Keep Calm and Q&A

Q&A host Tony Jones has spoken out on the now-infamous Zaky Mallah incident, ahead of his final hosting for 2015 tonight.

Jones notes that Mallah was not an IS supporter, which is why his question was not excluded, but acknowledged ABC was unaware of his other sprays on social media directed at female journalists.

What is also interesting is that the view from inside the production team, during a time of crisis.

“We took the view early on that this was a collective decision that we’d made, that if anyone wanted to blame anyone we were all equally to blame and that no single person on the program could or should be singled out or scapegoated,” he told Fairfax.

“We’re all pretty experienced journalists so I can say we understood the urgency of the matter but no one was panicking or arguing with each other behind the scenes.

“It was actually a pretty unified response and with cool heads … we thought about how we could handle this.

“Obviously the ABC at a broader level was involved at a higher level so we had lots of meetings about it and in the end I think we behaved sensibly.

“The ABC behaved relatively sensibly and the government finally saw that we were taking it seriously.”

Results of an independent review of Q&A by Ray Martin and Shaun Brown are yet to be announced.