Star ABC journalist Leigh Sales has defended her false claim that the 26-page Uluru Statement from the Heart document is comprised of “25 pages of minutes from meetings held with Indigenous communities”.
Sales sent an email to all ABC staff last week labelling it misinformation to suggest the 26 pages were one singular document. She also erroneously claimed that all pages beyond the first were made up of meeting minutes.
The document was released by the National Indigenous Australians Agency under freedom of information laws and is numbered sequentially from one to 26. Pages two onward are not wholly comprised of meeting minutes and instead are formal, structured and referenced sentences.
The political debate centres around whether those pages can be considered in totality of the Uluru Statement from the Heart but in her email to ABC staffers, Sales went a step further, by mischaracterising the additional pages as meeting minutes.
In an interview with 2GB’s Ben Fordham on Monday morning, Sales doubled down on her decision to send the controversial all-staff email, dictating how staff should interpret the document.
“I feel like it is part of my job, and part of the weight of my profile to take a stand for things like factual accuracy in debate,” she said.
“So when I saw last week that there was this idea that there’s this secret 26-page document and it starts to take hold as if it’s a fact, I think with someone of my seniority, it’s incumbent on me to say – hang on a...
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