Senior journalists at the ABC have told of their anger at the handling of the “Cabinet Files” by the corporation’s management and in particular the decision to hand the trove of documents back to the government.

The Cabinet Files was the publication of nine news stories in January, which were sourced from a cache of cabinet documents obtained by the ABC after they were found in a filing cabinet in a second-hand shop in Canberra. “Hundreds of top-secret and highly classified cabinet documents have been obtained by the ABC following an extraordinary breach of national security,” the broadcaster said in its original reporting.

A few days later, the ABC news director Gaven Morris made an agreement with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to return the documents.

In several interviews, senior ABC staff, from both front and behind the camera, have expressed their disquiet at the move. They declined to go on the record for fear of reprisals from the management. The staff, who work across the ABC’s news and current affairs programs, told Guardian Australia there was consternation over what they believed was a lack of rigour in the editorial oversight.

“It looked like they were focusing on damage control rather than looking for really good stories,” one said.

The journalists told Guardian Australia it looked like Morris had done “a pre-emptive buckle” so as not to upset the government. They wondered what was in those boxes and whether the assigned reporters had gone through them “with a fine tooth comb” and found stories they chose not to report or if they had missed anything.



They asked why the ABC had given the files back when Morris had earlier said “we could have told hundreds of stories over weeks or months”.

Morris, who was elevated to the position two years ago at the age of 43, has a background in 24-hour news management rather than current affairs reporting, making him the target of some suspicion among seasoned current affairs reporters.

The ABC’s freedom of information editor, Michael McKinnon, got the documents from the source and asked the Canberra political reporter Ashlynne McGhee to work on them with him. The stories carried their bylines.

In a behind-the-scenes piece published in the Australian, the ABC’s new head of investigations, John Lyons, said everyone at the network was in agreement that “any documents which could endanger public safety or national security if published would not be published”.

But one journalist said: “There is a lot of disquiet in the organisation” and added that the broadcaster should have drawn on its investigative resources to cover such a big find.

Some say Four Corners, ABC’s flagship investigative program, should have been involved and others said it was strange that the story was kept under wraps in one small part of the news division and not shared with investigative and specialist reporters.

Another seasoned journalist asked: “Did they go through all the documents? They seem to have taken a very conservative approach. It was a great surprise when the documents were given back. No journalists with specialist knowledge were involved.”

But sources in the Morris camp said McGhee and McKinnon did not work alone and many senior people were involved, including Lyons and the deputy director of news, Craig McMurtrie, the managing editor of the Canberra bureau, Gillian Bradford, and the manager of editorial policy for ABC News, Mark Maley.

An ABC spokeswoman said conjecture and speculation around the Cabinet Files was coming from people without direct knowledge of the investigation. “As has been said before, the significant public interest stories were told,” she said.

“The stories were worked on by an experienced, senior team and went through the normal editorial and legal processes. The ABC reported the stories that passed the tests of being both significant and in the public interest, and did not reveal sensitive information which might have unjustifiably endangered public safety or national security with no overarching public good.

“Returning the documents was achieved without compromising the ABC’s priority of protecting the integrity of its source and its reporting, while acknowledging the commonwealth’s national security interests. The obligation to consider and balance such editorial, ethical and legal concerns is integral to responsible journalism, and one we always take very seriously.”

The internal criticism grew louder last week, when the ABC had to apologise to Kevin Rudd for a mistake in the Cabinet Files story about the home insulation scheme.



The Rudd error was described as “embarrassing” and “shameful” by some journalists, who said it was extraordinary no one knew what the royal commission had said about Rudd’s culpability.

A story – about top secret files being left in a safe in the office of the senior minister Penny Wong when Labor lost the 2013 election – was changed after publication to include Wong’s response because the reporter did not give Wong adequate time to respond, according to the shadow minister’s office.

Many ABC staffers cheered an article written by the veteran investigative journalist Brian Toohey, in which he said handing back the documents was a “disgrace”.



“Disturbingly, the ABC has seemingly adopted a new rule that no document should ever be reported if some anonymous official has stamped it with a national security classification,” Toohey wrote in the Australian Financial Review.

“Instead of performing a watchdog role on behalf of the public, this rule would conceal abuses of power by security agencies as well as disastrously false intelligence – examples of which the media has routinely reported in the past.”

The former Four Corners reporter Andrew Fowler was also highly critical of the ABC, writing in Guardian Australia that it was sending a message there would be no more scrutiny of security matters unless they were officially sanctioned by the government.

“Handing over documents to any Australian intelligence agency signals the emergence of an unhealthy relationship between the ABC and the very institutions of government they should be holding to account,” Fowler said.

The ABC’s Media Watch program reflected the mood at the broadcaster when its host, Paul Barry, asked on Monday whether scores of stories remained untold.

“But it is a sorry end to what in many ways was a great get for the ABC,” Barry said.

“Trusted by its source, responsible in its dealings with government, and bringing us three or four genuine scoops. How sad that what could have been a triumph ended in something of a train wreck.”

The ABC spokeswoman said the track record of ABC News in investigative and in-depth journalism was second to none and its commitment was “absolute”.

“Currently, we are in the process of forming ABC Investigations, the largest dedicated daily investigative and specialist journalism team in the country, which will work across programs and platforms,” she said.

“We are also launching the Specialist Reporting Team, reporters and producers who will bring in-depth, expert reporting to the rounds of technology and science; regional communities; consumer affairs; education; health; arts, culture and entertainment; social affairs; and Indigenous.”

