The ABC has appointed veteran journalist and media executive Alan Sunderland to undertake an independent review of the broadcaster’s Line of Fire reports about an Australian military operation in Afghanistan.
The Line of Fire reports concern an online article and 7.30 story by one of the ABC’s most experienced journalists, Mark Willacy from the ABC’s Investigations unit.
The ABC has admitted a video clip of Australian troops firing from a helicopter in Afghanistan in 2012 was “incorrectly edited” and later also expressed concern about the reporting and the use of helmet cam footage.
Willacy has won seven Walkley awards including a Gold Walkley in 2020 for exposing alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.
Sunderland is a Walkley-award winning former SBS and ABC journalist who had responsibility for the public broadcaster’s editorial standards, editorial complaints and journalism training for six years until 2019.
His report, which will investigate allegations about the reporting and the editing of the footage used in the Line of Fire stories, will be completed by the end of October and released publicly.
The broadcaster’s managing director, David Anderson, revealed this week a letter sent to ABC Legal raising concerns about the audio editing was not passed on to editorial.
Channel Seven accused the ABC of adding gunshot sounds to a video which accompanied an online story published in 2022.
The original video did contain audio of both one shot and six shots but the edited video transposed the six shots.
The ABC said the Sunderland review will include all aspects of the Line of Fire reports broadcast on 7.30 in September 2022 and published online.
The allegations of inaccurate editing were made by former commando Heston Russell in an interview with Seven’s Spotlight program.
The ABC has said Willacy was not involved in the editing or the production of the video in which the gunshots were heard.
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.
The case was brought over two online news articles, a television news item and a radio broadcast that relate to the alleged actions in Afghanistan in 2012 of the November platoon, which Russell commanded.
Justice Michael Lee found the ABC defamed Russell by conveying that he was “the subject of an active criminal investigation into his conduct as a commando in Afghanistan” and “reasonably suspected … of committing a crime or crimes when he was a commando in Afghanistan”.
Lee found that Willacy, who was the author of the articles alongside his colleague Josh Robertson, had not established the public interest defence.
Lee said he had no doubt Willacy “believed the publication of the matter was in the public interest” but “his belief was not reasonable in the circumstances”.
The article published in November 2021 “overstated the cogency of the evidence in the ABC’s possession and was published following several missteps, including the failure to procure fairly and consider a response from Mr Russell”, Lee found.
But the publication was not “improper, unjustified, or lacking in bona fides” because the ABC considered it was important and of public benefit.
