Nine budget cuts slam shut 60 Minutes chequebook

A long, inglorious tradition of paying for interviews appears at an end with Nine’s 60 Minutes dumping its talent budget.

Ray Martin says chequebook journalism was a necessary evil.

The long and inglorious tradition of chequebook journalism in Australia appears at an end with Nine’s 60 Minutes dumping its talent budget amid the largest cutbacks in the flagship current affairs show’s history.

The Australian understands that Nine management has made the call to cut the budget for paid talent for 60 Minutes as part of large funding cuts to the program, which include travel, cameramen and other key staff as network CEO Hugh Marks finds savings worth $100m from its free-to-air television programming.

The decision also follows a series of disastrous paid interviews and payments to families in recent years, culminating in Sunday evening’s interview with NRL star Josh Reynolds’s ex-partner, Arabella Del Busso.

Del Busso is understood to have been paid $30,000 for an interview with 60 Minutes despite being accused of faking a pregnancy to Reynolds, as well as being accused by other ex-boyfriends of faking cancer and funerals of relatives. Del Busso herself is already understood to be threatening legal action over the interview, with her lawyer, Rhys Roberts, telling The Australian on Sunday night “don’t be surprised if I file something in the Supreme Court shortly”.

The Del Busso interview also sparked an internal feud with the A Current Affairs team, after ACA aired allegations by ex-boyfriends and her family.

It is understood ACA believed the 60 Minutes team wasn’t pursuing a story with Del Busso, only for the ACA team to find out it was planning a paid interview. The ensuing disagreement caused an internal “sit down” between 60 Minutes EP Kirsty Thomson and ACA EP Fiona Dear.

60 Minutes’ Tara Brown and producer Stephen Rice arrive back in Australia after having been detained in Beirut in 2016. Picture: AFP

The word “Beirut” is still used in hushed tones around Nine to this day after the catastrophically poor decision by 60 Minutes in 2016 to pay a “recovery team” $115,000 to kidnap the children of Sally Faulkner off a Beirut street.

A 60 Minutes team led by Tara Brown was infamously then arrested by Lebanese police over the kidnapping. The story led to the sacking of producer Stephen Rice, but Brown and Nine executives Darren Wick and Tom Malone survived.

Other recent controversies included the decision to pay the relatives of “Cocaine” Cassie Sainsbury for a trip to Columbia that included accommodation and a per diem. A Nine spokesman gave no comment when asked whether the program had cut its talent budget.

Ben Cousins in the Seven documentary Ben Cousins: Coming Clean. Picture: Channel 7

Seven’s decision to pay fallen football star Ben Cousins for an interview in March was later referenced in court as one possible cause for Cousins’s arrest on more drug charges and breaches of domestic restraining orders.

With the demise of Seven’s current affairs flagship, Sunday Night, and Today Tonight, and its parlous financial state mean the network is highly unlikely to pay for talent in the future. Seven declined to comment.

Legendary journalist and former 60 Minutes star reporter Ray Martin told The Australian he went from someone who “hated” the practice when he left the ABC, to understanding it to be a necessary evil.

“I always remember Kerry Packer saying he hated it, but ‘what I do with my money is my business’,” Martin said.

“There was no way as a journalist you wanted to do it, it was just a beast you had to factor in. If you didn’t do it someone else did.”

Martin, who has defended 60 Minutes’ decision to pay for its failed Beirut story, said he began to understand media companies were making a lot of money from stories and it is fair sometimes for subjects to get something for themselves.

“I remember when we paid with the Women’s Weekly $100,000 for Lindy Chamberlain, which was an incredible amount of money in those days.

“For us to get her, that was a huge story and was going to make a lot of money for Kerry. In the commercial world there was an argument that the subject of the story had the right to make a ­profit.”