60 Minutes admits ‘we made mistakes’, with 746,000 tuning in to watch tearful reunions
Last night’s episode of 60 Minutes drew an audience of 746,000 metro viewers for an episode which focused on the tearful return of the mother and crew to Australia.
60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown on last night’s show. Nine has now admitted it made mistakes.
At the start of the show, host Michael Usher admitted 60 Minutes was complicit in the “child recovery operation” of Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner’s children in Lebanon, telling viewers: “There is one thing we want to be clear about from the outset – we made mistakes,”
“In the next few weeks, we will share in detail what we know about this whole sad scenario and our role in it.”
The program then went to interview reporter Tara Brown where they discussed how “it went badly wrong” and Faulkner was forced to leave her children behind in Lebanon.
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In the interview between host Usher and Brown, the reporter told him of her shock at being arrested and how Faulkner has lost a lot in the turmoil that followed.
“I think despite how terribly it has gone she (Faulkner) has tried everything to get them back,” said Brown. “Ultimately she will be able to tell them she did everything.”
“I think when we presented ourselves and we were being questioned I thought we are journalists we are doing our jobs. They will see reason, they will understand that,” she said.
“I just thought reason would prevail, but it didn’t.”
60 Minutes was outrated last night only by the ABC’s Midsummer Murders, which had 778,000 viewers, and by the Seven and Nine news bulletins.
The second last episode of Darryl Somers’ You’re Back in the Room hypnotism game show drew 587,000 well down on its debut numbers which saw it pull well over 1m.
Seven’s broadcast of an AFL match Melbourne and Richmond drew 381,000 in Melbourne and Adelaide.
Ten’s highest rating program of the night was a repeat of Modern Family which had 331,000.
Seven’s 6pm news bulletin was the highest rating program of the night with 1.044m while Nine News’ bulletin drew 913,000.
Can’t even milk their own disaster. This is not the Channel Nine of old.
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I don’t think them making “mistakes” was in doubt.
Why they undertook an apparently criminal enterprise in a foreign country still seems a little cloudy.
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I would argue that the mistake lies in the values of Channel 9 and 60 Minutes – or perhaps – the lack there of. This is what happens when your only priority is profit driven by ratings.
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Pathetic. Allowing Brown to assert that kidnapping is journalism says it all.
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Channel 9’s personal and commercial ethics and their corporate and social responsibility have clearly been revealed and yes, heads need to roll to include those of Ms Brown as an extremely well paid ‘journalist’, and I use the term very lightly, who unquestionably has a great deal to say about what stories are told and how 60 minutes will go about telling them or, as the the case in this instance, creating them. Channel 9’s complicity in this whole matter and their lack of desire/ability to ‘do the right thing’ was revealed very early on in the piece when one of the executives, it may have been Wicks, responded to the press questioning him about direct payments from Channel 9 to the ‘recovery’ crew they hired/contracted and his only answer was, I cannot respond as it might ‘upset’ the Lebanese government. Once again with a media organization truth and honor take a backseat to ratings and public perception. He know they had made the payment(s) and rather than ‘not upsetting the Lebanese government’ he simply made Australia and Australians look substandard in the eyes of the rest of the world. It would be a good think to start #turnoffnine and #removeTara hashtags.
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Difference between creating news stories and reporting on them.
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I want to quite clear before I begin, even I have made mistakes.
The Crook: His biggest mistake was getting caught with the booty, red handed.
The Politician: Her biggest mistake was to underestimate the public when she deliberately lied through her teeth about her party’s intentions.
The Assassin: Whose biggest mistake, after setting up the hit brilliantly, was to forget to load the gun.
Anyone can make mistakes, anyone, even those news photographer guys during the Brixton riots, who paid black youths to petrol bomb empty shops, only after they had rung to inform the two guys of the exact bombing time.
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