ABC’s news director, Justin Stevens, has admitted a video clip of Australian troops firing from a helicopter in Afghanistan was “incorrectly edited” and has been removed two years after it was posted online.
“Just last week it was brought to our attention by Channel Seven that a video clip in an online story from two years ago had an error,” Stevens told the Melbourne Press Club. “A preliminary inspection suggests a section of audio was incorrectly edited.
“We removed the video and are still looking into how this happened. Once we have the full facts we will determine the appropriate response.”
Channel Seven accused the ABC of adding gunshot sounds to a video which accompanied a story produced by the ABC’s special investigations unit, at the time headed by Linton Besser, and award-winning reporter Mark Willacy.
The allegation was made on Seven’s Spotlight program which broadcast an interview with former commando Heston Russell about the ABC’s reporting on him.
Russell won a defamation case against the ABC last year and was awarded $390,000 after a federal court judge found the public broadcaster did not prove its reporting was in the public interest.
On Sunday Spotlight alleged raw footage of the incident shows that one shot from a helicopter became six shots in the ABC video.
The ABC removed the video and told the program ABC investigations head Jo Puccini, Willacy and reporter Josh Robertson “had no role in the production and editing of the online video you have brought to our attention”.
“Any suggestion that they have acted inappropriately or unethically is completely false,” a spokesperson said.
ABC News Breakfast’s co-host, Michael Rowland, asked Stevens how something like that could happen. “Let’s not sugarcoat it,” Rowland said during the Q&A. “It was a bad mistake, an audio editing issue that did not involve the journalists involved in putting together that story, including Mike Willacy.”
Stevens said the video editing was being investigated and the ABC would be transparent with the public once the facts were established.
In a wide-ranging speech, Stevens said the ABC is a frequent target and is the most scrutinised media organisation in the country. He revealed the ABC news budget is $311m.
He claimed sometimes what is called “scrutiny” is really an agenda-driven attack on the ABC “motivated by ideological, personal or commercial interests, often directed at specific journalists with the goal of denting their reputations”.
Stevens said “spurious attacks” on ABC journalists were made by both social media and some media outlets, but stopped short of naming them.
“Activists on X, for example, rarely go a day without piling on the ABC’s respected national political lead and Insiders host David Speers,” he said, adding that X had become the “preeminent platform for toxic abuse and disinformation” in recent years.
“David’s track record and work over decades is exemplary. Make no mistake: he’s a target of this vicious pile-on because a noisy cohort don’t want an impartial journalist in a role like his.”
Stevens said the attacks were disproportionally made on women, people of colour, culturally diverse people and First Nations.
“There are media outlets out there that are fixated on individual staff,” he said. “They campaign against them, they bully them. They’re trying to get them to not do their job. We won’t be intimidated.”
He also said the broadcaster is preparing for contingencies if Meta removes news from Facebook and Instagram because of government attempts to force it to pay for news under the news media bargaining code.
He said he had met with his counterpart at the Canadian broadcaster, CBC, where a ban has been in place since August last year.
“Hopefully Meta don’t go down that path, because if they did, particularly in the context of a federal election around the corner, it would mean that mass misinformation and disinformation would proliferate on people’s feeds,” Stevens said.
He said Meta may claim people are not using news on their platforms, but users are regularly seeking out and discussing news on Facebook and Instagram. “There’s no shortage of people’s interest in wanting to read that content,” he said.
He revealed the ABC has assigned a staff member to “properly facilitate information” on Reddit.
