Journalist portrayed Brazilian tribe as freaks who kill their children, according to Acma ruling on the Sunday Night program

Channel Seven has lost a three-year legal battle with broadcasting authorities over a current affairs program it aired in 2011 which was deemed to be an inaccurate and racist portrayal of a Brazilian tribe who lived in the Amazon.

The battle to overturn the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s original ruling was lost last week when the full federal court dismissed Channel Seven’s appeal and ordered it to pay Acma’s costs.

The segment featured Seven video journalist Tim Noonan and writer and adventurer Paul Raffaele travelling through the Amazon jungle and meeting with the Suruwaha people, who Noonan described as having “disturbing practices”. “These lost tribes encourage the murder of disabled children,” he said.

Raffaele claimed that the Suruwaha believe that children born with birth defects or born to a single mother “are evil spirits and should be killed in the most gruesome way possible”.

“They take these poor little innocent babes out into the jungle to be eaten alive by the wild beasts or jaguars or they bury them alive, this is one of the worst human rights violations in the world,” he said.

In his federal court judgement Justice Buchanan backed Acma’s original report when he said he found the statements made by Noonan and Raffaele “would be likely to provoke or perpetuate intense dislike and serious contempt of and for the Suruwaha tribe and its members on account of their practices and beliefs”.

The commercial television code of practice requires programs to be factually accurate, balanced and fair.

The original complaint about the network’s Sunday Night program was made by Survival International, a lobby group for tribal peoples around the world. Survival’s director Stephen Corry described the Sunday Night segment as “freakshow TV at its very worst”.

“The Indians are made out to be cruel and inhuman monsters, in the spirit of 19th-century colonialist scorn for ‘primitive savages’,” Corry said in 2012. “It’s clearly designed to have the same effect – to suggest that they don’t deserve any rights. The idea that such nonsense is supposed to help tribal children is breathtaking.”

After Seven failed to correct what Survival claimed were a number of “errors and distortions” in the broadcast, the group lodged a formal complaint with Acma, which launched an investigation into whether the report breached the code which regulates broadcasters.

According to Survival, the Suruwaha Indians had been shown the report were very angry at their portrayal. They said the Seven crew had instructed them to remove their western clothing before filming so they looked more primitive.

Survival claims the Seven story played into the hands of fundamentalist missionaries who were seeking to remove babies from their families.

The complaint was dismissed at the time as “nonsense” by the show’s executive producer, Mark Llewellyn and Seven management has defended the program through one investigation and two court cases.

But Acma’s investigation found that Seven had breached the commercial television code of practice requirements for factual accuracy in its reporting on the Suruwaha tribe and its alleged practice of infanticide.

The also found the report provoked “intense dislike and serious contempt on the grounds of race or ethnic origin”, which is another breach of the code of practice.

“The Acma is satisfied that given the highly evocative language used in the report to describe the killing of babies and the judgmental tone used by Paul Raffaele and the reporter condemning the alleged practice, it is likely that in all the circumstances these contributory factors would have perpetuated and provoked an intense dislike and contempt for the Suruwaha,” the authority said.

Seven refused to accept the authority’s ruling and sought a judicial review in the federal court in September 2012. But the federal court dismissed Seven’s claim on all grounds holding that it was open to the Acma to make the findings that it did and that the findings were not affected by legal error as alleged by Channel Seven.

Seven lodged an appeal against the federal court decision, although the appeal was limited to one aspect of the decision. On Friday 19 December, 2014 three judges found Channel Seven had not established any legal error and dismissed their appeal with costs.

The program’s executive producer was not around to see the conclusion of the saga. In October Llewellyn was suspended by the network after an altercation with a member of his staff

He has since been replaced as executive producer by Steve Taylor, who has run the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program since 2009. Seven says Llewellyn will be back in a senior role at the network in 2015.