The first thing to say about the Four Corners “expose” on Fox News is that it was formulaic. It even started with historic footage of Rupert Murdoch with his two sons, James and Lachlan, then very young, setting up the whole dynasty schtick complete with dramatic music.
The most shattering phrase in the episode came right near the end: “next week”. Four Corners’ star reporter Sarah Ferguson is going to give us a second instalment of this dreary smear – then again she did give us three episodes of the “Story of the Century” on the nutty Russia collusion theory. Ferguson and the ABC are not shy about over-claiming. Last night Ferguson introduced her program by declaring: “Tonight on Four Corners, how America’s No. 1 cable news network became a propaganda network for Donald Trump and helped destabilise democracy”.
I guess it was 79 years too early to get away with “story of the century” again. And last time I checked, the US was still a democracy.
Four Corners called the program The Big Lie, which was probably something of a Freudian slip, because it revealed more about ABC obsessions and its tenuous grip on reality than it did about Fox News.
It told us nothing we did not already know. Trump was a disrupter, he won, and then four years later he lost and proved a very bad loser.
Ferguson was able to demonstrate that Trump was very unhappy about how Fox News covered the election and its aftermath. Indeed, her “tell all” interviews with disgruntled former Fox employees revealed how dissent and differing points of view are endemic at the broadcaster.
One of the criticisms of Fox News during the rise of Trump was that it broadcast his campaign rallies and was rewarded with boosted ratings. This is an extraordinary revelation about the ABC and the broader left – they think it is a crime against journalism to give unfiltered coverage to a right-of-centre presidential candidate and their evidence is that people wanted to see it!
Telling observation
The ABC would have learned more if it thought about this perspective and wondered about the reasons for the success of Fox News. It was there, buried away in this program, in a clip of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes on Fox and Friends celebrating the 15th anniversary of the station a decade ago.
Asked why he thought the network would work, Murdoch says he had a “hunch there was room for another point of view”. When you consider that response and the success Fox News has enjoyed, it is a massive indictment on the political groupthink of the other television networks.
Indeed, in the same clip, Ailes recounts how Fox News discovered “a secret niche in broadcasting, half the American people”. That is a telling observation that the ABC would do well to consider, but instead it portrayed Ailes as some sort of evil genius who was the “creator and dark eminence” of Fox News who was “pulling the strings behind the scenes”. He was the CEO; pulling the strings was his job.
But Ailes, of course, apart from being a brilliant broadcasting executive, turned out to be a sexual predator and was terminated after Fox News presenter Gretchen Carlson exposed his demands and their career consequences. Extraordinarily in this #MeToo age, Ferguson seems to diminish this sexual harassment episode and how the Murdochs forced an appropriate reckoning, by declaring it was just an “excuse” to get rid of Ailes.
At no point does Ferguson contemplate the reasons for Fox News’s success or what it might say about other media. She portrays a network back in 2016 that was “increasingly pro-Trump” apparently failing to realise the same phrase applied to the American electorate. Presumably, in her view, the other networks were more objective and representative by failing to recognise Trump’s connection with the electorate or his plausibility as a winning candidate.
Strong views
Carlson, at one point, said that after she left, Fox News “allowed Trump to dictate what news to put on Fox”, but she failed to provide any examples. Ferguson did not proffer any either. Carlson also praised Ailes for believing in “fair and balanced” news while claiming that ethos deteriorated after he left.
In a program that proffered little that has not been discussed previously, Ferguson made the stunning observation that some Fox News opinion hosts were decidedly pro-Trump, and actually said so on air and at Trump rallies. She referred to Sean Hannity as a “star struck fan boy” when speaking to Trump at a rally, which makes me wonder how Ferguson would describe her colleague Leigh Sales interviewing Malcolm Turnbull.
The point here is obvious to those of us not on the ABC payroll but somehow missed by the public broadcaster’s people: Broadcasters like Hannity and Tucker Carlson, or Paul Murray and Peta Credlin in our country, hold strong views, and are sometimes partisan, but they do it in an open and honest way that respects the intelligence of their audiences.
At the ABC people such as Ferguson and her husband, former Q+A host Tony Jones, or radio broadcasters such as Fran Kelly and Rafael Epstein, all pretend to be political neuters under the ABC guidelines for objectivity. I respect their right to hold green left or any other views, but by pretending such a disposition does not exist, they are not being frank with their audiences – they are disrespecting them, and they are flouting the ABC charter. They could learn much about honesty and accountability from Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt.
One of the episodes Ferguson focused on was the election night coverage when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden and Trump was furious. Yet her interviews demonstrate the independence not just of Fox News in its relationship with Trump but also internally where the Fox News team that made the call declared there was no interference or push to overturn it. (Given the final result saw the state go to the Democrats by only 11,000 of more than three million votes, or 0.3 per cent, it is fair to say the call on the night was very courageous, to say the least, and that in hindsight most psephologists would have left that call for another day.)
All this only makes me long for a documentary based on the ABC’s election coverage in 2019. It would track the exuberance evident early, the huge seat predictions for Labor, and then follow the seat counts and emotions through the many stages of dirge that followed, informed by exclusive access to Barrie Cassidy’s contemporaneous text exchanges, and perhaps Ferguson’s too.
The very topic of Monday night’s hit job tells us much about the ABC. Ferguson and Four Corners could have examined the recovery from Covid-19 in the US where divergent vaccination rates and approaches to lockdowns in various states will prove a crucial experiment for the world. They might also have examined the energy and emissions challenge for the US and the world, or President Biden’s soft and, so far, ineffectual foreign policy, or indeed, his fitness for office.
Feeble leadership
Four Corners might have examined the forces and possible solutions to America’s border crisis, or even whether despite extreme comments from Trump and others about electoral fraud, Biden can achieve any meaningful reform to deliver fairer and more transparent electoral processes. They might also have investigated the origins of Covid-19, including the suspicions and secrecy surrounding the activity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a story pooh-poohed by the ABC for more than a year.
News Corp reporters, including The Australian’s Sharri Markson, have led a global search for truth on the virus origins only to be smeared by the ABC’s Media Watch program for doing so. This demonstrated the core problem at the ABC: it is less interested in facts than it is in ideology, so that it instinctively is willing to overlook reality because it has a preoccupation with potential partisan motives.
This, is why no reporter at the ABC understood the forces unfolding in the American electorate that made Trump’s rise and 2016 election win a realistic possibility. Fox News saw it coming.
Likewise in Australia, despite its vast resources and expansive staff, no reporter or analyst at the ABC predicted that Scott Morrison was a plausible prospect in 2019. Many at News Corp, including at Sky News and The Australian, saw it coming.
Getting issues wrong, sometimes disastrously so, is the high price our public broadcaster pays for feeble leadership that allows ideological positions to develop and embed themselves in the organisation. In recent times the ABC has been terribly wrong on those crucial elections but also on Cardinal George Pell and former attorney-general Christian Porter – vendetta journalism has run ahead of the facts.
Required by law to be an objective source of news and information, we know the ABC has a corporate position on climate policy, border protection policy, renewable energy, Trump, and even on the pandemic response where its preference for lockdowns and an unsustainable zero-Covid approach has held the nation back. Antipathy to News Corp is another deeply embedded bias within the organisation –– I experienced it and partially subscribed myself as a young reporter more than 30 years ago.
Please explain
Yet all this is increasingly getting out of hand. The ABC is fuelling, if not working hand-in-hand with embittered political forces of the green left, such as former prime minister Kevin Rudd and his new allies, former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, to use parliamentary process to condemn News Corp through the use of a Senate committee as a media show trial.
ABC journalists actually welcomed the one-week ban handed to Sky News Australia by YouTube over what it decided were a small number of misleading comments about pandemic responses and possible treatments, such as ivermectin, during thousands of hours of broadcasting. Yet the ABC itself this week apologised for interviewing a medico about ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment: Should the ABC now be silenced for a week, or should we accept that legitimate debates ventilated by expert opinions are crucial?
The illiberalism of the ABC when it comes to freedom of expression is worrying. It should give short shrift to the arguments of Rudd, Turnbull and Hanson-Young because they are driven only by a desire to amplify views they support and silence views with which they disagree.
The ABC would do better to ease up on its intergenerational obsessions and ideological purges and concentrate on self-examination. Apart from the malicious and erroneous attempts to convict Pell and Porter in trial by media, Ferguson herself has some explaining to do.
Just last week in a self-congratulatory program about Four Corners’ 60th anniversary, Ferguson spoke about why the program was important. “I live in America where we’ve just seen the catastrophic consequences of what happens when a shared believe in truth and facts breaks down,” she declared. “So Four Corners’ commitment to those things may actually be one of the most important defences for Australian society.”
Talk about hubris. This is the same Ferguson and Four Corners program that aired this introduction in 2018: “Tonight we begin our special three-part investigation into the story of the century the election of US president Donald Trump and his ties to Russia.”
Yes, Ferguson, Four Corners and the ABC called this expensive and heavily promoted series the “story of the century”. But it amounted to nothing but a disastrous and embarrassing case of ideological egg on the ABC’s face. At taxpayers’ expense they had promulgated a phony and partisan conspiracy theory.
Instead of apologising for its own editorial transgressions and focusing on reforms to improve its processes and journalism, the ABC chooses to run another episode in its decades-long, institutional and personal crusade against News Corp. This only confirms to most Australians that the broadcasting behemoth they fund is out of touch with mainstream concerns and is preoccupied with fringe ideological obsessions at the expense of useful public broadcasting. Maybe there is room for another point of view.
Chris Kenny is a Sky News presenter
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