Red Faces over Abuse Story, Hendrik Gout, Independent Weekly, June 5, 2010

Red Faces over Abuse Story

By Hendrik Gout
Independent Weekly
June 5, 2010

http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/red-faces-over-abuse-story/1849836.aspx

On Friday, February 11, the ABC’s urbane managing director Mark Scott rose to his feet at the Melbourne Press Club to outline the future of journalism in the ABC.

He insisted that despite the challenges of new technologies, the ABC was as committed as ever to strong journalism. In fact he said the corporation’s brand new News Online Investigative Unit would be airing a story in coming weeks that had taken months of research and was the first “multi-media collaboration” between the unit and Lateline.

That report was seen nationally on Lateline on May 17. Written by reporter Suzanne Smith and the former Religion Report’s Stephen Crittenden it covered the vexed question of how the Catholic Church handled sex abuse by priests, in particular the role played Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson.

Today, Mark Scott may be wondering if, fter months of research, the Investigative Unit may have made a botch of it.

The Lateline report strongly implied that Philip Wilson must have known about sex abuse by several priests in the New South Wales Diocese where he once lived and worked. The nub of the Lateline story was a classic “guilt by association” claim about his early years as a priest.

The ABC put to air an allegation by a single abuse victim that in the ’70s the newly ordained 20-something Philip Wilson would – or at least should – have been aware of the abusive activities of a Father James Fletcher because they both lived, along with other priests, in a rambling two-storey Bishop’s House in Maitland.

The victim, Peter Gogarty, was the ABC’s key witness around whom the whole allegation against Philip Wilson was built. The story claimed Philip Wilson – along with his Bishop, Leo Clarke – would have seen the 12-year-old Gogarty going up and down to Father Fletcher’s bedroom.

Yet according to his CV posted online, Peter Gogarty was born in 1960. He would therefore have been 12 in 1972. Philip Wilson was not even ordained a priest until three years later.

And on closer inspection, the Investigative Unit’s report even contained the seeds of doubt about its credibility in its own first paragraphs, when it said that Bishop Clarke lived at the Bishop’s House from 1976.

Again, a little maths would have helped. If Bishop Clarke moved to the house only in 1976, and Peter Gogarty was born in 1960, then the victim would have been about 16. Yet the Lateline report stated categorically that Gogarty was 12 at the time. (This error was “clarified” a few days after the broadcast – not on air on Lateline but in the online transcript.)

Clearly, if the abuse by Father Fletcher was happening at the house when the victim was 16, it was still an extremely serious matter. But the bald statement of “fact” by the ABC that the boy was just 12 makes the allegation just that little bit more horrendous – and more potentially damaging for the Archbishop, if he had known.

So did the ABC’s Investigative Unit ask Philip Wilson about all this before the report went to air?

The ABC’s Sydney reporter asked for an on-camera interview only on the morning of May 17, the day of broadcast. A spokesperson for the Archbishop said the request was declined because it would have been impossible to answer detailed questions about matters dating back to the seventies at such short notice.

This did not appear to have bothered the ABC Investigative Unit which, it seems, was clearly intent on going to air that night come what may. An objective observer might conclude that the Investigative Unit had already decided that the Archbishop must be guilty – a classic “gotcha” story which leaves the target little time to respond.

The Investigative Unit then sent a series of questions to the Archbishop by email later on the morning of the broadcast. Some but not all of the answers were put to air that night as part of the TV story, perhaps on advice of the ABC’s lawyers. The rest were tucked away on the Online page.

There, but for the work of two Adelaide-based journalists – the ABC’s Alan Atkinson and The Australian’s Michael Owen – the matter might have rested, leaving a huge brooding question mark over just what Philip Wilson knew and when.

Mr Atkinson declined to answer any questions from The Independent Weekly, and said they should be referred to ABC management. His interview with Archbishop Wilson went to air in Adelaide on Stateline on May 21. Mr Owen’s story was published in The Australian the following morning. In both reports, Philip Wilson said he had gone to live at the Bishop’s House full-time only in1982, some six years after the date suggested by the ABC. He had stayed there occasionally before that but he remembered seeing Peter Gogarty at the house only when he was in his late teens.

If Father Fletcher had arrived at the house from 1978, Peter Gogarty would have been closer to 18 than 12 when he, Father Fletcher, Bishop Clarke and Philip Wilson were supposed to have been in each other’s company.

This is a very different scenario from that so boldly painted by the ABC - of Wilson regularly seeing a 12-year-old climb the stairs to the bedroom of Father Fletcher.

Perhaps most damning of all to the Lateline story was that Peter Gogarty himself flatly denied to Mr Owen in The Australian that he had ever said he was 12 at the time it was claimed Philip Wilson might have seen him in the house.

Both Mr Atkinson’s and Mr Owen’s stories also contained a denial by the Archbishop that he knew anything about Father Fletcher’s abusive activities. When asked on Stateline if he had been naive, he replied that he simply had not known about abuse by priests at that time. He told The Australian that back in seventies, when he was in his twenties, he didn’t know anything about paedophilia.

Not only that, Peter Gogarty was interviewed again to get his response to what the Archbishop had said to Mr Atkinson, and some of his replies were included in the much more balanced Stateline report.

So where does all this leave the ABC’s much-vaunted News Online Investigative Unit, one of Mark Scott’s new babies? One would have to conclude: with baby food all over its face.

Clearly damage was done to the Archbishop’s reputation as a result of poor research in the Lateline report. Sources within the ABC suggest the Investigative Unit – in just one story – has so damaged the ABC’s reputation for objectivity and accuracy that it might struggle to recover.