Fred Tulett, a former Southland Times editor who died on Monday, has been described as “old school”. It was an apt description and one that should be regarded as a compliment.
Fred, who died in his Central Otago home aged 77, edited the Invercargill daily for 15 years until his retirement in 2013. He led the paper with great verve and ensured it was a force in the region at a time when the provincial press was generally in decline.
Before that he was chief reporter of The Dominion, which was when I worked with him.
He was a tough, savvy, quick-thinking newsman with the voice, appearance and manner of a regimental sergeant-major. I probably wouldn’t agree with Stuff CEO Sinead Boucher on many things, but her description of Fred as a warhorse of the newspaper industry was spot on.
She also said he was a representative of a past era in New Zealand journalism. That could have been interpreted in two ways, one of them not complimentary, but it too was true. We didn’t realise it then, but it was a golden era.
As chief reporter of the Dom, Fred could be brusque but had a reputation for backing his staff. Two former Dom reporters who contacted me yesterday commented on his staunch defence of them when they were under attack. Fred didn’t lose many battles.
He was noted for his collaboration with the late David Hellaby on a series of investigative stories that exposed a white-collar crime ring – the so-called Gang of 20 – that was centred on a dodgy company called Registered Securities Ltd. Several of the principals ended up in jail.
But the episode I remember when I think of Fred is the sensational exclusive story he wrote for the Dominion Sunday Times – the Dom’s stablemate – about the affair that caused the collapse of David Lange’s marriage.
Fred just happened to be in the office tidying up his desk on a quiet Saturday in 1989 when the phone rang. The call was from an angry and resentful Naomi Lange, who wanted to expose her husband’s relationship with his speechwriter, Margaret Pope. Lange, who had only recently stood down as prime minister, had announced two days earlier that the marriage was over but hadn’t indicated why.
Cool and quick-thinking as ever, Fred’s first reaction – counter-intuitively – was to ask Naomi to hang up so he could call her back. We had the Langes’ home number in our files and he wanted to be sure it wasn’t a hoax call.
In Lange’s own words in his autobiography, Naomi “poured out her anger about me and Margaret” in her interview with Fred. Naturally his story was all over the front page and dominated the national conversation for days. It seriously damaged Lange’s reputation.
I remember thinking it was extraordinarily lucky that Fred was at his desk when the call came in. The only reporter in the office at the time was timid and inexperienced and might well have hung up in fright, but Fred was a born newsman and knew exactly what to do.
11 comments:
Fred is ten years older than me but I remember him often being spoken about by older journos on the Taranaki Herald back in the old NZ News days ...Jim Tucker, June Litman , George Koea, Garth Gilmour come to mind. Sadly few remain.
I read more of the ''new era'' prose on Stuff today...one was about two young candidates (of the correct side of course) lamenting abuse they got on the campaign trail.
Quite revealing is one candidate's comment that the political system and politicians forced on the country 169 years ago are not ''representative of Aotearoa''. I have a good idea what his alternative would be but he (age 19) did not say.
That was good-thinking by Fred to check back that it was Naomi calling. While calls like that once did happen, there were also hoaxes. I once took a call at home late one night from a woman claiming to be the wife of a prominent cabinet minister, wanting to tell all about a major issue of the day. It was still in time for my morning newspaper deadline, but I was suspicious. I had never spoken to the actual minister's wife so did not know her voice, but I knew where they lived. I said I would come straight round and asked for her address, and she stumbled, unable to give it.
I later discovered the caller was a member of the Press Gallery, trying to fool me into running a false story.
Fred was one of those legends, like Bert Nealon and Frank Haden. While I knew and had worked with both of them, I never met Fred, more's the shame, but I knew his reputation. Fabulous that the entire front page of the Southland Times yesterday was taken up with a tribute to him, turning to page two even!
I never knew Fred Tulett, either, but in a way I did know him.
So many chief reporters, news editors, sub-editos were alike. They would not have survived well in today's climate where a bollocking is seen as bullying.But facts were everything.
I was hugely impressed that he got the story of suspicious activity by Israeli citizens after the big Christchurch earthquake on February 22, 2011.
He must have had superlative contacts in the security/police services - or else the leakers of the story chose their newsman well. An old-style, hard-nosed editor who would not have touched the story and put it in his solid, provincial newspaper at the bottom of New Zealand unless there was something in it.
He wasn't an innocent, excitable cadet.
As I said, I didn't know him but he's another from my era - Peter O'Hara, whom I did know, is another - who has gone.
- Paul Corrigan
A terrific boss who shaped many many reporters careers. Certainly mine. Fred was also great for a laugh and he could take a prank as well as dish one out. And you are spot on Karl, so long as you were honest with him, Fred was fiercely loyal to his team of reporters. He could easily have elevated a couple of scrapes I got into but didn’t. He was, however, a crap shot with a shotgun. Almost every Qantas as we caught up over a smoke and a drink he would insist he had dropped the slow flying duck that he missed on the farm pond he once came to shoot on.
I was in the Dom/Sunday Times office the morning that Fred took the call from Naomi Lange and remember it well. (I wasn’t, I think, the timid sole reporter Karl mentioned, but was subbing up tables in the business department.) Fred’s voice boomed across the office — his excitement at the scoop must have pushed up his volume knob. Then over the next couple of hours he played and replayed the interview tape in loud five-second chunks so he could transcribe it.
Fred was known to raise his voice at times in the office but I also saw him be gentle and almost parental with young reporters.
An innovation he tried at the Southland Times was to run a column written by a pair of teenagers entirely in unparagraphed text language. It was unprecedentedly dreadful and Fred seemed to know it even as he sheepishly asked me to “edit” and post it on the ST website. But he was willing to try things out and get new readers.
Thanks Nick. No, you were not the reporter I referred to 😉.
These were also the years when politicians and journalists had a reasonable trust of each other, with journalists accepting politicians were doing their best for the country, and politicians accepting that journalists had to produce (accurate) stories about them, even if they didn't like those stories.
We journalists had easy access to politicians in those years. I began my career in Muldoon's era. You could phone him at work or home and if he was there he'd answer the phone and talk to you, often grumpily but he always talked. He'd call you back if he was out. Ditto with Bill Rowling (opposition leader for much of Muldoon's time), then David Lange, Geoff Palmer, Mike Moore and Jim Bolger. I have been invited fishing with Bolger and Bill Birch and eaten the fish they cooked. I've been to lunch at the Lange house in Mangere with David and Naomi. Had morning tea with Helen Clark, who would also take my phone calls and even ring me as PM if she thought she could help with a story she knew I was writing. None of these politicians put any pressure on me to write anything flattering or promotional or kind or anything like that about them. They just trusted me and many if not most other journalists to write accurate stories and that is what we did. Politicians from all parties would speak to me, even Winston Peters, about whom I also wrote what I believed was accurate but I suspect he didn't.
Politicians had increasing numbers of spin doctors from Muldoon to Clark and beyond, but up till the Clark years there was a general respect and even at times friendliness between politicians and journalists, as I have tried here to describe.
Since the latter part of the Clark years, many politicians have increasingly discovered they can't trust all or even many journalists to tell a story straight or even report all the facts. We have witnessed the rise of the Journalist as Campaigner not for truth, justice and the public's right to know, but for a small range of arguable causes dear to academia and the journalist graduates therefrom. This change in outlook began, probably not coincidentally, as the internet began to eat the audiences and revenue of the mainstream media and as more and more of the post-2000 products of university media courses entered newsrooms believing their job was to promote the approved cause and oppose, deplatform and cancel the unapproved; not find the facts, tell them straight and let the public decide who and what to support. Virtually every journalist in NZ and elsewhere began living on Twitter, where only the Approved issues were allowed, and whose denizens (who also included academics and political activists) whipped up huge mobs to demand the sacking or cancellation of people with the wrong contrary view.
In recent times, much media reporting has reflected the prejudices of the day of the Twitter Mob. It's thus almost amusing that Musk's bizarre buying of it and suddenly allowing other points of view has infuriated the media and academic folk who dominated it, leading to many leaving Twitter in dudgeon. I say "almost amusing" because I believe the oligarchs who own these new media such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon and all the rest are a greater threat to democracy and freedom of opinion and belief than the current generation of journalists.
Journalism legends like Fred Tulett and Frank Haden and Pat Booth and many others were products of their time but they were journalists who believed in the right of the public to know what was going on. They were not political activists who believed the public should only know what the journalists believed should be known.
Thanks David.
Grant Harding: It wasn't until I met Fred on the street one day that I realised he wasn't tall, because in the newsroom he was a giant, a man I was in awe of, and pleased to have as my boss. I will always remember him as one of the best people I have ever worked with. You are right to say it was a golden era Karl - for a start there was no internet when I started at The Dominion in 1987, and Fred was one of three chief reporters, who served three news editors, an assistant editor and editor. The newsroom in Wellington was always abuzz with energy due to Fred, Dave and Alan, and a huge staff of reporters, subs proof readers and administrators. But I always regarded Fred Tulett as the leader. He was an outstanding mentor to all. He didn't just ask you to go the extra mile, he demanded it through his own adherence to excellence and the occasional standover as you hunched at your typewriter to tell you to "get it written". It was a bit more laidback in the Hawke's Bay office where Phil Kitchin's hammock was hung in a former bank vault. Vail Fred
RIP Fred. One of the great newsmen of our time.
I don't think I really have words for the far-reaching effects Fred (and Barrie Swift) had on me during my six-month stint at The Dom in the early 1990s, even if I was probably youthfully arrogant enough to complain about it from time to time. I learned good habits and skills from them I still use 30 years later.
My favourite memory of Fred was one day when sent something through to him at the chief reporter's desk, and swivelled over to see he'd got it. Fred was talking to someone on his way to the smoking room, cigarette already on his lip, digging in his pockets for his lighter... then he glanced towards the screen. Frowned. Took the cigarette from his lips. Looked over at me. "Dowling, what in God's name is this shit." (You could have probably heard it in Petone.) The walk to his desk felt longer than a math's exam. By the time I got there he'd pulled a seat over and told me to sit down in a far gentler tone. I can't even remember what the story was. Whatever it was, the first draft must have been a fright.
When I ducked into the Dom a few years later on a trip back from London, Fred couldn't have been more pleased to see me and took me straight to the pub for a drink and a catch-up. I really wish I'd kept in touch with him more closely over the years.
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