The ABC’s big lie and the madness of Four Corners

The ABC has used its flagship current affairs program to run a conspiracy-laden and error-ridden ‘expose’ into Fox News.

ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson anchored Monday night’s episode of Four Corners, titled The Big Lie.

The ABC has used its flagship current affairs program to run a conspiracy-laden and error-ridden “expose” into Fox News, blaming Rupert Murdoch for Donald Trump’s refusal to accept electoral defeat, ignoring News Corporation’s prominent role in demanding the former president hand over to Joe Biden.

The two-part Four Corners series and accompanying reports on radio and online includes interviews with several disgruntled former employees of Fox News in an attempt to smear the Murdoch-controlled broadcaster with the baseless claim it had a “role in amplifying Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him”.

ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson, on assignment in the US since late last year, anchored Monday night’s episode, titled The Big Lie — but the program was more notable for its glaring omissions than any groundbreaking revelations. In the second episode, Four Corners will try to link Fox News with the insurrection at the Capitol by Mr Trump’s supporters on January 6.

Despite being immediately sacked by the Murdoch family after being exposed as a serial sexual predator, Fox News’s founding chief executive Roger Ailes — a lifelong conservative Republican — was bizarrely praised by the ABC as a voice of moderation. The program attempted to make the case that Fox News was more moderate under the notoriously hardline Ailes, who was forced out of the network in 2016.

 

Four Corners also made much of Fox News host Sean Hannity’s impromptu appearance with Mr Trump at a political rally in 2018, but failed to note that the network censured the on-air star for his decision to appear onstage with the president.

The ABC argued that Fox and Mr Trump were on a unity ticket but failed to mention the 400-plus tweets by the then-president in which he heavily criticised Fox News’s coverage of the November election, including attacking the network’s marquee presenter Chris Wallace for his tough questions during the presidential debates.

Despite its thesis, the ABC showed how Fox News was the first major broadcaster to call the crucial state of Arizona for Mr Biden, a decision that enraged Mr Trump. The broadcaster’s political editor at the time, Chris Stirewalt, told Four Corners that while there was anger in the Trump camp, there had been no pressure from the company for him to overturn that call. “I received no instruction to reverse the call,” Stirewalt said.

The ABC’s contention that Fox News set the scene for the January 6 riot ignores the high-profile Fox News presenters who repeatedly blasted Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud. The ABC also does not acknowledge the role of Mr Murdoch’s other US media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal and its critical coverage of the “inexcusable” behaviour of Mr Trump or The New York Post’s front page demanding the defeated president “Stop The Insanity” and move on from the White House.

Instead, the national broadcaster declared the program would expose Fox News for its “slavish support of Trump” and make the unfounded claim it “split the Murdoch family and spoiled Rupert Murdoch’s succession plans”. In doing so it ignored the plethora of evidence showing the network catered for a range of opinions on Mr Trump, from harsh critics to those more supportive.

 

For example, after the January 6 riots, top-rating broadcaster Tucker Carlson said Mr Trump had “recklessly encouraged” the insurrection. The ABC also ignored evidence that a social media and Facebook-inspired frenzy had driven many rioters to the Capitol. Despite this, the ABC program accused Fox News of helping to “destabilise democracy” and put “US democracy in peril”.

“Fox News didn’t send the mob, but its worst outrage generators certainly fed their anger,” Ferguson reported on Monday.

The ABC spoke to former Fox News anchors, including Gretchen Carlson and Carl Cameron, all of whom had left the network before the 2020 presidential election and the public falling out between Mr Trump and Fox News. “The use of five former deeply disgruntled employees, only one of whom was part of the company during our coverage of the 2020 US presidential election and its aftermath, single-handedly discredits all credibility of the program,” a Fox spokeswoman said.

In a statement to The Australian, (published by Mr Murdoch’s News Corp), Fox News said the taxpayer-funded program “clearly violated the basic tenets of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s published standards by exhibiting bias and a failure to maintain any level of impartiality in the presentation of news and information”.

In the second of the two-part Four Corners report next Monday, the ABC attempts to link Fox News directly to the January 6 riots and claims this hurt democracy.

Mr Biden was sworn in as President without incident weeks later in a perfect display of US democracy at work.

The handover was handled by Fox broadcasters as expected. And Mr Trump’s claims of electoral fraud condemned. On one occasion, Fox News anchor Bret Baier told Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in the days after the election: “We are not seeing any evidence of widespread fraud … we just haven’t seen it. You know, it hasn’t been presented. There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet. But when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out.”

Similarly, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out Mr Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell for making claims about electronic vote-switching with no evidence to back it up.

“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,” he said on his program.

Another Fox News anchor, Eric Shawn, scrutinised virtually every election fraud conspiracy spread by the former president’s supporters.

“Election officials across the country insist, as of today, there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome the presidential election, that our precious democracy was not tampered with and that such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of election officials and workers across the country who we have seen dedicating themselves 24/7 to ensure a fair and free election for all of us,” he said.