60 Minutes kidnapping fiasco comes down to the question: who signed off on the money for the ‘child recovery operation’?
The fate of the 60 Minutes crew, who were stuck in a Beirut jail facing kidnapping charges, has dominated headlines for weeks. Nic Christensen looks at the questions Nine’s management team now faces and the questions whether anyone will be held to account.
The plight of journalist Tara Brown, Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew has, rightly, kicked off a public debate about the ethics of chequebook journalism.
But the key questions here are: what did Nine think it was paying for? How did they think it was okay to make a $115,000 payment to ex-soldiers to grab children from their grandparents in the middle of Beirut? And finally who signed off on all this?
Brown, Faulkner and co are now free – after Nine is reported to have paid a substantial sum of money to the father of Faulkner’s children Ali Elamine – and Nine is conducting an internal review to look at what went wrong, and how the TV network became embroiled in an international kidnapping fiasco.
Yet the question at the heart of this will come back to exactly who authorised Nine to make payments to the ‘child recovery firm’ of ex-Australian soldier Adam Whittington.
So many other questions around the wisdom, ethics and legality of 60 Minutes role:
– Why are they making innocent, vulnerable children caught in a marital dispute the subject of a TV show?
– Were they complicit in exposing those children to physical harm or mental trauma?
– Were they satisfied as to the wishes of the children to escape their father’s custody?
– Has their role and the payment of the money to get the crew released effectively foreclosed any ability by the mother to have future access or custody?
– Did any part of that payment find its way to officials such as to make it an illegal bribe under Australian or Lebanese law?
– What attempt was made by 60 Minutes to secure the release of Whittington and his team? Did they do anything in securing their own release that would compromise Whittington’s position?
– If successful in the abduction, would the 60 Minutes story have encouraged parents to attempt risky extraction of children in foreign countries?
Yes, this is not about paying for a story, it is about paying for a crime. If that’s what happened then Sixty Minutes crossed a line that should never be crossed in the name of journalism.
Great article Nic – so many questions need to be answered, and “someone” needs to be held accountable.
And I don’t care that happens to the thugs who pistol whipped a grand mother on the streets of Beirut and who have left a 4 year old child too terrified to leave home in case it happens again.
Ethics? The problem is, which ethics, what path should one take to find even the framework of an ethic with which to argue against this outrageous action.
News making used to be the event or occurrence itself, but for a long time, it has included a variety of things fabricated and funded to ensure a filler for the pages of the newspaper, or the gap in airtime and cyberspace.
As more and more news space has become available, so has bunk news and fabricated news been bulked up to fill that space.
In this, possibly never to be explained case, there is the attempted fabrication of news, leading to actual and unwanted news, driven by an arrogance difficult to comprehend; a kind of holier than thou move, in which, eager to be king, they appointed themselves “Dieu” and proceeded with the ” et mon droit “
Facts: If you contract a hit-man you are held to be guilty of murder. If you ‘conspire’ with others to commit a crime you’re guilty of being an accessory to the crime. If you just happen to be on hand and witness a crime and you report on this as an independent observer you are a journalist.
Ray Martin has made a fool of himself in this. Having his daughter doing the backup is even less impressive. But at least we know that this is not a mad adventure by a producer at nine. It’s a culture issue in TV.
Key point here is there was no story. Nine paid money to create one. Think of what that means in the daily bump and grind of current affairs etc.
criminal. And no matter what the mates find in the “inquiry” the CEO needs to own this.
Instead of Channel Nine focusing on creating sensationalist fodder for their so called ‘news’ broadcasts; why not focus on real events that are harmking the world?
– Climate change?
– Unaoil / Panama Papers
– Aboriginal communities in turmoil
There is so much they could cover. I wonder why they won’t?