Navy personnel have been involved in dangerous events on the open seas, but some news outlets who should be chasing that story are instead fixated on how the ABC is reporting it, writes Alan Sunderland.

There is a very important story running across daily news bulletins and the front pages of the newspapers at the moment. Some organisations, for reasons that are painfully apparent, think it's a story about how well the ABC carries out its journalism.

It is not.

Over the past few weeks, two boatloads of asylum seekers heading for Australia have been stopped, turned around, and sent or helped or towed back to Indonesia. The Navy has, it says, inadvertently entered Indonesian territorial waters while doing so. In the process of these activities, there appears to have been scuffles or contact between asylum seekers and Navy personnel. There have been injuries. All sorts of claims are being made about precisely what happened on board those boats.

By any measure, and regardless of whether you consider the Government's decision to turn back asylum seeker boats good policy or bad, these are important and highly newsworthy matters. In the past (think no further back than the 'children overboard' controversy of 2001) such drama on the high seas involving Australians has been major news.

But this time, there is a big difference. This time, the Australian Government has adopted a carefully considered position of making no comment whatsoever on operational matters when it comes to asylum seeker boats. They have put forward their clear and principled reasons for taking such a stand, and they have stuck to it.

Journalists, though, have a different set of responsibilities to governments. Journalists have a responsibility to inform the public about important matters that affect them. Good journalists will chase important stories through every available source, even when official sources refuse to comment.

So when those boats were turned back, and when the allegations of violence and mistreatment of asylum seekers began to emerge, the ABC started reporting. Equally importantly, we started probing.

In early January, when the allegations of mistreatment and burnt hands first emerged, they were flatly denied without qualification by Australian authorities. The ABC reported the allegations after first seeking a response. Then, when the response came, we reported those denials prominently and for some time the matter rested there. Then, some weeks later, video evidence emerged. This too was reported.

Behind the scenes, the ABC's journalists kept probing. Our contacts on the ground in Indonesia were strong, and we worked them relentlessly. We travelled to where the asylum seekers were and sought as many different accounts as we could. We reached out to all of our contacts in Australia, including among the armed forces, to get information from as many sources as possible. And at every possible opportunity we sought official information on the details of precisely what happened.

As the result of a lot of hard work and persistence from many good journalists, we now know that some extraordinary and dangerous things happened on the open seas and Australian personnel were involved. Due to the lack of official information there is still great confusion, claim and counter-claim about the precise details, and without a formal public inquiry we may never know. But already, in addition to the original hotly disputed claims by some asylum seekers that their hands were deliberately hurt by Navy personnel, there have been assertions that people were pepper sprayed and, as a result, stumbled blindly into hot engines; that people threw themselves into the ocean; that there were angry and violent confrontations; and that boats were deliberately disabled.

This is an important story. It is a story that is emerging thanks to the hard work of committed journalists trying to do their job in difficult and highly politicised circumstances.

My role in all of this is as the person responsible for the ABC's editorial standards. So I look on from a comfortable desk in Sydney, with the luxury of coolly assessing how well our journalists are performing and whether there is anything to learn from such a complex, fast-moving and highly charged story.

And yes, there are always things to be learned. Journalism is, as they say, the first rough draft of history. There are always lessons to be learned and ways to sharpen our performance. No doubt in this story, as in all others, we will find opportunities to reflect on how each development unfolded and how we responded.

But if we relied only on information from official channels then little or nothing would have been reported and the Australian public would have been left in the dark about the dramatic events unfolding on the high seas.

From the moment the first claims emerged in this messy affair, it was clear there was a significant story. Thanks to the work of good journalists who did not stop chasing, the public now knows that.

When the ABC starts chasing uncomfortable stories, we expect criticism. But it is indeed a strange world when some of those who should be chasing the story seem to think the story is us.

Alan Sunderland is the ABC's head of editorial policy. View his full profile here.

Editor's note (February 5, 2014): A statement from the ABC regarding its reporting on asylum seeker abuse claims can be found here.