60 Minutes donates $5,000 to charity

60 Minutes has reportedly made a donation of $5000 to Hands Across the Water, the  Australian charity raising money for Thai baby Gammy.

It follows Tara Brown’s interview with Wendy and David Farnell last week.

But News Corp reports 60 Minutes would have likely made at least $500,000 in advertising revenue for the episode, and the money falls well-short of the kind of fee it would have forked out for a paid high-profile interview.

In the lead-up to the interview Nine maintained it was not paying the couple for the interview but would make a donation to the charity.

Hands Across the Water received the money through its website last Thursday, with founder Peter Baines confirming, “(But) as with other donors and supporters we don’t disclose the details.

“We accept and appreciate all donations large and small and put them to the best use we can.”

Producer Tom Malone told the newspaper, “We made a separate decision to make a donation to Hands Across the Water. We won’t comment on the amount or timing of a confidential and anonymous donation.”

Of course 60 Minutes previously commenting on whether it pays for interviews or not goes against its own tradition of never confirming chequebook journalism -meaning it opted to do so when it suited its agenda. That will leave many of us presuming that every other time it declines to confirm if it has paid for an interview that it probably has.

Hands Across the Water has so far received around $240,000 from around 6000 people as a result of baby Gammy’s media attention.

The charity plans to use Nine’s money for a reunion between Gammy and his sister Pipah in coming years.