Everyone loses in the tawdry, dangerous and eminently preventable scandal over the role of 60 Minutes in a kidnapping in Beirut. The two children involved have endured torment beyond what they had experienced during their short lives of family dysfunction. Their names have been published and faces shown – something illegal in Australian family court matters. The bungled attempt to snatch them from their father would be seen as unconscionable if tried by a paid vigilante justice agency with media complicity here.

What was a private and emotionally fraught family matter has become a salacious debating topic globally.

Money has changed hands for what was an attempt to bolster ratings by playing to base instincts; by dividing audiences with an invitation to back the mother or the father; by trying to place journalists as heroes in some supposedly honourable crusade for justice. Except it went terribly and predictably wrong. All the adults involved stand condemned for an illegal violent action in grabbing the children from their grandmother. And to top it off, it seems money was required to get the crew and the mother out of danger.

A vulnerable, gullible and desperate woman who fought for 18 months to get two of her children back to Australia has probably lost any small chance she had of doing so.