There are elements of the 60 minutes/Sally Faulkner saga that we’ll never understand, nor completely get the truth on.
But what we can possibly see is where it started – with the act of a desperate mother who would do anything to get her two children back, and that certain actions were taken to exploit that.
One can only imagine the final, heartbreaking moment when Sally Faulkner had to say goodbye to her children. She met them for a number of hours at a play centre yesterday, under the watchful eye of her ex-husband Ali Elamine.
“She spent several hours playing with the kids because she wanted their final memory to be positive,” Elamine told The Project during an interview on Channel Ten last night. Yes, “Their Final Memory”.
Why this custody dispute ended with five Australians being detained and facing criminal charges related to kidnapping, will be the subject of plenty of conversations for some time to come.
But what we do know is that this is not how the story was supposed to unfold.
This story — before the 60 Minutes crew became the subject of the story – was being pursued for its ratings value (therefore it’s level of entertainment). It’s the after-dinner special. A real-life drama created for an audience to sit down with on a Sunday night. They would watch a Bond-like pursuit of Faulkner’s children that would ultimately end with the emotional reunion. Viewers would be on the edge of their seats as the ‘recovery effort’ unfolded, before later witnessing an emotional Faulkner sharing her joy of being reunited with her kids, possibly even back home in Australia.
The story would “rate its socks off”, as Paul Barry suggested on Media Watch.
And we would have watched. We may have cried and shared comments on social media. It would have been an emotional twenty minutes of television and 60 Minutes may have won the night.
Now, the more pieces of information that emerge from the whole incident, the sadder the situation becomes. The faces of the two children involved have been published all over the world, and they’ve had their “final memory” with their mother. No matter how positive it was in that Beirut play centre, they’ll carry this attempt at a ‘story’ for the rest of their lives.
The Australian reports today that the Nine Network paid a significant amount of money to Elamine in its official settlement registered with the court. It also claims that more money was paid directly to his family. Elaimine denied receiving any compensation during his television interview last night.
The story is very sad. Just not for the reasons Channel Nine would have hoped.
That’s life. Not everything can or should be entertainment.