The 60 Minutes producer behind the botched child kidnap story in Beirut has been sacked over "the gravest misadventure in the program's history".
Senior producer Stephen Rice lost his job despite an inquiry arguing no one should be singled out for dismissal after the Nine Network program made "inexcusable errors" in covering Australian mum Sally Faulkner's plight.
Reporter Tara Brown, who along with Rice and two crew members, spent a fortnight in a Beirut jail, and others directly involved in the story received formal warnings.
They are understood to include former 60 Minutes executive producer Tom Malone, now Nine's head of sport.
An inquiry found critical questions including whether Nine staff were breaking the law were never raised by Mr Malone who approved the story, Mr Rice who proposed it or the reporting team.
Producers at 60 Minutes had such a high level of autonomy that the executive producer saw no need to consult the news and current affairs director on the wisdom of commissioning the story, the inquiry's report found.
"If Nine's usual procedures had been adhered to, the errors of judgment may have been identified earlier, with the result that the story would not have been undertaken at all, or at least not in the way in which it was implemented," the report states.
Nine CEO Hugh Marks said the network and program had suffered significant damage to their reputation in a case that exposed its crew to serious risks.
"We got too close to the story and suffered damaging consequences," he said on Friday.
The 60 Minutes reporting team became emotionally attached to Ms Faulkner and grossly underestimated issues such as the power and willingness of a foreign government to enforce its laws, the three-member review panel found.
In their review, former 60 Minutes executive producer Gerald Stone, retired A Current Affair boss David Hurley and Nine's general counsel Rachel Launders had argued those directly involved be strongly censured but no staff be singled out for dismissal because of the autonomy given to 60 Minutes.
"It just struck me as unfair if there hasn't been a well-defined system of referral upwards, that any individual should be singled out for dismissal," Mr Stone told AAP.
"But at the same time, I accept entirely the right of management to make those hard decisions."
Mr Stone said it was clear that inexcusable errors were made.
"These types of errors often come about when a program is hard pressed to come up with good stories, to come up with the right stories, to feel under the pressure of their ratings going down and shifting of time slot," he said.
Mr Marks said it was inappropriate for 60 Minutes to directly pay the child recovery agency.
Two payments totalling $115,000 were made to Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), which had been independently contracted by Ms Faulkner to retrieve her children Lahela, five, and Noah, three.
A Nine lawyer had queried the direct payment, but the review said the concern was discounted by the producer on the basis that payments to third parties had been done before and therefore senior management were not alerted.
"It was very compromising to be seen as paying the company direct, but in truth there was no real difference between paying that company directly or the mother because they knew that the money would probably go from the hands of the mother to the hands of her hired agents," Mr Stone said.
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