ABC news boss Gaven Morris resigns from public broadcaster

Gaven Morris’ resignation follows a year of turmoil within the national broadcaster’s news and current affairs division. He has been eyeing an escape.

Battles with senior journalists, who at times acted like a law unto themselves, placed a huge strain on Gaven Morris. Picture: AAP

When ABC staff were told via email at lunchtime on Thursday that the public broadcaster’s news boss, Gaven Morris, was quitting, few were surprised.

For well over a year, Mr Morris – who has held the prestigious post of the ABC’s director of news, analysis and investigations since October 2015 – has been confiding to friends and colleagues that he’s had enough of the job, and was eyeing an escape.

“I reckon he deserves a medal for lasting six years – it’s one of the toughest editorial jobs in the world, what with the conflicting agendas of some staff and political stakeholders,” one well-placed source told The Australian. “It’s a nightmare. He’s done a good job, considering.”

Another ABC source simply offered: “He’s well and truly over it.”

If 2020 was a rough year for the ABC and Mr Morris, 2021 has been twice as hard.

Rolling, internal battles with senior journalists, who at times acted like a law unto themselves, placed a huge strain on the 49-year-old, who was also under immense pressure from the ABC hierarchy to rein in the seemingly unregulated use of social media by some of the public broadcaster’s highest-profile reporters.

His farewell note to staff carried a weary tone. “It’s without doubt a challenging job, but also fulfilling and worthwhile. I’ve given it my all,” he wrote.

But for all his professional achievements – and he can claim many – Mr Morris has found himself in the middle of almost all the public controversies to have consumed the ABC in the past 18 months.

The heated internal debates, disputes and missteps certainly weren’t all Mr Morris’ doing, of course, but he was unable to effectively crack down on some of the attitudes and behaviours of some of his most senior staff.

Emma Alberici.

In August last year, one-time ABC star Emma Alberici accused Mr Morris of undermining her in her ongoing spat with former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had taken issue with the journalist’s 2018 article on corporate tax rates that included nine errors.

“Despite the enormous toll his actions have taken on my mental health, Gaven Morris wanted to call it a termination payout, no doubt so he could tell the world I was fired for incompetence or some such,” she posted on Twitter the day after she left the ABC.

But the Alberici matter was just the beginning of Mr Morris’ internal battles.

In November 2020, the now infamous Inside the Canberra Bubble episode aired on the ABC’s flagship current affairs program, Four Corners, for which Mr Morris has editorial oversight.

The program carried allegations about the personal lives of some Coalition ministers, prompting Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to write a letter to ABC chair Ita Buttrose, asking her to explain how the expose of the private lives of politicians was in the public interest.

Soon after, Mr Morris made the fateful decision to kill one of the ABC’s golden geese, by shifting Q+A from its established Monday night timeslot to Thursday nights – a move that began its inexorable ratings slide to virtual irrelevance within months.

Amid all this, Mr Morris was telling colleagues he was becoming increasingly annoyed by the often ill-disciplined and inappropriate social media postings by ABC staff.

That issue was to come to a head later in 2021, when Sally Neighbour, executive producer of Four Corners, was the subject of an internal investigation into the Twitter posts she made at the conclusion of the defamation action that former attorney-general Christian Porter had brought against the ABC.

Louise Milligan Picture: David Geraghty

Soon after, a defamatory tweet that the program’s high-profile reporter, Louise Milligan, posted about federal MP Andrew Laming resulted in a taxpayer-funded bill of more than $130,000 in damages and legal fees.

The Australian understands Ms Buttrose was incensed by the senior journalists’ activity on social media, and much of the pressure to enforce change in that area fell to Mr Morris.

In February, ABC Online published an article by Milligan containing allegations against an unnamed senior cabinet minister. That story became the subject of defamation action taken by Mr Porter – who outed himself as the minister referred to in the February 26 article, and denied the allegations – with the matter ultimately costing the public broadcaster $780,000 in legal fees and mediation costs.

In June, there were further rumblings of discontent from within the news and current affairs team, when Mr Morris opted to delay the airing of a Four Corners episode about Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s alleged links to a known supporter of the QAnon far-right conspiracy movement, a move that caused friction within the once tight-knit team referred to in-house as “4C”.

But perhaps the final straw was the drama that befell the ABC’s “true crime” investigation about the fatal fire at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1979.

Mr Morris signed off on Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire but it was beset by accusations of sloppy journalism and lazy research, and eventually subjected to an external review, which found it had wrongly implied former NSW premier Neville Wran was linked to corrupt activity.

By the time the damning external review was made public six weeks ago, Mr Morris was preparing to announce his intention to leave the ABC.

Mr Morris and Ms Buttrose did not respond to questions from The Australian.

Perhaps the final straw for Gaven Morris was the drama that befell the ABC’s ‘true crime’ investigation about the fatal fire at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1979. Picture: AAP