A former 60 Minutes producer has revealed the program used to reject payment requests for "child recovery" stories – because it feared tarnishing its reputation.

The source believes high-ranking staff – including reporter Tara Brown and producers Tom Malone and Kirsty Thomson – are "just as responsible" as sacked producer Stephen Rice for the bungled Beirut kidnapping.

On Friday, Rice was fired – against the express recommendation of Nine's internal review – for his role in the debacle.

"Rice f---ed up, and he needed to go," says the producer, who worked closely with him and Brown on Channel Nine's flagship current affairs show.

"It's just a matter of who else goes, too. Tara? Kirsty? Tom?"

"Tara is responsible because she is so hands-on with these stories."

The producer rejects the idea that staff treat each other like family.

"It's total bullshit. It will be nasty in there at the moment. The '60 Minutes family' is rubbish. There are little camps – and when things go wrong, there is blame and anger directed at people.

"I can't imagine a lot of group hugs for Tara at the moment ... it was a very strange and toxic place."

Fairfax Media has confirmed the Beirut mission was originally pitched to Nine's Inside Story by a freelance producer. That program rejected it, but handed the idea to 60 Minutes.

At this stage, Thomson was 60 Minutes' chief of staff, and Malone was executive producer. (Since then, Thomson has been promoted to executive producer, and Malone is now Nine's sports boss.)

It was Thomson who assigned the Beirut story to Rice.

"It was not a guarantee of a story, [just] an idea [for Rice] ... to explore and present to EP [Malone]," a Nine spokeswoman says.

On Wednesday, News Corp published emails between senior 60 Minutes staff who worked on the doomed mission. They show that Malone and Thomson knew significant details of the abduction plot.

Back in January, Thomson wrote to Malone: "Sally Faulkner has been talking to [child recovery agent] Adam Whittington for months about the possibility of snatching her 4 and 6yo children ... [Inside Story] were going to pay $115K ($69 up front) for [Child Abduction Recovery International] to snatch the kids, escape via water... "

In its internal review, Nine acknowledged the "obvious pitfalls" of its reporting team getting too close to Faulkner. The Brisbane mother wanted to retrieve her two children from Lebanon, where they were living with their father, Ali Elamine.

"Sally is a pretty blonde, she speaks well, so she's the perfect 60 Minutes person," says the source.

"If she were a fat, overweight mother from the western suburbs, it would have been different."

Already caught in a ratings decline, 60 Minutes has been reeling since four staff were jailed for a fortnight in April. Founding producer Gerald Stone, who headed a review into the disaster, described it as "the greatest misadventure in the 37 years of 60 Minutes".

The source tells Fairfax Media that similar "child recovery" stories were aborted by Hamish Thomson, who was executive producer between 2007 and 2012. (News Corp reports that Thomson – who rejected the Beirut mission as executive producer of Inside Story because it was "too expensive and fraught with difficulties" – was made redundant by Nine a week ago. The report says his departure was prompted by his program being shelved, rather than any fallout from the 60 Minutes review.)

"Hamish ... was adamant that no money would change hands," the source says.

"We could not pay. He was concerned about the reputational damage.

"We looked at ... these tug-of-love stories – but we never went ahead with them because [Hamish refused to pay].

'We'd say, 'We won't get the story then?' And he'd say, 'We'll just have to miss out.'"

Fairfax Media has approached Hamish Thomson for comment.

The producer says parents who can afford to fund a child snatch have little motivation to involve a TV crew, as cameras and reporters tend to hamper these operations.

Tara Brown is "the most hands-on" of all 60 Minutes reporters, the producer says.

"Tara would go through everything; she wants to go through every single little detail. She is very level-headed, very smart and super intelligent.

"This is not an inexperienced team we're talking about ... yet at every single step of the story, there was an error.

"They should all take responsibility."

(Rice's lawyer, John Laxon, told The Guardian his client has been unfairly targeted: "To imply that somehow Stephen was off on a frolic of his own, or primarily responsible for what took place, is just nonsense. Stephen has acknowledged that mistakes were made, including by him. But ... he was doing the job that Nine asked him to do, in accordance with his employment contract, he was producing the story that Nine wanted him to produce, and that Nine knew all about.)

The source believes Nine has continued making mistakes since its crew was arrested in Lebanon.

"That soft interview [Brown did] with Michael Usher was a PR disaster. Then they allowed them to be filmed with beer at the airport. Totally stupid. In these situations, you do not show any enjoyment factor.

"If [Brown] had handled that interview with Usher differently – [if she had] shown some humility – there could have been a different reaction. But it seems she doesn't get what she's done is wrong."

Recently, former 60 Minutes journalist Ray Martin revealed he drove a getaway car for a child recovery report in the 1980s. Martin insists the program did not pay anyone for the story.

Another former staffer – who worked on 60 Minutes in its 1980s heyday – has also expressed concern about the 37-year-old program.

"We took ABC-type stories and tried to make them palatable to a commercial audience," the source tells Fairfax Media.

"These days, they often seem to be taking A Current Affair-type stories and turning them into 60 Minutes stories."

When Stone launched 60 Minutes, he hired around 25 staff. More than half were seasoned ABC investigative reporters or producers.

Its journalists – then household names – were encouraged to take a personal, involved approach.

"But there's a difference between getting involved in a story – and trying to influence the outcome," the ex-staffer says.

Early on, this person raised ethical and financial concerns with Nine's hierarchy about about "chequebook journalism". Back then, 60 Minutes dominated the ratings, and there was no direct competition from Sunday Night. Therefore, Nine rarely needed to open its wallet.

When asked if 60 Minutes refused to pay child recovery agents in the past, Nine declined to answer.

Know more? Email mlallo@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Twitter: @Michael_Lallo