The Australian vs Naomi Robson

She wouldn't give them an interview. They gave her a bloody nose.

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,19997692-5007183,00.html

NAOMI Robson doesn't do many interviews. Give them or conduct them, that is.

On the eve of her 10-year anniversary as host of Channel 7's Today Tonight in Melbourne, we wanted to talk to her about being one of the most watched, most successful women on television. She became the host of Today Tonight in Melbourne in 1997, then her audience expanded when she became the program's Sydney host in 2001 and the Brisbane host in 2003.

She commands an audience of more than one million people across the three capital cities alone, five nights a week.

But Robson declined to be interviewed by Media and we gather it has nothing to do with us. High-profile TV hosts such as Tracy Grimshaw or Seven's Melissa Doyle are often featured on the covers of women's magazines and their life stories are well known. Not so Robson who, apart from a few juicy scandals involving foul language and a criminal boyfriend, remains an enigma.

According to publicity sources, Seven has always been pretty reluctant to expose Robson to scrutiny. She does not have the skills to conduct on-screen interviews, having little, if any, experience as a reporter.

"They tried to get her to do interviews," a former Seven publicist tells Media. "But her sincerity factor was very low and she couldn't follow up questions."

Off air, the network feels she is too removed from her battler audience to risk exposure. (One example: when asked to name what she doesn't leave home without, Robson nominated her diamond necklace).

The director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Graeme Turner, who wrote Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia, says Robson came from nowhere and her appeal is difficult to fathom. But he sums it up as "a matron in Gucci".

"It's often said the most successful presenter is the one you want to have a beer with," he tells Media. "You would want to have a beer with Tracy (Grimshaw) before you want to have a beer with Naomi, but there's this cold, waspish, punishment-oriented, dominatrix in Robson that fits with the tabloid audience. They want to see these people (on the program) caned. And yet because she is relatively stylish and good-looking she doesn't come across as a harridan. There is a bit of matron in there."

Seven's director of news and public affairs, Peter Meakin, says Robson has done quite a few interviews, but we could find only light and fluffy articles in women's magazines and a few Melbourne newspapers. Where Robson is concerned, even the innocuous day-in-the-life-of pieces can be disastrous. This one from 2001: "6.30am. Still in her pyjamas, she has a quick flick through the morning papers. 'I have to know what's going on. We (with executive producer Neil Mooney and producer Steve Carey) have a meeting in the morning to talk about any ideas we've got for stories.' She has a quick shower and changes into her gym gear."

Gee, it must have been a very quick flick because by 7.30am she is at Toorak Personal Training Centre for her thrice-weekly gym session. "I find leg work to be the hardest, so I go to the gym to do that," she says. "On the days I'm not at the gym, I'll get on the treadmill and walk at home."

The diminutive Robson's obsession with her appearance is a trait that has not endeared her to her colleagues. That she is not well liked is evidenced by the leaking of not one but two highly damaging tapes of her in the TT studio. In one she swears nine times in 15 seconds. "They f*ing drop it in at the last minute, you should be able to read every f*ing word, every comma," she says. In the other, she calls the TT audience stupid and laughs at fat people while touching up her make-up. But the worst scandal hit in April when it was alleged she had a relationship with a cocaine-dealing Melbourne con man turned police informant.

But Robson has survived all the scandals, perhaps partly because the Melbourne media is so friendly to her and she is ahead of her game. Turner says TT has beaten A Current Affair so soundly partly because Channel 9 has been so suicidal about the show's direction. "Today Tonight mainly picked up viewers that ACA has shed," Turner says.

"I think what Robson does every time she performs is indicate a particular trashy, tabloid aesthetic, and she does that very well. If you see her as part of the overall look of the show, there is something about the visual style of the show that makes it look contemporary and more lively than ACA. The way she dresses and her cold, brittle image is part of that. If she was more warm and human there would be less of a distance between her and Tracy."

A former Seven publicist tells Media Robson is "totally self-obsessed", even while she is working, and he couldn't send her out to talk to the media because she "talks about her Gucci sunglasses, her personal trainer and her BMW" without a thought for how she may be perceived. She will sit in the studio and tell people how many stomach crunches she did that morning. Unlike your Ray Martins or Jana Wendts, Robson has little interest in the stories she presents and isn't even professional enough to fake it.

"She doesn't get who her audience is," a former colleague says. "She can come across as a snob and very elitist."

And that is why publicists keep her away from all but the friendliest journalists.

When she mixed with journalists at the biggest story this year, it all began to unravel. Robson went to Beaconsfield, along with the rest of the country's media, where her show-pony demeanour put a lot of people instantly offside. She suffered a barrage of bad publicity which, surprisingly, she addressed on air. Although aspects of the reports about her conduct in Tasmania were untrue - she did not have a Winnebago just for her hair and make-up - she was the only host to abandon the rescue scene and fly to Melbourne for the Logies. "You could not have imagined Melissa Doyle or Tracy Grimshaw leaving the story for the awards," one journalist says.

It is these traits that have given her the reputation of being more Frontline than Frontline, the satirical ABC program from the 1990s. That and her constant raising of her eyebrows and her comments after stories, such as "Mmm, disturbing" and "Mmm, not touching that one".

"She is the Mike Moore of Channel 7," one of Seven's Sydney journalists says, referring to her similarity to the Rob Sitch character in Frontline.

Unlike Grimshaw, Robson is a presenter rather than a journalist. Like the great Brian "Hendo" Henderson, Nine's former Sydney newsreader, Robson has no great journalistic background. A university drop-out, Robson worked in Britain during her 20s but the first media organisation to be named on her CV is Personal Success magazine, where she says she was assistant editor and features writer in 1989. In 1990 she joined Seven, and three weeks later was reading the news on Steve Vizard's Tonight Live, presumably based on her presentation and looks. The Californian-born beauty, who turns 43 this month, appears to have no affinity with the grotty neighbour-welfare bludger-rip-off merchant staples she fronts so confidently every night on TT. But as television is all about smoke and mirrors, it's working for Seven, so why change it?

Says Turner: "She is one of the great puzzles in broadcasting but she has been a successful presenter for a long time."