Nine Network has big job to restore credibility after Lebanon

You couldn’t help but notice that sympathy for 60 Minutes has been in fairly short supply.

It’s good to see 60 Minutes ­reporter Tara Brown and her Nine network crew back home safe and sound from Lebanon. Just so long as no one at Nine runs away with the idea that their sojourn in a ­Beirut jail generated too much wailing and gnashing of teeth back here in Australia.

You couldn’t help but notice that sympathy for 60 Minutes has been in fairly short supply. A former Nine executive (now an assoc­iate editor with The Aust­ralian), John Lyons, wrote in a ­recent analysis piece: “Nine’s handling of its public relations is in chaos.”

Lyons, incidentally, estimated in an article in last Thursday’s The Australian that getting its team out of Beirut probably cost the network about $3 million. That’s a lot to pay for a story 60 Minutes didn’t actually get.

Not that we’re here to prosecute or persecute Nine or 60 Minutes. You don’t, ideally, kick people when they’ve been a fraction down. We know, from long experience, how easy it is for ­onlookers to seize the condemnatory moral high ground.

They often seize it without having had to make the big moral decisions, without having actually been there and without knowing the protagonists. So, hopefully, we’ll spare the network too many sanctimonious lectures.

It’d be unbelievable if 60 Minutes didn’t tell its own version of its Lebanese adventure, and good luck to it. Let’s hope we get clear-cut, unequivocal answers to a handful of questions the purists would like to see clarified.

Did Nine basically bankroll a child recovery/rescue organisation to snatch two young children (Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3) from a Beirut street in exchange for ­exclusive access to a “good” story? Why was this regarded as a good idea and was bribery involved in order to free Nine personnel from their incarceration? What had led 60 Minutes to the conclusion the children should more rightfully be with their Australian mother, Sally Faulkner, than with their Lebanese-US father, Ali Elamine?

Was sympathy and compassion, as opposed to high television ratings, the prime mover at the outset of the exercise? Will 60 Minutes continue to do chequebook journalism? Some would have other questions. But truthful answers to the abovementioned would serve for the moment.

But back to the perceptions of this affair. ABC television’s Media Watch first tackled the Lebanon snatch story on April 11, with its experienced, uncompromising pre­senter, Paul Barry, concluding that if Nine had paid for the ­failed snatch/kidnapping it had ­“behaved disgracefully’’.

Barry suggested whoever at Nine had authorised such an ­operation “should be sacked”. But, more significant perhaps, was that Barry’s segment elicited 44 viewer comments. That, in comparative terms, is quite a few. Some MW segments attract no comments at all. Others get two, three or five.

Look, we don’t normally do this but, because we’re talking about public perceptions and ­because a reader took the trouble to bring the comments to your correspondent’s attention, we’ll trawl through a handful of those 44 reactions.

Maybe they can serve to ­reinforce our earlier contention that Nine’s Beirut cause didn’t stir broad public sympathy as well as impart the general flavour from a section of the public mood for those who, like the scribe, rarely if ever look at viewer comments.

This is one that goes directly to public relations and to what Lyons referred to as Nine’s chaos: “It seems strange to think that Channel 9 are not able to stem the anger that people feel and just own up to some really dumb decision-­making. Unfortunately, they have had the Channel 9 staff roll out to the media some really appalling support, such as (prominent Nine presenter) Karl Stefanovic claiming the situation (resulting in Brown, her crew and others being jailed) is Orwellian.

“Unfortunately it is, but not in the way he thinks. What is Orwellian is to ­describe child abduction as child recovery; Tracy Grimshaw (the presenter of the network’s A Current Affair) saying the team aren’t cowboys. True, but now they are potentially criminals; Ray Martin (a senior Nine journalist) saying journalism is ethical, then volunteering he also was involved in child abduction in the 80s. It makes you wonder whether Channel 9 really understands ...”

If Nine is looking for sympathy or if 60 Minutes is seeking deep ­appreciation, they’d best look away, now. This was another MW comment: “Why can’t they (60 Minutes) just continue their ­reports about the 20 cents you will save when you don’t go and shop at Coles, Woolworths and IGA ...” There were references to “journalist thugs”. Someone wrote: “I hope they (the incarcerated) do 20 years with hard labour.” There was this: “I hope the court throws the book at them.” Nine, wrote ­another, had been “complicit in a crime”. There was this: “She (Brown) will do whatever it takes for ratings.” Another viewer said: “I watched 60 Minutes once, shortly after I came to Australia and found its claim to be a current ­affairs program nothing short of laughable.”

We promise you we’re not being deliberately unkind, simply pointing to the perception problem this story caused for the network. Certainly it would be unfair if we didn’t include this: “Tara Brown’s history strongly suggests she’s against women kidnapping their children and ­abducting them overseas. She did excellent work in the Tomasso Vincenti case that involved an Australian mother who (in 2010) abducted her (four) daughters from Italy (their home) to Australia. Whatever else may be true, Brown doesn’t support women who abduct their kids from their fathers.”

We’ll have to leave it there. Perhaps there’s just space to squeeze in a tribute to Nine’s most effective public relations advocate, the abovementioned Ray Martin. Martin, 71, the owner of five Gold Logie awards and the doer of many fine stories down the years, has been accessible, ­pragmatic and straightforward throughout the entire saga. He even managed to put forward a reasonably passable case for chequebook journalism. That, given the circum­stances, takes a fair bit of doing.