Aunty’s shame: ABC hatchet job unmoored from reality
The ABC’s attempted hatchet job on Fox News is so unmoored from reality it makes you wonder if Aunty can even find America on a map, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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The ABC’s attempted hatchet job on Fox News is so unmoored from reality it makes you wonder if Aunty can even find America on a map.
Whatever election and cable news channel Four Corners is trying to expose, it bears zero resemblance to the 2020 US presidential election and Fox News.
Four Corners claims Fox News pandered to Donald Trump and encouraged him not to accept his electoral defeat, and ultimately was to blame for the Capitol Hill riot on January 6. This is the reverse of the truth.
In fact, from the moment Fox News became the first network to call Republican Arizona for Joe Biden, Trump and his supporters have railed against the conservative cable channel.
Fox suffered an immediate slump in ratings as small fry challengers, News Max and OAN, filled in the credibility gap by running wild with conspiracy theories that were gripping Trump world.
I am a Fox News contributor, regularly appearing on top-rated shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity, as well as being a columnist for the New York Post. So I have an insider’s vantage point of how the election fallout was handled.
I saw in real time how Fox angered its own viewers and suffered a ratings slump in the weeks following the election because of its determination to report the news straight and evidence-backed.
“Stop the insanity” was the front page of the New York Post on December 28, 2020, over a photo of Trump. “You lost the election – here’s how to save your legacy”.
This also was the tone of the Fox News coverage. Trump had had enough time to challenge the election results. Now the ball had moved to the all-important Senate runoff in Georgia which would determine control of the Senate – and which ultimately the Republicans lost. Most commentators at Fox and the Post were highly critical of Trump for the loss.
While there was a range of views across Fox at the time, the network’s highest rating host Tucker Carlson set the tone less than three weeks after the election, when he ridiculed lawyer Sidney Powell, the lead proponent of the conspiracy theory that electronic voting systems had switched millions of votes over from Trump to Joe Biden.
“We literally do UFO segments,” said Carlson on November 20, 2020, when explaining why he refused to interview Powell.
“We would have given her the whole hour. But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her…
“She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
Fox stood firm against enormous pressure from a loyal chunk of its audience and the former President, himself, by refusing to promote election conspiracy theories.
The stance cost the network one of its most loyal and lucrative advertisers, Mike Lindell. The pillow king announced last month he was pulling his ads off Fox because it refused to promote his election-fraud theories. The Wall Street Journal reported Lindell spent $50 million in advertising on the network last year.
By the time of the Capitol riot on January 6 this year, the general tenor of Fox coverage was one of exasperation at Trump’s fantasy that Vice President Mike Pence could magically restore him to the White House.
On the day of the riot, Fox ran the video straight and on-air commentators universally condemned the violence and mayhem.
But Fox hosts did not subsequently mislead their audience into believing the riot was something more - an “insurrection”, a “white supremacist” domestic terrorist attack and the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War, as Biden styled it.
This hyperbole was the dish served up by the likes of CNN and MSNBC who have seen their ratings collapse to record lows while Fox has recovered its post-election audience and established itself as the most-watched cable news network in the nation.
Again, its middle ground coverage has been vindicated, as the FBI quietly admitted on Friday in a leak to Reuters, that it has been unable to find any evidence that January 6 was an insurrection; there was no “organised plot” but instead the FBI found virtually all cases are “one-offs.”
Ultimately the ratings strength of Fox shows that maintaining independence of opinion and integrity in the news process is what wins and maintains viewers.
It is the left-wing outlets, such as CNN and MSNBC, which lost credibility and audience by straying from journalistic authenticity in their addiction to the clickbait of false anti-Trump narratives.
Four Corners has embarrassed itself by grasping onto this vapour trail of Trump derangement.
The ABC has based its criticism of Fox on a range of disgruntled former employees, not one of whom had insight into editorial decisions at the top.
Gretchen Carlson, a former employee whose sexual harassment claims seven years ago led to the immediate downfall of Fox boss Roger Ailes, has nothing new to add.
What does her ordeal have to do with Trump or the 2020 election, anyway? It just seems to be an excuse for the ABC to use clips of Margot Robbie, Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron from the movie Bombshell as clickbait to sex up old news.
So desperate is the ABC to demonise Fox it even lionises Ailes as some sort of force of moderation at the network – a hilarious turnaround on everything it has ever said about the man previously.
At a time when the United States is engulfed in a once-in-a-generation foreign policy crisis in Afghanistan, because of President Biden’s ineptitude, the ABC has created a fake story from whole cloth.
If it genuinely wanted to report on an election media scandal in the US, it missed the big one – the media suppression and censorship of the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. On the eve of the 2020 election, the left-wing media and Big Tech conspired to smother a story that showed Biden in a poor light. That is genuine election interference by media and it was right out in the open but has been ignored by the ABC and its erstwhile Washington correspondents.
Instead, Four Corners went in search of evidence that doesn’t exist to shoehorn into the farcical Australian left-wing narrative of an evil Murdoch empire destroying the West.
It is stupid of the national broadcaster to tell such demonstrable lies about a rival news organisation – and unbecoming of its solemn charter to serve all Australians with integrity.
The irony is that the flagship ABC program feigns to lecture News Corp on fairness and impartiality when it has produced a dishonest confection which would put the worst Fleet Street beat up merchants to shame.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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