputation with progressive Australians. Few journalists can claim to have written biographies of people like Garfield Barwick and Patrick White, before going on to lead the media charge against Howard’s treatment of Tampa refugees in 2001 and Cardinal Pell’s child abuse cover-ups. Marr's most recent book, Killing For Country (2023), is shocking and essential.

It's a big catalogue of great writing and challenging thinking.

Marr’s ease with showcasing his big intellect lands badly with many but his smarts, his depth and his output are rarely matched. He’s won 4 Walkley awards and too many other accolades to list.

He’s earned the trust of many Australians - a precious thing in 2025. And he’s been ready to make enemies - essential for good journalism.

So what was going on with his pointless, pugnacious interview with Chris Hedges - Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist and well-known sympathiser with the cause of the Palestinian people?

From the first question, Marr was on an attack mission. And he didn’t let up. 

This wasn’t an intellectual squabble, a debate, or a legitimately challenging interview. Marr was on an ill-founded campaign that ultimately crashed and burned.

I don’t recall ever hearing Marr so incapable of making his case. Unfortunately that didn’t stop him.

In his first question he probed Hedges on the integrity of accepting a sponsored invitation to speak - a bad start.

Marr was incorrect with the facts and he seemed suddenly oblivious to the realities of Australian journalism.

Many of Marr’s elite Australian journalism colleagues (and a good many of our political and business elite), over many decades, have joined missions to Israel and Palestine sponsored by pro-Israel organisations.

Right now, these people hold some of the most senior roles in journalism in our country. They have a huge influence on the information we consume. 

None of them practice the transparency of Hedges. And Marr felt no need to provide this essential context for any "sponsored visit" challenges to Hedges.

As an American, Hedges can know little of how compromised Australia’s media is in its coverage of the Gaza violence.

A second low point was Marr’s embarrassing attempt to propose that the potency of misleading headlines is overrated.....

Marr tried and dismally failed to sully the reputation of a man who strikes many as a rare, measured, credible voice on the right side of tough issues. Hedges showed poise as he batted away each Marr assault.

Hedges has paid a high professional price for his integrity. An Arabic speaker, he left his job as the New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief over his public opposition to the Iraq War in 2003. He has been in the frontline of wars in the Middle East and the Balkans.

Marr’s sledging of Hedges parted wildly with Late Night Live’s time honoured format. For decades, the programme has been magazine-style, where interesting expert guests are invited to share their knowledge, opinions and special expertise - usually in a respectful conversational style. Confrontation is rare and not the focus.

There’s an important place for this type of journalism. Late Night Live has proven that over many decades.

Philip Adams, Marr’s predecessor from the 1990s till last year, even managed to have a collegial interview with Henry Kissinger. 

Days after the Hedges' lynching, Marr had an enlightening interview about the Whitlam dismissal in 1975 with Paul Kelly. Kelly goes by the grandiose title of Editor at Large at the dubiously partisan Murdoch broadsheet, The Australian (Kelly has also been a recipient of pro-Israel sponsored tours). 

Kelly has said and written little of value in decades.

Marr welcomed him to the programme like a loved mentor. He felt no compulsion to challenge the integrity of a man often espousing repugnant, unfounded views.

The interview, a discussion of the Whitlam dismissal of 1975, was excellent - proving the value of the Late Night Live format and repudiating Marr’s betrayal of his audience with Hedges.

But Marr again betrayed his own standards by not disclosing that Newscorp, Kelly's employer, was a key protagonist in the Whitlam dismissal saga back in 1975. NewsCorp toxicity has a long history.

If Marr thinks Hedges a man of questionable integrity - why platform him? - especially on LNL? If he believed discrediting Hedges was an essential mission in speaking truth to power, why didn’t he have any evidence to support his view? And even if Hedges had walked out with his reputation shredded (the opposite of what actually happened), what would have been achieved?

Marr judged his attacks to be of more importance to his audience, than Hedges’ extraordinary life - writing and beyond. How could Marr’s history of impeccable judgment and well- researched argument, have so abandoned him?

In addition to his Pulitzer Prize winning journalism, Hedges is an ordained Presbyterian Minister with a Masters in Divinity. His views on organised religion, the American religious right and current US political turbulence are as compelling as his knowledge of the Middle East. He teaches in American prisons and is a commentator on rising authoritarianism.

Marr’s framing muzzled all of that.

Marr even channelled the loathsome hard-right figure Douglas Murray when, in a final hopeless effort, he challenged Hedges' Gaza authority on the basis that his time as a correspondent there was decades ago.

Hedges’ Australia visit has been focused on the slaughter of Palestinian journalists - an issue, it seems, of limited interest to Marr, one of Australia’s most privileged writers.

Hedges answered every Marr challenge calmly and directly. Marr didn’t land a single punch.

The loved Late Night Live format was trashed for nothing.