The proper thing to do would be for Lisa Wilkinson to hand back her Logie

The Brittany Higgins interview on The Project won the Logie award for best News Coverage or Public Affairs Report in 2022. Lisa Wilkinson accepted the award saying the interview was the most important work she's ever done.

Those who instinctively rubbish commercial TV journalism will need to check their prejudices. Seven’s Spotlight on Sunday night was impressive journalism.

Led by Mark Llewellyn, with Liam Bartlett interviewing Bruce Lehrmann, the Spotlight team explored a story of national significance, explaining it, probing it, asking hard questions. Whether we accept the former Liberal staffer’s answers is left to us to decide. This was journalism that respected the viewer.

The Project interview with Brittany Higgins that aired on February 15, 2021, was in a different category. Hard, probing questions were rare. Objectivity seemed absent. Fairness equally so. The shoddy journalism that went to air starts to make sense when you listen to the pre-interview audio conversation, obtained by The Australian, between presenter Lisa Wilkinson and Higgins. This full five-hour plus audio has never been made public, except for a 40-second grab that played in court last year and larger excerpts that featured on Spotlight. It is damning for all involved. And for fans of objective, serious journalism, there is so much to cause despair.

Not just the shameless war-gaming between Higgins, her partner David Sharaz, Wilkinson and producer Angus Llewellyn to get “friendly” MPs and journalists to keep Higgins’s version of the rape allegation and the political conspiracy to silence her going. What is equally troubling is how Wilkinson assumes the role of #MeToo maestro. The Ten Network celebrity can be heard helping Higgins frame her story, suggesting angles, and words, and making nasty and uncorroborated judgments about Higgins’s former boss, former defence minister Linda Reynolds, and Reynolds’s chief of staff, Fiona Brown, women whom Higgins maligns as villains in her own version of events.

For example, Wilkinson prattles on about a Twitter spat she had with Reynolds. So much so that she searches for the exchange on her phone, reads it out, commends herself for recalling this exchange. When Wilkinson described Reynolds as an “idiot”, the venom was palpable.

The same lack of professionalism is shown towards Brown. Higgins’s version of Brown and Reynolds as workplace villains who wanted to hide a rape for political purposes was, we now know, false yet was met with little curiosity from Wilkinson.

Brittany Higgins is interviewed by Lisa Wilkinson on The Project.

Wilkinson says she doesn’t want to put words in Higgins’s mouth before suggesting what she could say: “… speak about the culture that, you know, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but if you can enunciate the fact that this place is all about suppression of people’s natural sense of justice. Because you see around you the way that this place works.”

That is what Higgins does during The Project interview they recorded a week later. In fact, you might get sloshed if you downed a shot of vodka every time there was a word match between Wilkinson’s off-camera suggestions and Higgins’s eventual on-camera answers.

Here is Wilkinson again, playing apparent #MeToo director.

Lisa: And we’ve come a long way, if you look at the history of the world, we’ve come a long way in a very short space of time. But we can’t stop. And this is, like, if you were a bloke, you wouldn’t be getting this treatment.

Brittany: No, not at all.

Lisa: We must get that point across. Because that whole thing of what an incredibly safe place it is to rape someone. I mean it looks like intent.

Sure enough, when Higgins is filmed for the final interview, she says: “I just couldn’t live with myself if it happened to someone else.” The 61-year-old woman appears to be leading a woman in her 20s by the nose down the darkest alleys of #MeToo. “You’re doing something magnificent,” says Wilkinson. “So, it changes the culture there and it desperately needs changing. I’ll say it again, it’s a sick culture.”

Can’t Wilkinson see it is magnificent only if Higgins is telling the truth? If it’s not true, wicked is a more apt description. And Wilkinson cannot possibly know Higgins is telling the truth. No one knows what happened that night. There are two versions. There is an allegation. And there is a presumption of innocence. These aren’t nuances. These are fundamental elements to a democracy. Nuance appears to be tossed aside by Wilkinson.

Lisa: Because you’re taking back ownership of your story and what happened to you to make sure that it can’t happen to others. And it changes the culture as much as is possible. Because you’re also riding on the back of the Four Corners story, as you know.

Brittany: Yep, yep.

Screen grabs from Seven's Spotlight program of CCT footage showing Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann together at a bar, The Dock. Picture: 7 Spotlight.

Lisa: And that makes it so much more powerful than if it was standing out there on its own. It’s like the MeToo movement, it’s because women linked arms and rushed forward that all of a sudden the individual stories no longer got shouted down. It became, well, this is everywhere.

When Wilkinson talks about Canberra having its “own set of rules” during the five-hour conversation, that too is repeated by Higgins on air. Wilkinson even suggests Higgins take a sick day on her last day at work – the Friday before The Project airs.

I can think of a zillion other things I’d rather do on a Sunday than listen to Wilkinson play the role of therapist, coach and #MeToo conductor to Higgins. Yet it was a riveting masterclass that captures what happens when the believe-all-women mantra appears to take hold of a journalist. Believe all women, another way of saying men are guilty, is an inherently and hopelessly flawed starting premise for any objective journalist.

The five hours of audio between Wilkinson and Higgins, with Sharaz and Llewellyn too, ought to be played in journalism courses across the country. And played twice to any student who fails a first-year subject.

Any good journalist learns to build rapport and establish trust with the person they want to interview. Wilkinson appears to go way beyond that as she lectures Higgins that “it’s about fear, it’s about intimidation, it’s sexist, it’s, everything is implied, everything’s in secret and that’s, everything seems to operate in dark shadows, because the minute you shine a torch on any of it, it’s as ugly as sin”.

The torch has turned on the Ten celebrity to reveal someone who appears hellbent on launching a #MeToo juggernaut, maybe picking up an award here and there, with a large side-serving of political partisanship, nasty invective about women and gratuitous snide gossip. What’s lacking is a sober, objective and fair search for truth. The proper thing to do would be for Wilkinson to hand in her Logie for her Higgins interview. That interview has been nothing but trouble for her, for the justice system, for good journalism and for people who deserved to be treated better.