Obituary: Kevin Sanders – Television.AU

Kevin Sanders, pioneering Australian journalist who became well known in the US, has died at age 87.

Born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, he started his career at Perth radio station 6PR. He then made the move to television at ATN7, Sydney, and on to Melbourne’s GTV9, where he presented a late night 15-minute news program, Kevin Sanders Reports. Even in his early days in television, he was already in demand for speaking at conferences and events. “I welcome these appearances,” he told TV Times in 1963. “Because they give me a chance to speak to a live audience instead of a camera.”

When the full-time coaxial cable link between GTV9 and TCN9, Sydney, opened later that year, became Australian television’s first Canberra correspondent, presenting nightly reports from the national capital for both channels’ evening news bulletins.

By the early 1970s he had moved to the US, first hired at Los Angeles station KTLA5 before joining Eyewitness News at WABC7 in New York as a cultural affairs commentator.

He returned to Australia in 1977 to become a freelance producer and co-host of Nine’s A Current Affair with Sue Smith. The hosting line-up lasted only six months.

He later became a science reporter for CNN and produced documentaries aimed at increasing awareness around the dangers of nuclear weapons. In 1996 he was the only journalist to cover the entire proceedings of the World Court hearings in the Hague on the legality of nuclear weapons. He later wrote, produced and hosted the Globalvision documentary on the hearings, The People vs The Bomb.

Source: TV Tonight, Legacy. TV Times, 24 July 1963, 4 December 1963, 12 February 1977, 27 August 1977.

1 thought on “Obituary: Kevin Sanders”

I admired Kevin Sanders and am sorry to hear that he has died. I remember him as one of the few openly progressive news and current affairs personalities on Melbourne television in the mid-1960s. This took courage and determination. I also heard, as a freshman, Kevin Sanders address a student audience at the University of Melbourne in 1966. He had visited Indonesia and pointed out that between 2 and 2-1/2 million people had been killed there at the time – in late-1965 or early-1966. Many, if not most, of these victims were people who had been slaughtered by their neighbours for no political reason. The disorder and bloodbath conceiled the fact that many Indonesians with a grudge were using the civil chaos to get even with each other. The military sat back and accepted this. – Kevin Sanders eventually left Australia’s Channel 9 for the U.S., estranged by Eric Pearce’s sympathy for the Liberal-Coalition government and its policy of support for the the U.S. in the Vietnam War.

Kevin Sanders made a valuable contribution to informing Australian what was really going on in the worls around them.