Sunday night will see another battle between Nine and Seven, as 60 Minutes’ Ben Roberts-Smith exposé takes on Spotlight’s exclusive interview with Bruce Lehrmann.
The duelling current affairs shows will face off days after Seven and Nine backed different horses in the Roberts-Smith defamation trial, with Seven boss Kerry Stokes’s pick losing badly when a judge found, on the balance of probabilities, that the newspapers being sued had proven in their defence that the former SAS soldier, who Stokes said was innocent, had committed war crimes.
The ruling was a vindication of the work by investigative journalists Nick McKenzie, 41, and Chris Masters, 76.
At Seven West Media’s annual general meeting last year, Stokes said: “Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent and deserves legal representation and that scumbag journalists should be held to account. And quote me on that.”
Revealed: The truth about Ben Roberts-Smith. SUNDAY on #60Mins, he used to be Australia's most revered soldier, but no longer. pic.twitter.com/HXarLv2KOm
— 60 Minutes Australia (@60Mins) June 1, 2023
The billionaire media mogul’s decision to fund his Seven Queensland executive’s legal fees has backfired and the pressure will now be on Seven West to defend employing a man who has been found by a federal court judge to have murdered unarmed civilians.
As Age investigative reporter McKenzie told ABC 7.30 after the verdict: “This is a media proprietor who should believe in journalism, yet he was waging a huge war against investigative journalism.”
Stokes, who employed Roberts-Smith in Queensland and backed his legal effort, said the judgment “does not accord with the man I know”.
“I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence,” he said in a statement to AAP.
Seven has another figure to showcase when former 60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett sits down with the man who was accused of the rape of Brittany Higgins at Parliament House. Lehrmann has always denied the allegation.
“7News Spotlight made no payment to Bruce Lehrmann for the interview, however the program assisted with accommodation as part of the filming of the story,” a spokesperson told Weekly Beast.
7NEWS Spotlight, this Sunday 7:00pm on @Channel7 and @7plus. #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/mqeSIgzOce
— 7NEWS Spotlight (@7NewsSpotlight) May 30, 2023
“Despite the headlines, Bruce Lehrmann has never told his side of the story, not one single word,” a promo says.
The interview was announced the day after Lehrmann dropped defamation proceedings against News Corp. “Nothing is off limits as he answers questions about what happened when he entered a ministerial suite with Brittany Higgins in the early hours of Saturday 23 March 2019.”
Meanwhile, over on Nine, 60 Minutes reporter Tom Steinfort, cameraman Scott Morelli and sound recordist Matt Brown will be speaking to Afghan witnesses to Roberts-Smith’s alleged crimes.
McKenzie, whose book Crossing the Line will be published by Hachette Australia in July, said Nine has been in contact with relatives of murdered man Ali Jan about the verdict.
“It was very hard obviously to make contact with people in Afghanistan given the current state of affairs,” the 14-time Walkley award winner said on RN Breakfast on Friday. “One of his relatives who was detained with him tells their story [on 60 Minutes] about what they saw.”
West Australian backs ‘war hero’
Kerry Stokes’ West Australian newspaper was sympathetic to Roberts-Smith to the end, with the headline on Thursday’s multi-page feature before the verdict reading “War Hero’s Day of Truth”. Inside he was given space to put his case that he was a victim of tall poppy syndrome: “The VC put a target on my back. I always followed the laws of armed conflict.”
There was even a hopeful line at the end. “If Mr Roberts-Smith wins he will be in line for the biggest defamation payout in Australian history – estimated to be multiples of the $2.9 million actor Geoffrey Rush was awarded from News Corporation.”
Running interference
When McKenzie and Masters wrote their stories in 2018, Roberts-Smith hired a PR firm and investigative reporter Ross Coulthart as a consultant and recruited the Weekend Australian to give him a favourable sit-down interview.
Accompanied by photos of Roberts-Smith with his then wife Emma, the former soldier claimed on the front page of the national broadsheet that the stories were “demonstrably false’’.
“Nine has accused me of murder,” he said. “Frankly, it is time for their journalists to put up their evidence or admit they have none.”
The Daily Telegraph continued to support Roberts-Smith too. The Sydney tabloid featured an exclusive interview with him in 2019 on page one to promote the Tele’s Save Our Heroes campaign. The newspaper version of the story failed to say that the Victoria Cross recipient was being investigated by the Australian federal police for alleged war crimes in an Afghan village in 2012. An interview with Roberts-Smith was also aired on Sky News.
And who can forget Peta Credlin in 2018 in the same paper saying: “I stand with uniform every time.
“Yet a series of articles in Fairfax newspapers, have thrown a lot of mud at Ben Roberts-Smith, with all sorts of damning details, and barely a hint that there might have been mitigating circumstances.”
Age holds its peace
The Age announced this week “A grand tradition is changing” – that is, that Nine’s Melbourne paper is trialling a reduction in the frequency of daily editorials. “Editorials will still run regularly on Saturdays and appear other days as required,” editor Patrick Elligett said. “In place of daily editorials, we will feature more reader commentary, new columns and quizzes.”
For 170 years the Age’s editorial writers have carefully articulated the publication’s viewpoint, Elligett explained shortly after taking on the role. Maybe it’s time to ask why a daily editorial is justified even when there is nothing obvious to say, he said. On Friday the Age published an editorial which clearly had a right to be there. “This masthead you support has prevailed in defending itself against the charge of defamation, and the court has found that the man who brought those accusations, funded by a rival media company, in fact committed war crimes and murders.”
Crikey raises a glass
Just like Nine, Private Media’s Crikey is celebrating a legal win of sorts. In April Lachlan Murdoch dropped his defamation proceedings against Crikey, ending a long and very stressful period for the independent media site. Costs are still to be decided but the company is holding an event at the Ace hotel in Sydney to reflect on the nature of media power in Australia.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, chief executive of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom Lesley Power, and Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane and editor-in-chief Sophie Black will discuss “The Murdoch method: how the powerful suppress stories that matter”.
Switzer ‘disappoints’ ABC
After Q+A host Stan Grant said he was stepping down, the Australian’s commentators Janet Albrechtsen and Tom Switzer, who is an ABC radio presenter, dismissed Grant as a “celebrity activist” who viewed Australia’s British heritage “with shame”. In the same piece they attacked RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas, a former employee of the Australian. “Patricia Karvelas aired something of a therapy session with head of Indigenous news Suzanne Dredge at the ABC – an evidence-free, emotion-laden 11 minutes showcasing the ABC’s self-indulgence,” they wrote. “Professional boundaries appear to be fewer and further between.”
The attack in the Australian on Grant and Karvelas by a fellow ABC presenter angered the management of Radio National and ABC staff, and the ABC said Switzer was given a dressing down.
“Stan Grant and Patricia Karvelas are two of the most respected and accomplished journalists in the country,” a spokesperson for ABC RN told Weekly Beast.
“The ABC strongly disagrees with the remarks in the Australian on May 24 about Stan and Patricia that you reference.
“We can confirm we have expressed our disappointment about the remarks to Tom Switzer, who co-wrote the article with Janet Albrechtsen. We’re not going to comment further on any discussions with our presenters.”
Bad choice of words
While Nine’s newspapers were celebrating one of the best investigations the mastheads have ever published, its TV division, Nine News, had to issue an apology of sorts after a TV newsreader referred in a bulletin to the Indigenous voice to parliament as “the divisive voice”.
Nine News, stablemate of the #SydneyMorningHerald & #TheAge have started using a new term in its broadcasts “The divisive Voice” in respect to the referendum.
— Philip Pollard (@archcontext) May 29, 2023
Incredible.pic.twitter.com/wHPsa2UoFI
“Our news teams have been reminded about using emotive language when reporting news stories,” Darren Wick, Nine’s director of news and current affairs, told Weekly Beast.
