arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

VETERAN 60 Minutes reporter Richard Carleton has admitted he had misled and lied to viewers by showing footage from another massacre site to illustrate a story about the massacre of Srebrenica. Mr Carleton, 60 Minutes executive producer John Westacott and producer Howard Sacre are suing the ABC and its Media Watch team over two Media Watch segments in July 2000 accusing 60 Minutes of lifting footage from an earlier BBC documentary. Mr Carleton told the ACT supreme court yesterday that being accused of plagiarism was the journalistic equivalent of paedophilia. But under cross-examination by counsel for the ABC, Media Watch presenter Paul Barry and former executive producer Peter McEvoy, Mr Carleton conceded he had knowingly used footage of a morgue and a mass grave site far away from Srebrenica to illustrate the Channel Nine report. Asked by barrister Terence Tobin if he had misled viewers, Mr Carleton said: "In the technical meaning of the word misleading, yes." Asked had he lied, he said: "In so far as the meaning of the word lie is taken (to mean) misleading, yes."
But Mr Carleton denied he had behaved unethically as a journalist and said the footage had enhanced viewers' understanding of the 1995 massacre of Muslim residents by Bosnian Serbs. The hearing before Justice Terence Higgins is continuing. /rlt/rz