The public has a right to know how 60 Minutes stuffed up on the Lebanon kidnap case

If the Beirut child snatch story had come off we could expect to see an episode of 60 Minutes with all its distinctive elements: sonorous voiceover, nerve-tingling music, tear-stained interview, dramatic street scenes and cloying journalistic satisfaction that a wrong had been righted and justice done.

All the traditional elements of entertainment infused with “current affairs”.

Instead, we are left with a pile of unanswered questions from a TV network looking shabbier than usual. Who authorised the Beirut story, who signed off on the payments to facilitate it, was legal advice provided, and will the results of an inquiry conducted by Nine Network insiders be made public? No response to those questions has emerged from Nine’s spinners. Instead, we are gracelessly flicked a non-statement and told: “This note to Nine staff from [chief executive] Hugh Marks is all that we are saying.”

There’s another important question: why did Nine seek to fudge the truth about payments to the abduction recovery “expert” Adam Whittington and his company? The network has been content to let the public and the relevant authorities believe that the abduction recovery was being driven by Faulkner. Now it’s evident that Nine’s fingerprints are all over bank transfers to IPCA Ltd, a corporate entity associated with Whittington, and that the network is involved in orchestrating the botched rescue mission.

The extent to which there has been a failure of journalistic ethics by Nine could conceivably be analysed at journalism schools around the country for decades to come. Letting the co-conspirators swing in the breeze while Nine’s precious cargo of talent pays its way out of trouble deserves an entire chapter.

Marks’s note does contain this extraordinary line:

... at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they had breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally’s story.

In other words, to Marks’s way of thinking, an intention to engage with British “recovery” lads to snatch children off the street of a foreign country miraculously would not leave any of the perpetrators open to criminal charges, if caught.

He’s having a big lend of us. For now the stuff-up is to be buried in an internal inquiry headed by 60 Minutes founding executive producer Gerald Stone along with David Hurley, a former executive producer of the tabloid news program A Current Affair, and Nine’s general counsel Rachel Landers.

Stone and Hurley have been at the cutting edge of chequebook journalism. It’s surprising former 60 Minutes presenter Ray Martin wasn’t included on the panel, what with his experience as a get-away driver for an earlier Channel Nine child snatch in Spain. Maybe, that was too far a stretch even for Nine because last weekMartin told ABC radio that the 60 Minutes crew has been “ethical and I think they have done the right thing”.