ABC collusion: Media Watch falls prey to groupthink
For some ABC journalists, damaging Trump – or indeed undermining any position that does not fit the ABC world view on renewable energy, the war in Gaza or trans rights – is more important than accurate reporting.
This mirrors the attitude at the BBC where inaccurate reporting of Trump forced the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and news boss Deborah Turness on November 9.
Media Watch host Linton Besser even admitted at the end of last Monday’s program – which scrutinised the BBC’s biased editing of a speech by Trump on January 6, 2021 – that some ABC coverage of trans issues, for instance, needed a rethink. That’s the only positive from Besser’s lame defence of the edit of the same Trump speech by a Four Corners episode, Downfall, fronted by Sarah Ferguson on February 1, 2021.
Now the host of 7.30, Ferguson dealt with the BBC issue on November 11. She covered the BBC’s biggest ever crisis by interviewing Alan Rusbridger, who unsurprisingly attacked the Beeb’s critics. Rusbridger, a staunch left winger, edited The Guardian from 1995 to 2015.
Ferguson’s next item that night dealt with the news that the International Olympic Committee is considering banning trans women from women’s Olympic events. Journalist Adam Harvey did not interview a single supporter of the likely ban, which he linked to Trump at the end of his piece.
Nor did the story include a single female voice. Yet the push to keep elite women’s sport exclusive to women has been the biggest issue in world sport for almost a decade.
A leaked internal BBC report published by The Daily Telegraph in the UK found similar problems at the BBC with its reporting of trans issues, as well as matters involving Trump and Gaza.
In Australia, the ABC has been smashing the Liberal Party for a week for ditching net zero by 2050 but does not report that most countries are not meeting their Paris CO2 emissions targets and more than 100 Paris signatories did not lodge 2035 targets before this month’s COP 30 in Brazil.
Nor have ABC viewers been told Covid-19 almost certainly did start in a laboratory in Wuhan. This column in 2023 criticised Media Watch for its multiple defamations of Sky News Australia host Sharri Markson, who got the issue right in her book What Really Happened in Wuhan.
The catalyst for Media Watch’s latest attack on this newspaper and Sky News was journalist Chris Kenny’s report that Ferguson’s Downfall program had also edited Trump’s speech to make it seem like the President was directly urging his supporters to violence.
In fact Trump had urged them “to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women” and “to peacefully and patriotically make your voice heard”.
Kenny’s criticism was unarguably correct, even though the Ferguson edit was not as shocking as the BBC’s. ABC chair Kim Williams should admonish managing director Hugh Marks and news boss Justin Stevens for their silly defence of the program and instruct ABC ombudsman Fiona Cameron to accept Kenny’s formal complaint about the Downfall edit.
Media Watch also linked this column to its criticisms over a piece published a month earlier that bagged Ferguson’s three-part 2018 pot boiler, The Story of the Century. It was a small mention in a wider column about the approach to controversial issues taken by new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her Substack publication The Free Press. Besser took issue with that column’s criticism of Ferguson’s main corroborating intelligence source, former Department of National Intelligence director James Clapper.
That October 13 column also referred generally to the latest intelligence revelations during the second Trump presidency. One concerns Barack Obama’s former CIA director John Brennan, now facing a series of criminal charges for giving false evidence about investigations into Trump.
Brennan may face further charges relating to the concealing of evidence he received from Dutch intelligence in July 2016. The Dutch had learned Russia already knew by then of a Democrat plan to accuse the Trump camp of colluding with Russia.
Besser says “neither Clapper nor Sarah Ferguson ever claimed that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin”. Yet the entire three-part Four Corners program was designed to imply to the ordinary viewer that Trump’s team not only colluded with Russia but that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
Besser claims the piece is just about a Russian influence campaign in 2016. The Russiagate story has always had two distinct strands.
It starts with an intelligence community probe initiated by Obama into alleged Russian influence peddling before the 2016 election but morphs into a story about Trump collusion with Russia. That collusion story was driven by Clapper and Brennan through The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC. Brennan was on the payroll at NBC and MSNBC from the start of 2018.
The intelligence community’s undermining of Trump finally finished when 50 former intelligence officials signed a statement in 2020 falsely claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Were Ferguson aiming for a balanced piece, she would have admitted at the start of part 1 that Clapper had already testified to congress privately in early 2018 and admitted in several subsequent interviews that he had never seen evidence of Trump collusion.
Four Corners should also have owned up to Clapper’s role in pushing the false Christopher Steele document that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. Steele is mentioned at some length by Ferguson.
Steele’s discredited dossier, leaked to the then Buzzfeed news site, claimed among much else that Trump had urinated on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
Clapper had been accused of lying to congress when denying he leaked the Steele document, which he later publicly admitted he had discussed with CNN political journalist Jake Tapper.
This is critical because Steele was used by Obama’s closest intelligence leaders as the basis for extending the Russian interference probe into the possibility of Trump camp collusion. All this was in response to the Russian hacking of rival Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and their leak by WikiLeaks in March 2016.
When Besser claims neither Clapper nor Ferguson suggest collusion he is being too cute. The program barely discusses Russian disinformation or use of social media and the internet to influence potential voters. But it is chock full of innuendo about Trump, his family and his junior staffers.
The promo to part two, focusing on the investigation of junior Trump aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, specifically says: “On Monday Four Corners reveals the story of two key players central to the allegations of COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
One of Ferguson’s key sources in part two is Luke Harding, author of a book on Russiagate called Collusion.
The Mueller Report in 2019 cleared Page. Papadopoulos, a novice, unpaid adviser to Trump, admitted lying to the FBI and was jailed for 14 days.
Part three finishes with a spectacularly false collusion claim.
“Clapper: Russia is the existential threat to the United States. They are a foe of ours and I think right now the indifference to that imperils the country.”
“Ferguson: The Kremlin’s puppet master now has America dancing to his discordant tune. He couldn’t have planned it better.”
Spooky music plays while the vision morphs into a portrait of Putin.
Yet Trump in his first term took many decisions that hurt Putin.
Pulitzer Prize winning former Guardian journalist and founder of the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, nailed the silliness of the idea Trump was a Russian puppet.
“How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when he is right now trying to remove one of Vladimir Putin’s client states in Venezuela or when he’s trying to bully Angela Merkel out of buying Russian gas, probably the thing that’s most important to the Russian economy. Or when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians. Something Obama refused to do ... Or when he bombed Putin’s client State in Syria ... this whole narrative that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin is idiocy...”
The great irony is four years of Democrats’ aligned intelligence, media and legal efforts to destroy Trump only drove sceptical voters back to him in 2024.
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