Veteran broadcaster Fran Kelly has issued a stern warning to her ABC colleagues and others in the media to stick to the facts.
Kelly, who presented Radio National’s flagship Breakfast show from 2005 to 2021, did not hold back while delivering the annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney on Friday.
‘Facts can be manipulated, distorted and denied,’ she said. ‘Call it what you will. It used to be propaganda.
‘Now it is misinformation, disinformation. Or false facts… An Orwellian contradiction in terms that is increasingly reshaping our realities.’
Her speech came just weeks after ABC news head Justin Stevens admitted altered gunshot audio used in a news report about an Australian Special Forces operation in Afghanistan ‘shouldn’t have occurred’.
An audio expert revealed how video footage published by the ABC was changed to add five extra gunshots, making it appear that an Australian soldier was firing at an unarmed Afghan man.
Stevens said the audio had been ‘incorrectly edited’ and has since been removed from all of the ABC’s online platforms.
Though Kelly didn’t name names in her lecture, some in the audience were undoubtedly made very uncomfortable by what she said.
‘What once could be proven categorically is now up for bitter, sustained debate on a scale that was simply impossible to achieve before we all moved online,’ she said.
‘Arguments abound that facts don’t matter anymore … only perception. Only emotion.’
Kelly, however, said that she was not specifically alluding to ABC’s discredited coverage of the story about the Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan.
‘It was clear in my speech that I wasn’t referring to any particular story or issue, I was talking about declining trust in the mainstream media in general,’ she told Daily Mail Australia on Monday afternoon.
Kelly also cautioned her media colleagues about what matters most as they carry out their trade.
‘As journalists, verified, irrefutable facts are our stock in trade, our only credential is the truth,’ she said.
‘And as the waters of disinformation swirl, we must seek it, hold it and raise it above the waves.’
She also said media reports should feature ‘less commentary, more reporting. Less telling, more enquiry.’
Kelly added that ‘we need to keep serving up the facts – not facts that come with ridiculous qualifiers such as true or false, real or fake – but facts.
‘Verifiable Facts. Facts verified by us.’
Her ABC colleague, former 7.30 host Leigh Sales delivered a similar message at the same event in 2023.
‘Too often, too many journalists at all media organisations are abandoning values espoused by people like Andrew Olle, for various reasons,’ she said.
‘One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters.
‘They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers. I’m not sure they can even identify their own bias.
‘The job is not telling the audience what to think; it’s giving them the fullest set of facts possible so they can make up their own minds what to think.’
