Michael Charlton, first host of Four Corners and Gold Logie winner, dies

Michael Charlton, the inaugural host of the ABC's Four Corners program and Gold Logie Award winner, has died aged 98.

In his time as a reporter and presenter, Charlton covered US president John F Kennedy's assassination, the Apollo Moon landing and the Vietnam War.

His death was announced in The Telegraph UK. The announcement said he died at his home on August 24 but provided no further details.

He took up the role as Four Corners host in 1961 after previously hosting the opening night of ABC TV and a successful spell as a cricket commentator.

He won the Gold Logie in 1963, a year after venturing abroad to take on a role at BBC's Panorama program, where he worked until 1976, before hosting BBC phone-in program It's Your World in the 1980s.

A national celebrity

When Four Corners first aired in 1961 with a staff of six and a weekly budget of just £480 ($1,000), Australians had never seen anything like it.

It had an immediate impact, and Charlton's engaging style turned him into a national celebrity.

"The principle impact that I think it had was to catch a particular mood in Australia, a mood of growing independence, a wish to know more about the country itself," Charlton later said.

Within weeks of its debut, Australia's first TV current affairs show had shocked the nation.

It brought the abject poverty of an Indigenous community in New South Wales into the living rooms of white Australia.

"This is Box Ridge," presenter Michael Charlton announces standing amid corrugated iron shacks in his suit and tie.

"Just over here is a cemetery for the dead. And what Bishop Davies calls a cemetery for the living is all around us."

The impact was immediate, with people all over Australia outraged and the New South Wales government "deluged on Monday with all kinds of protests and outrage", Four Corners founding executive producer Bob Raymond later recounted.

Charlton also hosted the very first live Australian television coverage of election night on the ABC in 1958.

"Tonight, the ABC News service welcomes you to the first television coverage of a federal election," Charlton declared, cigarette in hand.