Reporter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes team formed an emotional bond with Sally Faulkner and genuinely wanted to help the Australian mum bring her children home.
But they misjudged what would happen when Ms Faulkner went to Lebanon with a child recovery team to try to get the two children back.
"The reporting team had formed a genuine emotional attachment to Ms Faulkner and, as they saw it, the justice of her cause," an internal Nine review found.
"Worthy as that might sound, such commitment has its obvious pitfalls in coverage of a custody dispute between parents of different nationalities."
It led to 60 Minutes grossly underestimating a number of factors, not least being the power or willingness of a foreign government to enforce its laws," the report said.
"That type of misjudgment is not to be expected of seasoned journalists and is bound to tarnish the program's world-wide reputation for credible reportage."
The inquiry members, who included ex-journalists in former 60 Minutes executive producer Gerald Stone and retired A Current Affair boss David Hurley, have suggested the crew should have stepped back and thought it through.
With more measured consideration, they might have asked if a desperate mother's judgment was too clouded to realise the many dangers in her plan or whether they would have helped her best by urging her not to proceed.
The review has deemed that Ms Faulkner's sad plight certainly warranted coverage, but it was a story that could have been told in a number of other ways that did not expose Nine to formidable risks.
And it did not get to the level of covering a war zone, a story worth pursuing despite the risks involved.
The story was undoubtedly a worthy one, Mr Stone said.
"There's no doubt that the story was worth telling, but when you compare it to the stories that really do demand a degree of risk to tell - such as a war zone or a question of corruption - then there's no comparison," he told AAP on Friday.
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