What’s wrong with this footage of Seven’s Mike Amor scrabbling to lift a dehydrated and dazed baby from the rubble of Haiti?

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Or images of Channel Nine’s Robert Penfold hovering helpfully in the background with a cup of water?

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Comments on YouTube are full of praise for both stories and the rescue. And Caroline Overington in The Oz quotes Amor, “That moment, it was beyond news.”

But when two rival news teams are involved, it’s never beyond news. Seven and Nine ran big this weekend with the miraculous rescue of “miracle baby” Winnie, but both news outlets had slightly different takes.

The man down in the hole in the footage of Seven’s and Nine’s story on the rescue of Winnie is named by Nine as its interpreter, and Seven as its security guy.

According to the Seven report, the man initially hovering over the hole in the wreckage of his former home thought he heard the cries of his own tiny daughter. Cameras jostled for space, and then the “member of Seven’s security team” jumped into help. Finally, the whimpering baby was pulled free, blinking in the light, past the dead body of a presumed family member.

As Nine put it, the baby was passed from one newsman to another “and then, eventually, to her uncle.” In the Seven footage, as Amor feeds Winnie water, relatives seem to be hovering around, presumably to check the identity of the baby. And the father searching for his own child?  He’s nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, Nine makes no mention of Mike Amor and cuts the footage before Amor starts giving Winnie water.

Which leaves the viewer with a slight sense of unease about what’s been left out of this story, and where the family members fit.

In the end, the fixer, Deiby Celestino, whoever he belongs to, showed more modesty by crediting God with the rescue than either of the Australian news outlets.