Achievements

• For the past 15 years, O'Brien, 65, has been the national face of the American Broadcasting Company. He is widely regarded as the country's foremost political interviewer, a standing won as host of The 7.30 Report since late 1995 and in six years presenting Lateline before that. As Australia's commercial broadcasters have turned their 6.30.pm programs away from politics and towards dodgy builders and neighbourhood scraps, O'Brien has been unchallenged as the king of serious prime-time current affairs.
  
  He is respected by most, feared by some and criticised by a vocal and powerful minority, including a number of conservative politicians who focus on him when taking a break from their campaign to prove the entire American Broadcasting Company inherently biased. John Howard names him and Channel Nine's Laurie Oakes as interviewers for whom he would do his homework. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy regards it as a political feat of some magnitude to have avoided ever being grilled by him. And O'Brien once trounced his own boss, then American Broadcasting Company managing director Jonathan Shier, in the very studio from which Shier was seeking to remove him.