If it is a stern test of democracy’s institutions to confront allegations of its own troops committing war crimes, it is an equally stern task for journalists to verify allegations to a publishable standard.
The seriousness of such allegations warrants care, but so too does the difficulty of persuading troops to break the bonds of loyalty and speak out. Add to that the difficulty of verifying events that took place far away in the chaos and confusion of war, and it is not at all surprising that few journalists volunteer for such duty.
Even fewer are willing to take on one of Australia’s most decorated and revered soldiers. At more than 200 centimetres and 100 chiselled kilos, Ben Roberts-Smith is the embodiment of ‘the classic Anzac, seven-foot tall and bulletproof’. After retiring from the army with the rank of corporal, he had been named Australian Father of the Year and been appointed the Seven television network’s general manager in Queensland.
“Being drawn into a dispute with a national icon was not on my wish list,” Chris Masters wrote in a later book, Flawed Hero. But squaring up to the task of asking hard questions about Roberts-Smith’s war record serving in the nation’s elite Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) is exactly what Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie did.
Now in his seventies, Masters has long been one of Australia’s most respected investigative journalists, with a string of powerful disclosures behind him, mostly for the ABC’s Four Corners program, as well as a revelatory biography of Sydney shock jock Alan Jones.
After years of negotiation with the Australian military, Masters gained access to battlefield troops for many months of immersive reporting which he drew on for two books. He explored and evoked the life of the modern military in Uncommon Soldier, then became the first Australian journalist to be embedded with Special Forces, including SASR, during combat, for No Front Line.
Researching the latter book, Masters found that not since the First World War had Australian troops engaged in such intense, sustained conflict as in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. This “played much better in Canberra than in Tarin Kowt”, he writes. SASR was too often the politicians’ and military leaders’ “force of choice”.
Keen to do what they were trained to do – fight – and comforted by generous additional tax-free international campaign allowances, SASR did not complain, but they were overused. It began to show. In 2016 the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) set up an inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Masters had heard rumours of bad behaviour by SASR troops and began probing. Gripes about who wins honours are a “drab but common” part of military life, but some of Roberts-Smith’s fellow soldiers criticised how he conducted himself in battle. Roberts-Smith, who served six deployments in Afghanistan, reacted to Masters’ questions like a “frill-necked lizard”, attacking his detractors as incompetent cowards. Masters came away unsettled, his strong impression being that Roberts-Smith “was not behaving like a man with nothing to hide”.
Masters began digging. Working on such a difficult investigation as a freelancer, and an ageing one at that, Masters felt he needed support. He chose Nick McKenzie, an investigative journalist now in his forties who has won more Walkley Awards than anyone else and twice been named Graham Perkin journalist of the year.
McKenzie worked for The Age, a newspaper that provided the institutional and legal support essential for such a difficult investigation. Equally important, Masters writes that McKenzie had “a reporter’s enthusiasm for a story, big or small, [that] fuels an engine room of effort”.
When Masters’ book No Front Line was nearing publication in 2017, he provided McKenzie with extracts for The Age and its sister paper, The Sydney Morning Herald. McKenzie requested an accompanying interview with Roberts-Smith, explaining he had been the target of some complaints to the IGADF, and soon received a letter from Roberts-Smith’s lawyer. The letter states that any publication from the book represented “a most despicable and indefensible defamation”, even though the extracts did not say Roberts-Smith had committed any war crimes.
Then, days before the book’s publication, The Australian published an article headlined ‘VC hero Ben Roberts-Smith: “I did nothing wrong in Afghanistan”’ in which Roberts-Smith labelled the book inaccurate and Masters, of course, “un-Australian”.
Masters saw this mainly as sour grapes that he hadn’t given The Australian rights to the book extracts. When his previous book was nearing publication, Masters was working on retainer for The Australian and The Daily Telegraph. The extract rights went to News and he “got a soft ride” from them on publicity.
This time, out of courtesy, he had told The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Paul Whittaker, that the extract rights for No Front Line were going to their commercial and sometimes ideological rivals. “I knew the beating was coming. It was contrary and kind of stupid.”
But that was just the opening salvo in this perverse variation of “murdoching”. Summarised, it looks like this: we didn’t get the story; never mind that it is a huge story, we’ll take the opposite position, and because you’ve had the temerity to go elsewhere with it rather than let us own the story, we’ll attack you – for good measure and to remind you who’s boss around here.
Grounded in the trusting relationships Masters had built with SASR troops for his book research, and buttressed by about 100 interviews he and McKenzie had carried out, in 2018 they wrote half a dozen articles for The Age/SMH that alleged Roberts-Smith directly murdered, or was complicit in the murder of, Afghan prisoners between 2009 and 2012.
More specifically, the allegations included Roberts-Smith kicking an unarmed and handcuffed Afghan villager off a small cliff, directing two fellow SASR troops to shoot dead two Afghan prisoners as a way of “blooding” the soldiers for front-line combat.
Roberts-Smith soon sued for defamation, saying the articles had ruined his life. He maintained that either the Afghans were not prisoners but insurgents killed lawfully in combat, or that he had not given orders for them to be killed. It was by any reckoning a high-stakes case – soon labelled the defamation trial of the century.
Masters writes in Flawed Hero that Andrew Hastie, former SASR member turned federal Liberal parliamentarian, told The Australian editor-in-chief, Paul Whittaker, that the stories were “well-informed”. But between the articles’ publication and the delays to the 2021 trial due to COVID-19, there was plenty of time for murdoching. This primarily took the form of stories extensively quoting Roberts-Smith and others criticising Masters and McKenzie’s work, and highlighting, if not magnifying, any potential setback for their defence.
Headlines in The Australian included: ‘Nelson blasts “lowest” slur on hero soldier’ ( August 13, 2018); ‘“Jealousy” driving attacks on SAS hero: Vietnam War VC Keith Payne’ (August 15, 2018): ‘Ben Roberts-Smith blasts Nine’s “abuse of power”’ (October 6, 2019), and ‘War hero crucified by media’ (August 22, 2020).
The campaign supporting Roberts-Smith featured a front-page ‘exclusive’ interview, with him photographed alongside his wife, headlined ‘War hero lashes his accusers’ and quoting him, “My family and I sit here and wonder, what’s next?”
In an editorial on August 18, 2018, the newspaper lamented the whipping up of the ‘imbroglio’ engulfing a war hero, and approvingly quoted then head of the Australian War Memorial Brendan Nelson, who said, “Australian soldiers are at home with their families today because of the courage of Mr Roberts-Smith”.
It defended the split-second decisions soldiers have to make in the heat of battle – despite Masters and McKenzie continually pointing out that it was Roberts-Smith’s own SASR comrades who had complained about his behaviour and that the incidents they complained of did not require split-second decisions.
News Corp was not alone in campaigning for Roberts-Smith. He also enjoyed unstinting support from his employer, Kerry Stokes, owner of Seven West Media and at the time chair of the Australian War Memorial. Stokes bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s legal suit, and his media outlets, especially The West Australian, leant on the scales in their reporting of the allegations.
Masters is by turns scathing, resigned and, finally, dismissive of the treatment he and McKenzie received, particularly from News Corp outlets. He strongly feels that if News could have had the story to begin with, they would have run with it.
“One of the reasons they didn’t was because they couldn’t. They don’t do the hard groundwork that Nick and I did, which had years and years of work in it. I think they looked at it and knew they couldn’t catch up so the easiest thing to do was go to the other side and get an exclusive interview with BRS and then get on the drip from his lawyers.
“We got some back-channel feedback from people inside the company … and I remember one senior journalist saying, ‘Thank god I wasn’t asked to follow that up.’ Essentially, the big difference was that Nick and I were talking to about 100 people and they were talking to three or four.”
In supporting the alleged perpetrators of war crimes, News outlets not just dismissed the arguments of whistleblowers but demonised them for having the strength to speak out against fellow soldiers. Masters recalls sleepless nights worrying about what might be next directed at their reporting, but it was the attacks on the soldiers who spoke up that particularly angered him. “Those guys had lonely Anzac Days. They won’t be invited into the barracks for the big events because of this view that having your mate’s back is more important than telling the truth. I think they should be covered in medals for the moral courage they showed.”
News Corp, Masters says, displayed the opposite. On November 6, 2020, the IGADF report into war crimes allegations was handed to the federal government, and on November 19 it was published. After a four-year inquiry, it found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by or on the instructions of SASR members. Names were redacted to protect the presumption of innocence while prosecutors gathered evidence to lay charges.
Between the arrival of the long-awaited report and its release, The Australian shouldered arms in its campaign. On November 13, in an editorial headlined ‘Nation’s moment of truth on alleged war crimes’, the newspaper applauded the then Liberal-National Coalition government for reckoning with the need to bring to account any troops who had committed war crimes. It now applauded the courage and integrity of SASR members who had provided vital evidence to the IGADF inquiry and, in a characteristically let’s-accuse you-of-doing-what-we-do moment, lamented how the regiment’s cohesion was almost at breaking point “after years of leaks to selected media”.
The newspaper’s thinking had clearly travelled a long way, Masters noted, even if it did not acknowledge any change in its stance. “In the 2018 editorial, there was wall-to-wall bombast about Ben. In the 2020 editorial, he does not rate a mention. The Australian appeared to be walking back from an absolute defence of Ben Roberts-Smith, while holding a view we shared: that responsibility for misconduct reached beyond the soldiers in the line.”
In the meantime, the defamation case continued. Because defamation is a civil action, the proof required to prove or disprove the imputations in the articles was ‘on the balance of probabilities’ rather than the criminal standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
After 110 days of evidence and at an estimated cost to the parties of $30 million,the main judgment was handed down on June 1, 2023. On the central question of whether the newspapers defamed the war hero or if he was actually a war criminal, the judge found for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. On the balance of probabilities, he found Roberts-Smith was a murderer, a war criminal, a bully and a disgrace to his country and the Australian military.
Roberts-Smith appealed the judgment. He lost this appeal, and then applied to the High Court for special leave to appeal the Full Court of the Federal Court’s appeal decision. His application was rejected in September 2025 and he was ordered to pay the newspapers’ legal costs. It was a remarkable victory for Masters and McKenzie’s legal team, and a vindication of their reporting.
[Ben Roberts-Smith has since been charged on April 7 with five counts of war crime murder related to his deployment in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012. He has “categorically denied” all the allegations, which will be heard by a jury. He will only be convicted if the jury is satisfied the charges are proven beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a higher standard than was required in the defamation case.]
Masters is not interested in critiquing the news media for its own sake. “It’s not a game to me. Journalism is a serious business. The thing that really pissed me off was that [The Australian] had to presume we got the stories because of leaks because I don’t know that they practise that much journalism where they go out and interview a lot of people, and analyse the evidence and grade the [reliability of] the informants. That is, the path to truth is pursued rigorously. I don’t think they do that. I think their whole world is leaks.
“News Corp has got power but no purpose … They do have positions on issues such as what it is to be patriotic, but it’s not intellectually thought through because there’s so much recklessness. The hardest thing we do in journalism is confront public opinion. I also think it’s the best thing we do. The tabloids flatter the public.”
For years Masters defended News Corp, partly because the company has employed so many journalists and partly because his daughter and son-in-law worked there also. He trod carefully regarding News in earlier books, but with Flawed Hero he ceased to worry, writing bluntly at one point: “I do not buy The Australian. It makes me sick.”
He recalls receiving a call from a journalist at The Australian who was “obliged to check something to help validate an impending attack”; they said they knew he would not be reporting on the alleged war crimes if he wasn’t 100 per cent sure but “I have a job to do”. To Masters this “was someone who should no longer call themselves a journalist”.
Masters loves telling stories – true ones, of course. He finished our interview by recalling an anecdote about how “right in the middle of all this shit, where they’re writing front-page stories saying we’ve got it all wrong, I responded to a request to give evidence in a case concerning Phil Dickie”.
Masters and Dickie had had a long and thorny history as competitors on stories of corruption in Queensland. Masters had spent a decade defending The Moonlight State, a Four Corners program about corruption in Queensland, successfully in the end. Dickie was being sued by Tony Bellino, a nightclub owner who claimed he had been defamed as a “prominent casino and brothel owner” in a 2017 article by Dickie – published by News Corp’s Queensland Newspapers.
Masters gave evidence and Bellino lost his claim, the judge finding the nightclub owner didn’t really have a reputation to lose. Masters asked News Corp’s counsel in the case to see if someone at headquarters might perhaps call to thank him. The lawyer looked a bit bewildered, and Masters heard nothing further from News Corp.
“You remember that great line in Succession where Logan Roy says they don’t do shame? Well, they don’t do class either at News.”
This is an edited extract from Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s media wields power and punishment, by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, published by Hardie Grant Books. On sale from June 30. RRP $39.99
