Fox News complaint about Four Corners still unresolved 

This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.

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There’s something about being linked to the January 6 assault on US democracy at Capitol Hill that seems to have struck a nerve with Lachlan Murdoch. 

Crikey is not the only outlet to have earned Murdoch’s ire. So too has the ABC — and for much the same reason. 

It was 12 months ago, almost to the day, that Four Corners broadcast the first of a two-part series called Fox and the Big Lie, fronted by Sarah Ferguson.

Fox News was incensed by the picture it painted, amassing a 36-page document detailing how it had been done wrong by the ABC. The ABC’s internal complaints department found there were no breaches of its code of practice back in November last year.

Fox then escalated the matter and took its complaint to the federal government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in December last year. 

And there, extraordinarily, it now sits — unresolved nearly eight months on.

Why is it taking so long? ACMA’s answer is that the complaint is complicated and raises much to be investigated. Whatever the case, ACMA is in an invidious position given the Murdoch group’s hostility to government regulation. Imagine if it were to find there was no complaint to uphold? Especially involving the ABC, which the Murdochs have long sought to destroy?

So what’s the background?

On August 23 and August 30 last year, Ferguson presented a powerful case, backed by the voices of several former Fox News insiders that the network had gone and hitched itself to the Trump bandwagon and become a destructive force in US democracy, driven by a push for audience and profits. 

Here’s a selection of what Fox’s former on-air personalities and correspondents had to say:

There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not ashamed or troubled by my association with what I think is the biggest purveyor of misinformation in the world, which is the Murdoch media empire.

Conor Powell, former foreign correspondent, who left Fox after nine years. 

What you saw Fox becoming was an ethically and morally corrupt enterprise. The United States of America gave Rupert Murdoch a great deal, and he repaid it by doing a great deal of harm.

Lt Col Ralph Peters (ret.), former fox military analyst. 

I think that they allowed the former president to dictate what news they put out to the American people. They were seeing that when they showed his rallies that the ratings went up. I mean, listen, this is all a money game. This is all about ratings. This is all about the bottom line.

Gretchen Carlson, former anchor who famously filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against then Fox chairman Roger Ailes (and won).

Fox certainly has participated in the destruction of democracy by promoting the types of things that Donald Trump did. Now, that’s a pox on Fox.

Carl Cameron, former chief political correspondent who resigned after 20 years with the network.

The program made the case, in Ferguson’s words, that Fox News hosts embraced and spread Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and that the Murdoch cable news network became “a propaganda vehicle for Donald Trump and helped destabilise democracy”.

“The poison of Trump’s lies, widely spread, widely believed and cynically used by politicians, drove the raging mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6,” Ferguson reported.

“Fox News didn’t send the mob but its worst outrage generators certainly fuelled its anger. Trump wasn’t alone in his assault on the truth but he could never have spread the Big Lie so widely without his most reliable echo chamber, the Murdoch-owned and -run Fox News,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson had also found a quote from Lachlan Murdoch from 2018 in which he appeared to link himself directly to the editorial positioning of the Fox network.

“What I do do, running a media organisation is obviously — you know, work closely with the managers of those newsrooms and with the managers of those newspapers and it’s important that they get the ah, the ah, the positioning and the messaging right,” Murdoch told a New York Times-hosted panel discussion.

From its corporate HQ at 1211 6th Ave New York, Fox screamed blue murder. The network complied its thick dossier of complaint and fired it off to the ABC.

“First, and most basically, the episodes abandoned all semblance of impartiality and instead presented a one-sided political polemic against Fox News, the most-watched cable news organisation in the United States for nearly two decades. The patent bias, second, led to programs riddled with basic factual errors, uncorrected even after Fox News presented contrary evidence. Those errors, third, stemmed from the ABC’s abject failure to abide by basic journalistic procedures,” the Fox letter, quoted by Nine, said.

In Australia, News Corp lifers and trusties joined the attack, echoing Fox HQ. The program had revealed “more about ABC obsessions and its tenuous grip on reality than it did about Fox News.” The “insiders” were bitter ex-employees who had their own problems.

Fox followed up with a demand that the ABC hold an independent external review of the Four Corners broadcast labelling elements of the coverage “indefensible” and “a gross distortion of the truth”.

The ABC found nothing of substance in the complaint — a step that, predictably, fired up the Murdoch media’s attacks on the ABC. Fox then took its complaint to ACMA, the ultimate arbiter of complaints in Australia’s broadcast media. That was in late December 2021. And 240 days on, there it sits.

And why the delay?

“The complaint raised multiple allegations that the ACMA is carefully assessing. Investigations of this nature can take a number of months to conclude,” a spokesperson responded via email. “At this stage we don’t have an estimated completion date.”

Now it’s at risk of being in the eye of the Murdoch storm.