JANA WENDT. Born Melbourne, Australia 1956. Educated at Melbourne University. Researcher, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV documentaries 1975-77; field reporter, ATV-10 news, 1979; co-anchor, 1980; reporter, Nine Network's Sixty Minutes, 1982-87; host, Nine's A Current Affair, 1987-92; host and reporter, Sixty Minutes, 1994; host, Seven Network's current affairs program Witness, from 1995.

TELEVISION

1972- A Current Affair
1979- Sixty Minutes

 

See also Australian Programming

 

 

   

Jana Wendt is Australian television's best known female current affairs reporter and presenter. She is also widely regarded as one of Australian commercial television's most skilled interviewers.

The daughter of Czech immigrants, Melbourne-born Wendt began her career in journalism researching documentaries for the Government-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1975. After completing an arts degree at Melbourne University, she accepted a job in commercial television, joining Ten Network as an on-camera news reporter in their Melbourne news room. Shortly after moving into the role of news presenter at Ten Network, Wendt was offered a position on as a reporter on Nine Network's new prime-time current affairs show, Sixty Minutes.

Under the guidance of executive producer Gerald Stone, an American with broad experience in both Australian and U.S. news and current affairs programming, Sixty Minutes proceeded to set the standard for quality commercial current affairs in Australia both in terms of content and production values. The youngest correspondent to join the Sixty Minutes team, Wendt quickly established a reputation for her aggressive interviewing style and glamorous, ice-cool on-camera demeanour. It was this combination of acuity and implacability which earned Wendt her nickname "the perfumed steamroller".

In 1988, Wendt left Sixty Minutes to anchor another Nine Network program, the nightly prime-time half hour current affairs show, A Current Affair, where she cemented her journalistic reputation with a series of incisive and revealing interviews with national and international political figures. Her subjects included Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, U.S. Vice President, Dan Quayle, former U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, former Philippines President, Ferdinand Marcos and media barons Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. In 1994, Jana Wendt returned to Sixty Minutes to fill the newly-created role of anchor.

Wendt's departure from A Current Affair the previous year followed accelerating criticism of the program for its increasingly tabloid accent. The trend, evidenced for critics by A Current Affair's frequent use of hidden cameras, walk-up interviews and stories with a voyeuristic, sexual theme, was at odds with Wendt's image as a guarantor of dispassionate investigative reporting. While she declined to criticise the program on her departure, she did register her general professional objections to the tabloidisation of Australian current affairs on her return to Nine Network in 1994. The first Sixty Minutes she hosted was an hour-long studio debate on journalistic ethics and the tabloidisation of news and current affairs.

A traditionalist who endorses the notions of journalistic objectivity and the watchdog role of the media in the public sphere, Wendt is an icon of an era many media analysts believe to be passing in Australian commercial current affairs television. The approach of pay television and debt burdens many network owners inherited in the 1980s, caused Australian broadcast networks to look carefully at their production budgets and to demand that news and current affairs divisions show increasing profitability. The result has been an attempt to move the focus of such programs away from public sphere issues like politics, economics and science and concentrate on domestic sphere matters such as relationships, consumer issues, sexuality and family life. In many instances, this shift in focus has been accompanied by a more melodramatic, emotional approach on the part of journalists and hosts. It is a trend which Wendt has consistently resisted and which has led her to become a respected, but somewhat isolated figure in the commercial current affairs landscape of the 1990s.

-Joan Lumby