Veteran current affairs journalist Kerry O'Brien has criticised the state of Australian politics and the media, saying interviewing has become too much of a "gladiatorial" sport.

The six-time Walkley Award winner signed off from the ABC's flagship investigative program Four Corners last year after five years as its presenter and more than 40 years with the national broadcaster.

Appearing on the ABC's Home Delivery, O'Brien said Australia's democracy was in a bad state.

"The health of the democracy can partly be measured by the health of its media and I don't think the health of our government, of our democracy, is great right now," he said.

"I don't think our politics is in a great state and I don't think our media is in a great state."

His comments come as Australia prepares for a federal election later this year.

O'Brien said political interviewing, in particular, had become a "gladiatorial" sport.

"I think it's too much the case. I think some people regard gladiatorial interviewing as good interviewing, and I never did," he said.

"It's the nature of political interviewing now, certainly with those so-called 'gotcha moments'.

"I never really consciously went for gotcha moments, but when you did occasionally get one it was, I thought, for the right reasons."

'TV is a superficial medium fundamentally'

Reflecting upon his childhood growing up in Brisbane, O'Brien said he could vividly remember when television first came to Australia in the 1950s.

But he said the television age had brought with it a "superficiality" that he did not like.

"It can be immensely powerful when it's used well, but it is a superficial medium fundamentally," he said.

"We as a broad community have been sort of drawn into the lives of often very uninteresting people that have the tag celebrity stuck on top of them.

"You can appreciate somebody coming up to you in a street and saying 'Listen, I just wanted to say I really like your work', and you go 'Oh great, thanks'.

"And then there is the person who comes up and says 'Aren't you that guy on television?'"

"All they're drawn to is that head on a box that they know, rather than whatever quality might come from whatever programs."

'A good journalist understands what makes people tick'

Australian journalist Kerry O'Brien in the 1970s and the present day. ( ABC )

O'Brien was first drawn to a career in journalism as a schoolboy at St Laurence's, a Catholic boys college in Brisbane.

"The first time I remember the word journalism swimming into my mind was the careers officer," he said.

"I took that seriously enough to have a crack at getting a cadetship at The Courier-Mail when I was leaving school, but that was no dice.

"I meandered around for three years before I stumbled into journalism at Channel Nine."

O'Brien said he was fortunate to have found a career that he was passionate about.

"It's a wonderful stroke of luck to find yourself in a job that you can have a passion for — that you can feel has an importance about it that is providing a genuine and important service for people," he said.

"A good journalist is a journalist who has enough understanding of what the public interest is and what makes people tick ... I always took the view that really I was there asking questions on behalf of the broad Australian public."

Hoping to become a gentler person

Having left the "daily grind' of current affairs journalism, O'Brien said he now had an opportunity to become a "gentler person".

"I don't think I have been a hard person, but you don't see the things that a journalist sees over those periods of times without being affected by it," he said.

O'Brien said there were moments during his career when he would be overcome with sadness.

"I can remember once standing on a street corner one night and just bawling my eyes out, and I could not understand why," he said.

"I just felt this enormous sadness inside.

"You look back on some of the stories that I have covered and the things that I have seen — standing on a mass grave, trying to make sense of Filipinos swept away in a tidal wave that's wiped out a Muslim fishing village and taken 8,000 lives.

"You are standing on the heap, this mound, this very large mound of a mass grave of several hundred people and you are seeing a tiny coffin, a tiny child's coffin attached to the back of a push bike and a grieving family pushing it up the hill to dig a little hole in the mass grave."

So what kept O'Brien in the journalism game?

"It is just a love thing," he said.

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Julia Zemiro's Home Delivery returns to ABC TV at 8pm.