Controversy continues to swirl around the recent Media Watch story that wasn’t — a planned probe into two ABC Lateline “special investigations” that suggested the Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson had covered up the activities of paedophile priests.

The Media Watch item scrutinising the first major initiative of the ABC News Online Investigative Unit was eventually shelved in May following a tortuous internal process that saw host Jonathan Holmes declare a conflict of interest due to his friendship with Lateline reporter Suzanne Smith, and researcher Misha Ketchell told to avoid her due to a spat stemming from his earlier gig editing Crikey.

According to sources outside the ABC, Ketchell made dozens of calls over at least four successive working days researching the story.

Now, Ultimo insiders continue to express angst that the piece never made it to air. According to The Australian’s Caroline Overington, leaks from irate staffers informed her short report on Monday and anonymous correspondence from the national broadcaster continues to reach Crikey.

It has provoked a mini turf war, with Aunty’s Adelaide and Sydney arms brawling over an extended right-of-reply Archbishop Wilson gave to the ABC’s South Australian Stateline program.

Meanwhile, a June 5 report in The Independent Weekly critical of Lateline has been circulated by Wilson amid allegations he used the article as a propaganda weapon. Adelaide radio continues to run hot, a South Australian PR firm helmed by Chris Rann (the brother of Premier Mike Rann), has been marshalled to run “crisis management” for Wilson and the Church says it is preparing to sue the ABC.

The whole fracas appears to be an inauspicious start for the Investigative Unit, led by Smith, that was launched to much fanfare in February by ABC chief Mark Scott.

But as is so often the case with the emotionally-charged issue of child abuse, the truth may not be as clear as either side makes out. To be fair to Lateline, the stories that appeared were almost certainly the tip of the iceberg, and heavily legalled. Much of the documentary evidence from the period is behind Church walls. And if the Media Watch criticisms were broadcast, the program might have been accused of defending paedophiles.

The sickening facts of child abuse by the clergy have been widely reported. From the 1960s to the 1990s, at least five priests in the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese committed hundreds of criminal acts on at least 100 children who attended their churches and schools. A NSW Police investigation, Taskforce Georgiana, has yielded four convictions. Twelve days ago, notorious offender John Denham was jailed for at least 12 years for his 30-year reign of terror. Another abuser, Jim Fletcher, was convicted in 2004 over 24 other offences involving four victims and died in jail in 2006. There are no doubt more revelations to come, and police investigations are continuing.

But the focus of the Lateline reports wasn’t the crimes per se, but the sins of omission committed by Archbishop Wilson, formerly Father Wilson, who is next in line to succeed Cardinal George Pell as Archbishop of Sydney. The program zeroed in on what Wilson knew and when he knew it — a notoriously difficult proposition to prove.

Wilson, the reports suggested, would have been aware of the abuse because he held senior positions in the diocese, resided in the same Bishop’s house in Maitland as Fletcher and taught at the same school as Denham. But without hard evidence for this suggestion, Lateline asked others to speculate on what was in Wilson’s head. Unfortunately, supposition is rarely a solid-enough principle to stand up a story, especially when the Archbishop wasn’t contacted by Lateline until the morning the program went to air.

A spokesperson for Lateline, in response to Crikey‘s requests, said: “It is not supposition, it is evidence from Peter Gogarty and Archbishop Wilson’s response was published.” (Read the ABC’s full response to Crikey‘s questions here.)

In the first Lateline report on May 17, one of Fletcher’s victims, Peter Gogarty, gave an extended interview to Smith, alleging Wilson repeatedly saw him in the Bishop’s house after his abuse at the hands of Father Fletcher. In the next stanza, allegations were raised by a former student of St Pius X High School where Wilson taught religion in the late 1970s. Finally, Lateline examined what Wilson might have known about the notorious priest Denis McAlinden.

A factual error in the story’s first sentence didn’t bode well. Fletcher, Smith said, “s-xually assaulted a 12-year-old boy on many occasions in his upstairs bedroom”. While Gogarty’s abuse had indeed begun at 12 — in 1972 — he didn’t begin to visit the Bishop’s house until at the beginning of then-Bishop Leo Clarke’s tenure, when he was 15 or 16.

A few days after the story aired, Lateline published the following clarification on its website: “While the s-xual assaults by Father Jim Fletcher of Peter Gogarty began when he was 12, the s-xual assaults by Father Fletcher which took place in his bedroom at the Bishop’s house, occurred from when Peter Gogarty was 15.”

On ABC 891 Adelaide yesterday, hosts Matthew Abraham and David Bevan described the gaffe as an “error in the production process”. Lateline says the ages had been “conflated during the writing process and later corrected”.

Lateline‘s failure to request an on-camera interview with Wilson until the last minute was also curious given Smith and co-reporter Stephen Crittenden had worked on the story for several weeks. Wilson’s office protested that because allegations related to specific events in the 1970s, it would be unable to respond in the hours before the film crew’s arrival. Later that afternoon, the Church sent the program an emailed statement. Two of those responses made it to air, with the rest posted on the Lateline website. Lateline says it allowed Wilson “good time” to respond and the Church would “have provided the Archbishop with more time to respond if he had sought it”.

In that response, the controversial follow-up interview four days later on Stateline, and an article in The Weekend Australian, Wilson denied ever having seen Gogarty anywhere near the stairs. He said he had only moved into the Bishop’s house in 1982. While he had occasionally stayed at the house before then, he was not a “full-time” resident. By 1982, Wilson said Father Fletcher had moved out of the house to a shed at the back of the property. He says the only time he had seen Fletcher and Gogarty together was downstairs was in the house’s public rooms, although it remains unclear exactly when this sighting occurred.

If we believe Wilson, Lateline’s suggestion that he had seen Fletcher and Gogarty together in the house may have been out by 10 years. The abuse is not in question, and Gogarty is an engaging witness. But the sequence of events, and concrete proof of Wilson’s presence, remains elusive.

Smith was specific in her line of questioning, producing exchanges like this:

Smith: So after the abuse happened and you came down the stairs through the common room was Philip Wilson in the common room at any time? Did he see you afterwards?

Gogarty: Yeah. Yeah, I would say definitely yes. I mean, again, he lived in that house. He was around that house. If I went up those stairs, there was a chance that he would see me. I mean, he wasn’t always there because, you know, priests are out and about, but he would equally see me coming back down the stairs.

In the week after the report aired, Gogarty expressed concern over the error, and Smith apologised. And while standing by his recollection of events, he told Crikey the journalist’s approach was questionable.

“She [Smith] was pushing very hard for info and they clearly wanted to get the story out there,” he said. “It was never my intention to do this. I was never equipped to be the public face for these kind of stories. Still, I wouldn’t change anything now even though it was bloody hard work.”

One key fact that might have strengthened Smith’s story is that, according to Gogarty, from 1975 onwards Wilson, as a newly-ordained priest, was stationed just five minutes away at the East Maitland parish and was a regular visitor. Gogarty also says he now recalls a specific conversation with Wilson and Jim Fletcher over Wilson’s first overseas trip to the United States at the Bishop’s house in mid-1977. There are suggestions of other documents in the ABC’s possession, including handwritten notes allegedly made by Wilson in the mid-1980s, that are yet to be verified.

But none of this made it into the Lateline report.

“The difficulty is Jim Fletcher’s dead, [then-Bishop] Leo Clarke’s dead it’s always going to be Gogarty saying this and Wilson saying that. What could have been a fantastic story could leave people sitting on the fence with a reason to doubt me,” Gogarty said.

He also questioned the rush to get the piece to air, given that a few more weeks research may have uncovered a smoking gun: “It wouldn’t have mattered a spit if that story waited a couple of weeks.”

In the weeks since, Gogarty believes the Church has deliberately waged a PR campaign to suggest Wilson was unaware of his association with Fletcher until he was 18. He says the Church has obscured details of what it knows and says he is “extremely disappointed” by Wilson’s circulation of the Independent Weekly story.

Lateline‘s second suggestion of impropriety related to the criminal activities of Father John Denham at St Pius X High School, where Wilson taught religion for part of the time Denham was abusing children. Lateline relies on a third party, former St Pius student (and non-victim) Stephen Kilkeary, to speculate on what Wilson knew:

Smith: Stephen Kilkeary says the question for him remains was Philip Wilson aware of what was going on at the time.

Kilkeary: I’ve given that a lot of thought over the years and my view would be that it would be impossible for anyone not to know about the s-xual abuse that was going on at that school. It was — as I said, it was so rampant, so endemic, everybody talked about it, not just at the school, but even in the local community.

Archbishop Wilson, in his statement to Lateline, denied any knowledge of the abuse, nor any knowledge of Denham’s subsequent transfer in 1987 to Waverley College in Sydney. There is certainly a suggestion Wilson should have known, given his senior position in the Church, but this is different to proving that he did. Lateline says the Kilkeary interview was important to get a sense of the atmosphere at the school at the time.

The report then addressed the case of notorious child abuser Dennis McAlinden’s activities at St Joseph Primary School in Merriwa and St Columba’s in Newcastle in the 1980s. Mike Stanwell, the then-principal of St Joseph’s, sent a statement to Lateline reprising his comments reported in The Australian two weeks earlier over Wilson’s movements. In both 1985 and 1995, Archbishop Wilson had looked into claims against McAlinden. Two fresh complaints to police over the 1995 investigation give the story some currency.

In Wilson’s response to Lateline, he denied any involvement in either the transfer of McAlinden to Adamstown Parish in Newcastle in the 1980s or his subsequent move to Western Australia. He said that he had referred his concerns to his superiors — Bishop Clarke in 1985 and Clarke and then current Bishop Michael Malone after Clarke retired in 1995. But that response, while appearing on Lateline‘s website, wasn’t included in the story.

A second Lateline report, a month later on June 18, also raised questions over Wilson’s knowledge of McAlinden. That program centred on an interview given to the program by Bishop Malone and aired after the initial investigation by Media Watch.

Smith claimed Malone wanted Wilson to “clarify” his movements, especially his knowledge of McAlinden’s 1992 indecent assault charge in Western Australia, the stripping of his faculties in 1993 by the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese, and an unsuccessful “defrocking” in 1995. But a key fact is omitted.

Smith states that “in 1993, Archbishop Wilson’s CV places him in the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese”, when, in Wilson’s response to Lateline a month earlier, and from which Smith quotes elsewhere, Wilson states he “was in America studying from 1990 to 1995”.

Smith asks Malone about “smoke” relating to McAlinden in the period before 1995. But for the majority of that period, Wilson was completing a Canon Law Doctorate in Washington DC. He visited Australia for a few months in 1993 before returning to Washington.

Although he denies it, Wilson may well have known about the stripping of McAlinden’s faculties, which occurred in the same year he visited Maitland. And as the Newcastle Herald reported two weeks before Lateline, Wilson had received a sworn statement from a victim in 1995. But his earlier five-year US stint would surely be relevant in reaching a conclusion as to what he knew — a fact denied to Lateline‘s viewers. Lateline says the Archbishop’s answers contained a “mistake” because they did not refer to the return trip to Australia and it is still awaiting an official response on the issue.

Buried at the end of the piece is an explicit denial from Bishop Malone of a cover up. He says it was Wilson’s superior, the now-deceased Bishop Clarke, who should have informed the police:

“Quite seriously, when Phillip Wilson maintains that it wasn’t his responsibility, that’s literally true. He could have done all sorts of things to persuade Bishop Clarke to report the matter to the police. But if in the final analysis that didn’t happen, that was Bishop Clarke’s call, not Philip Wilson’s.”

Again, Lateline failed to secure even a ‘no comment’ from Archbishop Wilson before the story went to air, but says it “held off until it was clear that that no further comment was forthcoming”.

The Catholic Church told Crikey yesterday that legal manoeuvring was continuing and it couldn’t comment:

“Our advice is that the errors made by the ABC in the Lateline program and on national ABC TV News were defamatory of the Archbishop and he is in the process of legal action involving the ABC in relation to it.  As such, he has been advised that it would be inappropriate for him to respond to media questions or make any comment at all on these matters.”

The intra-organisation politics of the saga remain intriguing. Jonathan Holmes has a pre-existing friendship with Smith that would have precluded him from presiding over that week’s episode. Paul Barry, who is due to fill in for Holmes while he takes long-service leave, was on standby as an alternative.

Crikey understands Wilson’s extended right of reply with Alan Atkinson on SA Stateline caused huge tensions, with Sydney accusing Adelaide of treading on its turf. And Smith, who researched the story, continues to have a prickly view of Ketchell ever since Crikey, which Ketchell edited at the time, investigated her in 2006 over a series of Lateline reports on the Mutitjulu indigenous community.

Media Watch can hardly be accused of going soft on its own organisation after scathing reports in recent weeks over the glitch-ridden MediaHub device and the ABC’s shortcomings in its coverage of Julia Gillard’s leadership challenge. But one wonders whether they may have missed another questionable effort — Lateline‘s investigation of Wilson based on claims juries jailing the Church’s worst paedophiles might have struggled to accept.