Culture

Last Night’s ‘Q&A’ Was A Textbook Case Of Why You Shouldn’t Trust Breaking News

"News" on Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran turned out to be misleading, and everyone lost because of it.

by Alex McKinnon  28 April 2015

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There was an extremely emotional and unusual moment on Q&A last night, when host Tony Jones interrupted the normal flow of the show to deliver some breaking news on the impending execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. In a case of awful timing, the news came through as a friend of Sukumaran in the audience, Kavita Krishnan, was urging the government to do more to stay their executions.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you here, it may be news you want to hear, in fact it certainly will be, but we’re just getting reports, it’s coming up on the autocue here,” Jones told Krishnan. “Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has agreed to consider a last-ditch legal challenge brought by the Bali 9 pair. The court agrees to hear the case on May 12.”

The audience immediately began applauding, assuming the news meant a stay of execution for Chan and Sukumaran of up to two weeks, but Krishnan’s reaction was understandably one of confusion. “That’s wonderful news, but does that mean they’re not going to go ahead with tomorrow? Is that what that means?…Does that mean that they’re not going to go ahead with…the…”

It was a question Jones and Q&A were unable to answer — the ‘news’ had just come through and no one had anything to offer in its wake except speculation. Sinodinos understandably but wrongly assumed it meant the pair’s date of execution was getting pushed back: “Well I would assume so, given the news we’ve just been told,” he said. “Which is again this issue of continuing to fully exhaust all the legal processes. This is a very welcome development.”

Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek kept a cool head at the news, urging the audience not to take it at face value or read anything into it.

“I’m sorry Tony, just having read that on the autocue I think we have to be very careful,” Plibersek said to Jones. “We don’t know the full range of information. We might hear updates through the course of the show or afterwards. We just have to be very careful because the information, as you’ve said, is coming out in small pieces.” Jones took up Plibersek’s cue, clarifying that the news was coming from a single media report and telling the audience to “bear that in mind”.

As it turns out, Plibersek was right: the news means virtually nothing for the fates of Chan and Sukumaran, who are still due to be executed in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Dealing with breaking news on live television is tricky, especially on a high-stakes subject like the Bali 9, but Q&A revealed the limited value of insta-reporting last night. The misleading prospect of a postponed execution gave Krishnan and thousands of other people deeply invested in the Chan/Sukumaran case a piece of false hope that was inevitably taken away just as fast.

During the Sydney siege, Channel Seven’s Larry Emdur made a tough and gutsy decision not to speculate on-air that the flag in the Lindt cafe window was an ISIS flag, sacrificing guaranteed headlines and coverage for the sake of putting the facts ahead of the story and not leading people astray. He made the right call — as Q&A demonstrated last night, breaking news is never complete, and often wrong.