‘A Current Affair’ heavyweight Tracey Grimshaw has come out swinging on the ’60 Minutes’ Beirut kidnapping case currently in the Lebanese courts, penning an editorial for The Australian in which she defended them against those who might question their judgement on the bungled operation.
“Those colleagues are our friends in jail on the other side of the world,” she wrote. “And I’m going to be totally straight with you: I want them home.”
What follows is essentially a long defence of the four imprisoned crew members, who she exonerates with scattered personal and professional anecdotes. Interesting! Most compelling was this particular paragraph, about Tara Brown:
“She could wear a white shirt in the Syrian desert and it would still be white and unwrinkled after three days. I’d get coffee on mine before I left the airport. Her favourite place in the world is lying on the couch drinking milkshakes with her little boys. She would not spill the milkshake.”
This is the kind of spirited defence we needed. I need Tracey Grimshaw to tell me exactly how well various journalists are accustomed to using drinking straws while sitting on couches. Not quite sure what this has to do with a disaster of a child rescue operation in Lebanon, though.
It kinda all reads a bit like an obituary, really. They’re still here, even if they’re in a Lebanese prison. C’mon, Trace. Have a little bit of faith.
Some of her yarns about the journos, like Stephen Rice, are pretty wild:
“Ricey is a meticulous dude. An old school journo who once rode a donkey through the Burmese jungle to track down and interview a heroin-running warlord. If the Burmese government troops had seen him they’d have shot him.”
But they also read like stories you tell at someone’s bloody wake after they’re gone. Maybe they need less character references and more legal support.
Basically, her take is that she’s providing a character witness to push back against recent coverage, which paints the crew as rabid ratings fiends who don’t give a toss about local laws and would do anything for a yarn.
She reckons TV journos don’t actually think about ratings at all, and they’re totally fixated instead on the logistics of pursuing a story. Well, let’s see.
Karl Stefanovic also jumped into the fray today, defending the conduct of ’60 Minutes’ in the context of journalists wanting to get to the bottom of a yarn.
The crew are expected to face a bail hearing today at 5pm, which will be a vital moment in the case.
Source: The Australian.
Photo: Getty Images / Lisa Maree Williams.
