ABC’s Four Corners off the pace with conspiracy theories

The ABC news division’s focus on the failings of the Morrison government would be easier to ignore if it applied the same scrutiny to all sides of politics and all arguments in social and economic debates. Picture: Adam Taylor

The Australian media is so polarised that many journalists cannot even see what kind of politician the nation’s prime minister is.

At the ABC, where staff regularly tweet false criticisms about Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister is a far-right conspiracy theorist and climate change denier. Yet conservative media figures, such as Sky News hosts Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt, regularly complain Morrison is caving in on climate and immigration activism, and is too far to the left of the Coalition’s base on free speech and Covid-19 restrictions.

Senior political journalists – apart from a couple at the ABC and Guardian – see Morrison as a pragmatist unwilling to fight the ideological battles former PMs Tony Abbott and John Howard did. Morrison is running the highest deficit in history and is not conservative on policy fundamentals.

The trigger for this discussion is last Monday’s Four Corners program, The Great Awakening: a family divided by QAnon.

Overhyped by its own journalists, the federal government and critics of the ABC only ended up boosting audience numbers for what was a damp squib. There was little follow-up in other media because most of the story – about a former staffer for Morrison’s wife who is married to a QAnon conspiracy theorist – was old. The story had been covered in 2019 by Crikey, The Daily Telegraph and Guardian Australia, and in ­parliament.

Many journalists already knew two of the main sources for reporter Louise Milligan’s allegations had credibility problems.

One, Karen Stewart – sister of Tim Stewart, the alleged QAnon Trojan Horse in Morrison’s life – is a former Greens candidate for the NSW seat of Camden who has been bagging the Coalition on Twitter since she joined the social media platform in 2014. The other, Eliahi Priest, is a former associate of Tim Stewart.

None of this means the story should have been off limits. It’s reasonable to expect Morrison to provide an explanation of his relationship with the Stewarts, and the Stewart family’s description of the effects of QAnon on Tim and his son made instructive television.

But it gets weird when the nation’s pre-eminent current affairs program said it believes the inclusion of the words “ritual sexual abuse’’ in the PM’s national apology to victims of sexual abuse in October 2018 proves Stewart had enough influence over Morrison to secure the inclusion of words that apparently represent a special signal to the QAnon adherents.

Logically, unless Stewart showed Priest a text from the PM or his office about the inclusion of those words, all we have are claims of influence peddling between two conspiracy theorists. As The Australian reported last Wednesday, references to “ritual” abuse have been used elsewhere, and the final report of Julia Gillard’s child abuse royal commission included several mentions of “ritualised” or “ritualistic” abuse.

This resembles flaws in other ABC programs let down by a lack of journalistic scepticism. Milligan on 7.30 falsely branded Cardinal George Pell a paedophile on the evidence of mentally unwell former drug addicts while on Four Corners Milligan aired claims former Attorney-General Christian Porter was a 17-year-old rapist on the say-so of friends of a mentally unwell woman who had killed ­herself. While Four Corners has produced excellent journalism under executive producer Sally Neighbour, especially on China and its threats to Australians of Chinese extraction, its biggest mistakes have not been corrected.

The clear signal to its audience is Four Corners cannot be trusted to maintain proper journalistic standards when reporting on a government whose political stripes its journalists dislike.

Management needs to do more of what managing director David Anderson did a fortnight ago when he ordered the QAnon program be held over, as it “wasn’t ready” to go to air and needed more work. It’s called editing.

A good next step would be a discussion about why the ABC seems unable to scrutinise Labor or the Greens. Viewers I know were stunned at Insiders host David Speers’ tame interview with Greens Leader Adam Bandt last Sunday week. Famous for interrupting his guests, Speers gave Bandt a free run.

The news division’s focus on the failings of the Morrison government would be easier to ignore if it applied the same scrutiny to all sides of politics and all arguments in social and economic debates. It’s the ABC’s pieties that let it down.

The best story of the week was ignored at the ABC and – until two opinion pieces on Thursday and Friday – at this newspaper too.

It was the news in the Nine papers last Saturday week that the nation’s best anthropologist on Aboriginal issues, Adelaide Univer­sity’s Peter Sutton, and archae­ologist Keryn Walshe had pub­lished a book – Farmers or Hun­ter-Gatherers? – which scrutinised the prizewinning Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe.

Bolt on Sky News and in the News Corp tabloids gave due credit to the piece by reporter Stuart Rintoul.

Like this column, Bolt has been criticising Dark Emu and Pascoe’s claims of Aboriginal identity for years.

He has alleged Pascoe’s book misleads readers by misquoting and misusing historical evidence in primary documents by explorers.

This column in 2019 outlined the books Pascoe used to borrow and exaggerate his ideas: by Barbara York Main and W.K. Hancock in the 1970s, Eric Rolls in the ’80s and Tim Flannery in the ’90s. More substantive theoretical concepts were lifted from Rupert Gerritsen’s Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (2008) and Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2012).

This column in 2019 said: “Aboriginal women Josephine Cashman and Jacinta Price … raised crucial cultural issues” about attempts to paint their forebears in the European mould. Henry Ergas nailed it on The Australian’s opinion page on Friday, where he wrote that Aboriginal people lived “in a world in which the spiritual and temporal, the natural and the supernatural, were fused within a cosmic order that was not to be manipulated and transformed – as it was in the West – but revered and maintained”. In other words, Pascoe imposes on the “Old People” European notions of material progress unimaginable to them.

Explaining why he thought the ABC was ignoring the latest on Pascoe, Bolt made the same point this column did last week about media ignoring scientific research on the possible origins of Covid-19. Some journalists won’t judge a story on the facts.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial on Friday said it outright, discussing the Sutton-Walshe book: “This is not a right-wing criticism that devalues Indigenous stewardship of country.”

Bolt asked on Tuesday night how the ABC could ignore the latest Pascoe story when he, Quadrant magazine, the Dark Emu Exposed website and the Quadrant-sponsored author Peter O’Brien in Bitter Harvest, had all made similar points to Professor Sutton. There’s Andrew’s answer.

In both the QAnon and Pascoe stories, the left media will run any barking mad allegation against a conservative politician but ignore every barking mad claim by a progressive with a “correct” agenda.