ABC’s big call on ‘fake gunshot’ scandal

An independent investigation into altered audio aired by the ABC in relation into the actions of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan has found there was “no evidence of any intent to mislead”.

In September, the Australian broadcaster was criticised for broadcasting footage that was edited to include audio that depicted soldiers firing six shots at two unarmed Afghani civilians from a helicopter. Just one shot was fired in the original footage and it was a warning to enemy insurgents, former special forces commando Heston Russell said.

While the original video was aired by the ABC in 2022, Mr Russell aired the claims in an explosive interview with Seven’s Spotlight program earlier this year.

After furore over the incident, the ABC removed the 56-second video, acknowledged the error in the video and initiated an independent investigation.

During senate estimates on Tuesday, ABC acting managing director Melanie Klein revealed an interim report conducted by journalist Alan Sunderland found there was “no evidence of any intent to mislead by any ABC employee”.

“The review found no evidence of any intent to mislead by any ABC employee,” Ms Klein said.

“The interim report has also rebutted the suggestion that the central focus of the entire story was misleadingly altered.

“The review has also found that the stories contained important issues that are in the public interest in relation to the issue of altered audio.”

The report also said there was no deliberate effort to “distort the depiction of the events that occurred,” and said it was “not a deliberate editorial decision to include additional gunshot audio in order to mislead or deceive”.

ABC news director Justin Stevens also denied the footage was doctored and criticised the response from competitor media companies.

“The great shame from all of this is that for weeks, various outlets have accused journalists of the highest integrity of doctoring material, which is one of the most offensive and damaging allegations one can make against a journalist,” he said.

“The meaning of doctoring is to deceitfully change something intentionally. What Mr Sunderland’s review shows independently is that our team and journalists and executives at all levels did not doctor any material

“So there was mistakes, but it was not deliberate, and there was no doctoring.”

More to come