Consumer Warning: Sarah Ferguson is at it Again

I want to come back to the battle that you’re [Nancy Pelosi] engaged in to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. He’s clearly taken America to a dark place… Donald Trump poisoned American politics in a new way…

Sarah Ferguson at ABC’s 7.30, airing her prejudices on August 13.

Let it be said that Sarah Ferguson, stepping down as 7.30 host, often did good work on ABCTV’s news flagship. If she remains with the ABC I wish her well in her next slot. I can’t claim any insights into her successor at 7.30. For diversity and inclusion’s sake, I picture a tussle between one of the ABC’s blak-identifying women or an LGBTQIA+ river-to-sea critic of Israel.[1]

How Sarah’s contract would be wrapped up is another unknown.

She’s probably paired in the $450,000 slot with Leigh Sales (including $70,000 super and long service leave). She might even be the presenter on $596,000 including $97,000 long service leave.[2] I hope the ABC handles any separation generously and sensitively. The last thing taxpayers need is another celeb there separating in a huff.

If she stays, a good move would be 3am wake-ups for ABC morning radio: it needs a pick-me-up before listeners evaporate altogether (audience share in Melbourne: 5.9 per cent).

Of course, I’m only speculating that she’ll leave 7.30, but given her comments on the show last week, management can hardly ignore the broadcaster’s charter and its obligation to report without bias. I imagine they’re caucusing now about her at highest levels. The marching orders were laid down by chair Kim Williams on February 28, soon after he took over from the hapless Ita Buttrose. He told ABC podcaster Monica Attard (“Objectivity in Journalism”):

We must have an institution in which we can repose our trust[3]…It is simply not available to individuals to say what [they] think and might view as triumphant over all others…It is simply not available even for consideration…

There is an inherent tension when people are particularly close to a matter of major moment that has heightened polarities in social settings [where] objectivity is seriously challenged and perspective is seriously challenged…Objectivity truly is at the core of responsible journalism, at least the aspiration to it…

If the ABC is to sustain and hold a place of embedded trust with the Australian community, if it is going to be seen as a vital aspect of Australian democracy that provides a safe space for accessing information, for understanding the polarities in difficult situations, for understanding the primary drivers of individual events in news and current affairs, it must have aspirations to objectivity.

You know, if you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality, don’t work at the ABC. I really think this is a very serious issue. This is a publicly funded organisation. It is a publicly accountable organisation. It is a respondent to legislation of the national parliament. And it must always aspire to be as fair-minded in its work as it possibly can be…[Bias] is just not available for discussion because the Act says it is not available for discussion.

Leigh Sales was Ferguson’s predecessor at 7.30 to 2022. Handbags now at six paces for the girls?[4] Sales had this to say in her book Storytellers (2023):

People rightly don’t always trust us [journalists] anymore. Too often, too many journalists, at all media organisations, are abandoning values espoused by people like [the ABC’s late] Andrew Olle, for various reasons. One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters. They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers… Or perhaps it’s awkward and exhausting to constantly push back against the groupthink of your colleagues.

Another reason is fear of the consequences of reporting the full picture: that inconvenient facts could set back a cause the journalist believes in … I believe that becoming a journalist means you relinquish the right to be an activist, even on important issues you really care about … When I see reporters whose work always somehow lines up with one side of an issue that’s complicated, I know I’m seeing activism, not journalism. It erodes my trust …

Sarah Ferguson, interviewing Nancy Pelosi 84, on August 13 didn’t exactly adhere to Williams’ and Sales’ prescriptions. Across 20 minutes she paraded her obsessions about US presidential candidate Donald Trump. It followed only a week after her on-air crawl with leftist interviewee David Sanger of the leftist New York Times.[5] Her ostensible reason for having both Sanger and Pelosi was that they’d published new books. Worth noting is that 7.30 does not offer guest slots to authors of right-of-centre books.[6]

I’ll detail Sarah’s interview of Sanger first, then chronicle her on-air Trump bias since 2016, and then get to her smooching Washington’s swamp queen Nancy Pelosi last week, with the presenter’s blistering bias against ex-President Trump.

Ferguson and journo Sanger squirmed with pleasure about the Democrat National Committee (DNC) labelling Trump and his Vice-President nominee J.D. Vance as “weird”. This “weird” word – devoid of any defined content – was taken up and parroted by the entire Democrat-friendly media to boost their campaign for Vice-President Kamala Harris and running-mate Tim Walz. The blurb on Ferguson’s iView:

[Walz’s] description of Trump and Vance as ‘weird’ cut through, changing the Democrats messaging about Trump, presenting him less as an existential threat to democracy but something more ordinary, and beatable.

Sanger described the far-left Walz ludicrously as “relatively progressive — he has a very avuncular football coach kind of persona.” (This framing is also straight from the DNC’s playbook).

Ferguson (on cue): You just mentioned the fact that he [Walz] used that phrase “weird” to describe Vance and Trump which has obviously, um, garnered an enormous amount of attention in the US.But how important actually for him being selected was that success in dominating the news media and actually pushing Trump out of the way over the last couple of weeks?”

Ferguson was about last in line to recycle the DNC’s “weird” meme in her episode of lame journalism, squared. Sadly, the DNC couldn’t make “weird” stick in the media because Kamala herself is weird. Specifically, sample this clip. Walz is even worse.

The ABC’s specialty is bias by omission[7], making it hard for critics to complain successfully about what’s not aired. The Ferguson-NYT interview placed its ABC cone of silence around Walz. Not mentioned:

♦ Drunk in 1995, Walz was pulled over for more than 95 miles an hour in a 55mph zone, lied that he was deaf from military service and lied again in saying he got off with a speeding ticket despite a 0.128 reading.

♦ Stolen Valour: Unlike Vance, Walz quit his National Guard career to avoid getting posted to Iraq, which his co-troopers called “running away”. Thereafter he inflated his retirement at Master Sergeant rank to Command Sergeant Major[8], bragged about carrying his rifle “into war” and never corrected dozens of media references to him serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (he was once deployed to Italy).

♦ As Minnesota governor he kitted out boys’ lavatories at school with tampon dispensers for lads in transition. While Democrats deny this, his bill’s sponsor explained: “Not all students who menstruate are female. We need to make sure all students have access to these products.”

♦ Introduced on-stage for the first time to Americans as would-be Vice President, he recycled the myth that his rival, Vance, admitted having sex with a couch. Walz turned immediately to Kamala Harris and smirked, “How’d you like that?” In other words, ‘Enjoy my brazen lying, Kamala!’

♦ During the torching of downtown Minneapolis by BLM rioters in 2020, his wife, Gwen, kept their windows open so she could enjoy the smell of burning tyres. What burnt were mostly the life savings of black business owners.

♦ His 19-year-old daughter, Hope, alerted rioters via X that her dad was not going to call out the National Guard that night. In other words, they could continue burning down Minneapolis.

♦ As Governor, Walz praised and five times hosted a Muslim Imam, Asad Zaman, who had promoted a film glorifying Hitler. Zaman later celebrated the Hamas massacre of October 7. In 2018 Walz was effusive in praising the hate preacher: “I would like to first of all say thank you to imam. I am a teacher, so when I see a master teacher, I know it.” [9]

♦ Job postings for the Harris-Walz campaign ( “Associate Producer/Road Media Manager”) invite use of the following pronouns: 1) He/him, 2) She/her, 3) They/them, 4) Xe/xem, 5) Ze/hir, 6) Ey/em, 7) Hir/hir, 8) Fae/faer, and 9) Hu/hu. Applicants could add further pronouns.

As for Ferguson’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), it’s stricken the ABC for more than six years. In 2018, two years into Trump’s presidency, Four Corners put out her three part “Story of the Century: Trump/Russia”, involving Sarah in months-long costly fiction-finding trips to the US, UK and Russia. In accusatory mode, she reported how “members of the Trump team, including possibly the President himself, actively colluded with Russia to subvert American democracy”.[10]

Lacking evidence, she fell back on proxies like the FBI’s now-discredited James Clapper and leaker James Comey, some nonentities spouting innuendos, and spooky music. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year inquiry interrogating 500 witnesses and thousands of documents found no Trump-Russia conspiracy. The ABC has never corrected or apologised for trash-talking Trump. Leigh Sales was even bragging in her book Storytellers five years later about Ferguson’s attempted stitch-up.

Unabashed by the Mueller report, Ferguson added Murdoch Derangement to Trump Derangement in a two-part Four Corners (August 2021) called “Fox and the Big Lie”.[11] It claimed Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News shilled for Trump and supposedly “helped destabilise America”.^[12]

Threatened by Fox with libel over what Murdoch’s Australian called a “full frontal hit job”, Ferguson said, “We’re not in fear of anything … there are fewer more important stories to look at in America right now.” For her, the regime media’s campaigning for Democrats doesn’t get a look-in.[13]

Fox complained to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which found Four Corners “omitted key information that resulted in information being conveyed in a way that materially misled the audience.” The show “came close to, but did not breach” the impartiality standards in the ABC charter. ABC management blasted the umpire for subjectively attacking Ferguson’s “world class report”. Ferguson called ACMA “inflammatory” and ignorant about journalism.

Let’s now look at the Ferguson/Pelosi diatribe against Trump, who has, according to the pollsters, about a 50 per cent chance of securing the presidency for 2025-29. I have never seen such bias on the ABC in 20 years, and that’s saying something.

Ferguson in her Pelosi love-in considered Kamala’s knifing of the decrepit Joe Biden – who is still the sort of President — as a tribute to Kamala’s “political adroitness on display”. Dorothy Dixer to Pelosi: “What do you put that down to?”

Pelosi rambled about Kamala’s “grace with dignity… the beauty of her faith” when knifing Biden but added that Kamala had “knowledge of the opportunity that was there.” I’ll say!

Ferguson steered Pelosi onto her Trump-bashing agenda:

Ferguson: Did any of [your] experience of taking on powerful people within your own party and winning, did any of that prepare you for the experience of Donald Trump?”

Pelosi: They were not like Donald Trump for goodness sake! We’re not talking grotesque! We’re just talking more traditional … no, no, nothing, nothing could prepare anybody for a president who would incite an Insurrection against the Congress of the United States. No we’re talking something completely different.

Ferguson (chiming in): Did actually Donald Trump take you by surprise, the lengths that he went to?”

Predictably, Pelosi produced fresh rhetorical flourishes against Trump “and his toadies”. After consulting her hit-sheet, Ferguson lined up the frail 84-year-old to repeat how she would punch up Trump if he had joined the rioters:

As a matter of self-defense I would have to beat him up and I would probably have to go to jail for beating him up and that would be okay with me.

Plumbing the depths for more leading questions, Ferguson asked if the hallowed Congress was now the same to her after Trump’s supporters trashed it (they ignored Trump’s call to protest peacefully).

Pelosi: Oh yes, I mean uh they were horrible and they brought danger, they brought disgrace, they brought defecation on the floor of the Capital, a symbol of liberty and democracy to the world …we prevailed in having a transfer of power not as peaceful as it had traditionally been because of the actions of the president to refuse to send the National Guard. It was disgraceful, it was disgusting…but I’m more concerned about the message it sent out about the necessity for us to win this election.”

Ferguson: I want to come back to the battle that you’re engaged in to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. He’s clearly taken America to a dark place. Do you also hold him responsible for the dark place that he took your family to with the terrible attack on your husband in your home?”[14]

Her prompting of Pelosi was so over the top that even Pelosi pushed back. Referring to the home intruder who bashed her husband with a hammer, she said the man was “espousing Trumpian statements and the rest of that but we’re not all responsible for what someone else says.”

Pelosi’s beef was that “he [Trump], his children, Republican leaders” made jokes about the attack. The New York Post reported: “[The attacker] lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree.” Pelosi piously claimed that when Trump was shot in the ear, Democrats were appalled and prayed for him. (Apart, that is, from all the Democrats and supporters, including Australians, who criticised the shooter’s poor aim).

Ferguson (with another Dorothy Dixer): Can America um recover in its politics? I’m not saying it wasn’t rough and tough before because obviously it was, but Donald Trump poisoned American politics in a new way. (23.38mins). Do you think you can ever go back to the status quo before he came onto the political scene?”

Pelosi: Well we have to. I do believe that when you’re in a fight you can’t become them, but you have to say, ‘What can we do to prevail because we have to defeat them but do so in a unifying way.’

Proffering advice for her opponents, Pelosi added, “I keep saying the Republican Party should take back their party. They’re a Grand Old Party, they did great things for our country. And now they’re a cult to a thug, that’s what they are. This is something quite different — an assault on the democracy, on the capital, on the constitution, on the Congress … but we can’t become them in the fight.”

Ferguson (as opinionista): “There was a brief moment there where the Republican leadership worked with you, but that fell away and they refused to support your efforts to bring Donald Trump to justice for that day…”

Note to Ferguson: you are not qualified to be Trump’s judge, jury and executioner. Of all the prosecutions brought against the unarmed rioters (one female veteran was shot dead by a guard), none specified “insurrection” which is just Democrat hyperbole.

Trump had told the crowd to stay peaceful. There is a strong body of evidence that the rioters were augmented with scores of FBI agents provocateurs. Beyond dispute is that police assisted protesters’ entry by removing barricades and even escorted intruders from room to room, Pelosi’s supposed House inquiry was set up as a kangaroo court and, no thanks to that committee, only the devil will ever know the real truth of that day. In ferocity, the fracas was probably eclipsed by the thousands of trade unionists (i.e. “Kim Beazley supporters”), drunks and Aboriginals who fought guards at federal Parliament’s foyer half a day on August 19, 1996 leaving 90 guards and police injured, some severely, and the Parliament foyer trashed inside and out. Arson at Old Parliament House followed the rioting. Sarah, please keep some perspective on events.

What take-aways can be drawn from this material? It was only a few months ago that ABC management, curiously, piled-on against their pundit Laura Tingle for breaching editorial standards by calling Australia “racist”. She also bagged Opposition Leader Dutton for criticising high immigration. Tingle wasn’t speaking on an ABC platform – it was just a leftie writers’ talk fest. But as Media Watch’s Paul Barry said of Tingle, arguably she had damaged the ABC’s reputation for impartiality and independence, undermined her effectiveness at work and put her managing director David Anderson on the hotspot at Estimates Committee.

The Australian editorialised (June 1) about new chair Kim Williams’ silence on Tingle:

If he fails to speak out and censure the demonstrable bias of high-profile 7.30 chief political correspondent Laura Tingle, Williams will follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Ita Buttrose, an experienced media performer who, despite much promise, failed to make a dent in the entrenched bias and unanswerable staff culture that underpins the decline in the ABC’s audience numbers.

The failure by managing director David Anderson to censure Tingle properly only confirms long-held suspicions that the public broadcaster is a left-wing worker collective, out of touch with community values, in which staff treat management with contempt.

Fair suck of the sauce-bottle, as ex-PM Kevin Rudd used to say. Ferguson on the ABC’s very flagship last week was accusing an American politician of taking his country to a “dark place” (whatever that means, but it sounds evil)[15], and “poisoning” politics (ditto). Not a peep out of management or Media Watch, though Sky News featured it on “Lefties losing it!”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was more blunt, saying Tingle had “hijacked” the ABC:

This is taxpayers’ money and it needs to be objective in its reporting, clearly it’s not, and the inherent bias now, the cultural bias within the ABC is the reason that their numbers are plummeting and most Australians find it a distraction from their daily lives and own views, instead of finding it the informative source that it has been for all of us over a long period of time.

I can suggest why Ferguson will get away with her August 13 diatribe: managing director David Anderson likely suffers the same advanced TDS symptoms that afflidt his star reporter. He’s actually fretted that the ABC isn’t leftist enough on climate to appease young climate ferals, and presumably on American politics as well.

So although in my ideal world management would have Ferguson on the mat, in this world she’ll not be sanctioned and probably earn at least a Gold Walkley for smooching Pelosi. Given Ferguson’s hostility to Trump as “political poison”, would ABC management allow her to continue reporting on him – as candidate and as President if he wins in November? Of course they will. This is Their ABC and its chartered obligation to impartial reporting be damned.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here.

Endnotes

[1] In a Jerusalem sermon, copied by MEMRI, the preacher says, “Will you allow a single homosexual on the land of Jerusalem and Palestine – no! Our people will not allow there to be institutions that promote this abomination.”

[2] 2023 ABC Annual Report, p230. Leigh Sales says the high pay for TV anchors reflects their often precarious tenure: “The position is subject to intense scrutiny and can be short – lived .” (Storytellers, p277). Her own tenure at 7.30 lasted a decade, ending in 2022. Hence she adds, “The flipside is that a skilled anchor can turn their programs – and themselves – into beloved and trusted public institutions.”

[3] In five years the ABC has plummeted from fifth most-trusted brand to 18^th.

[4] The ABC complaints department insisted to me that this “handbag” expression, when used by Media Watch’s Paul Barry, was not sexist or derogatory.

[5] For the decade to 2020, the NYT hired its pages and credibility to the Communist Party of China for a trifling fee of $US100,000 a month.

[6] The only exception I can recall is 7.30 putting on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s ex-press secretary, solely to monster her. Leigh Sales opened with, “Can Donald Trump tell the difference the truth and a lie?”

[7] Omissions include the ABC’s continued silence about corrupt multi-million deals revealed in Hunter Biden’s hard drive, and Hillary Clinton’s oft-repeated assertions that Trump stole her 2020 election victory.

[8] Walz nearly attained Command Sergeant Major rank earlier but didn’t complete the protocols and retired one pay-grade below that level.

[9] Regime media such as the Washington Post ignored these scandals, running instead profiles like “Tim Walz as football coach: A rambunctious, rah-rah joker”.

[10] As the ABC spruiked it, “Walkley award-winning journalist Sarah Ferguson follows the spies and the money trail from Washington, to London, to Moscow, to deliver a riveting account of the allegations and evidence against US President Donald Trump and his dubious connections to Russia – speaking directly to the characters central to the unfolding collusion drama. This extraordinary report interrogates the evidence so far and brings fresh perspective to a gripping story that could have been lifted from the pages of a blockbuster spy novel.”

[11] Executive producer was Sally Neighbour, presenter was Ferguson and a job called “writer/producer” was filled by none other than Ferguson’s squeeze, Tony Jones, the ABC’s one-time top-paid presenter and now hire-a-hubby contractor.

[12] Fox News offers viewers a broader spectrum of political views than the ABC would ever permit: as ex-chair Ita Buttrose once said, it was inconceivable for the ABC to hire anyone like non-left pundit Andrew Bolt.

[13] Journalists used to care about free speech. These days Washington Post journalists at White House briefings complain that the President hadn’t censored last week’s hour-long Trump/Musk interview.

[14] On Ferguson’s logic, Pelosi was culpable for that Democrat-supporting would-be assassin shooting and severely wounding a Republican congressman practising baseball in 2017.

[15] Referring to everything to do with Trump as “dark” was an explicit strategy of the DNC machine in the early days of Trump’s presidency, immediately aped by the regime media. The term “dark” has no meaning other than to denigrate.