Sometimes stories hit harder than expected for veteran newsman Michael Usher. In a career spanning more than three decades, it’s bound to happen. And, when it does, Michael can’t stop the tears from flowing.
Recently, the 7NEWS Spotlight presenter was co-hosting Seven’s Anzac Day coverage with colleague Monique Wright. After one moving news segment, Michael broke down on air. His reaction was raw and natural.
Like many, Michael grew up watching his grandfather – one of the ‘Rats of Tobruk’ who fought in World War II – march in Anzac Day parades. As he watched the news package this year, something caught Michael’s eye that instantly transported him to his youth.
“I saw images of one man in the archival footage that looked like my grandfather,” Michael, 56, tells TV WEEK. “It grabbed my heart and squeezed it. I just got so emotional.”
Often, when covering breaking news, Michael is learning information as quickly as he’s delivering it to audiences. In these moments, such as when he was called in from annual leave to lead Seven’s coverage of last year’s Bondi Beach shootings, he’s doing his best to remain calm while guiding viewers through “such awful news”.
“A lot of it is you sitting there at the desk thinking to yourself, this is affecting me badly,” he says. “I know it’s going to affect my family badly. Let’s just deliver calmly what we know and be careful with what we don’t know.”
When he’s not anchoring news coverage, Michael sinks his teeth into long-form journalism on 7NEWS Spotlight, which he likens to working on a “submarine”.
“You go deep for six weeks or six months on some stories,” he says. “I’ve got one story I’ve been working on for two years that we still haven’t got to air yet.”
Michael thinks a lot about the trust people have placed in him to tell their stories, when he’s asking “very private people to pour their hearts out”. Like being there when Sydney father Danny Abdallah confronted Samuel Davidson, the man who killed three of his children and their cousin, crashing into the group of children on the pavement when he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and forgave him.
“Danny said to me, ‘What else do I do? Do I hold on to all of that negativity and hate for the rest of my life, which will come at risk to me, my marriage, my other children, my friends, my business? Or I can forgive and try and make things better for all of us.’
Michael tells us: “I’m still in awe of his forgiveness.”
This year marks 10 years since Michael switched from the Nine Network to Seven. Yet there is one dreadful story he reported on more than 20 years ago that sticks with him.
The journalist was covering the 2004 Athens Olympics, when he was sent to Beslan, North Ossetia, in Russia, where a hostage situation at a school led to the deaths of 186 children.
“The families went in and took their children and prepared them in their homes that night and then buried them very quickly the next morning,” Michael says. “All night long, there was wailing echoing through the town.
“The next day, there were parades of people carrying the caskets of the children who’d been slaughtered to their graves. I broke down a few times away from camera. It was just all too much.”
Covering the news might take up a large chunk of his life, but Michael did get to show a clean pair of heels as a finalist on Dancing with the Stars in 2025. Watching on were his children Tom, Max and Alex, who lovingly mock their father by referring to him as “newsman”.
“They said, ‘Go and not be newsman for a while and give it a go,’” Michael recalls with a smile.
“And they turned up to all the rehearsals and watched all the shows.”
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