60 Minutes Beirut drama will live on as TV’s cautionary tale

Australian TV presenter Tara Brown, left, and Australian mother Sally Faulkner, right, leave a women's prison in the Beirut southeastern suburb of Baabda. Picture: Getty

The Nine Network has paid on the way in and on the way out.

“The Beirut story” will be etched into Australian commercial current affairs history as how not to do it.

First, being involved — in any way — in a kidnapping in Beirut was not smart.

Ironically, while Nine has tried to spin the idea that it was simply going to see a mother reclaim children who were duly hers against an unfair father, the network has ended up paying that ­father compensation.

Nine confirmed last night it was paying money as part of the deal to get its staff out of jail.

The annual budget for Nine’s news and current affairs departments is $160 million.

My estimate, based on having worked at Nine as an executive producer, is that Nine would have paid the father up to $3m in ­compensation.

Within Nine, it would be seen as money well spent; it gets their four employees home, it stems the flow of blood from 60 Minutes’ reputation and it allows Nine to get on with the business of ­competing for eyeballs.

The entire episode has been a disaster for Nine, in terms of costs as well as reputation.

Even if the network calls it “child recovery”, this was a kidnapping — two children were being snatched from their grandmother by masked men and then taken in a van to an unknown ­location.

Imagine if an agent from Mossad, Israel’s feared intelligence service, had gone to their superiors with the following proposal: we’re considering a covert operation in which we go into Hezbollah-controlled territory in Beirut and abduct two children.

The Mossad managers almost certainly would have looked askance. Mossad may have ended up doing it, but they are one of the few organisations that might get away with such an operation.

Nine ain’t Mossad.

60 Minutes appeared to undertake the operation with very little assessment of the dangers the ­operation posed to everybody — including the two children.

It seems Nine paid $115,000 for the Beirut story — either directly to the mother, Sally Faulkner, for her then to pay the abductors, or directly to the kidnappers.

Last night, Nine News began giving strong indications that a deal was about to be reached.

The four 60 Minutes crew members — reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment — were detained two weeks ago after an attempt by the British-based Child Abduction Recovery International to snatch the two children went wrong.

The agency managed to take the children from their paternal grandmother, but the children’s father, Ali Elamine, who lives in Lebanon, found out where they had been taken.

A key issue now is whether 60 Minutes directly paid the agency or whether it paid Ms Faulkner, who then paid the child recovery agency.

That Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were to leave their prisons is welcome news.

But now Nine needs to genuinely reflect on how it does its journalism.