The eagerly gulled
Ms Ferguson

Water finds its own level and it seems ratbag conspiracy theorists operate according to the same principle. The proof came in the recent 4Corners‘ two-part “expose” of Rupert Murdoch’s alleged control of all that is wicked and crawls  beneath the sun, the only champions of the good being those heroic talking heads at the ABC who have made it their mission to alert the world to the nonagenarian’s  boundless evil.

Several years ago, for example, Sarah Ferguson fronted a three-part series that professed to have proven Donald Trump was a Russian agent. Quadrant Online enjoyed a good laugh at the time as Ms Ferguson breathlessly regurgitated New York Times and Washington Post clippings. All of which, as it turned out, amounted to absolute nonsense.

This time around Ms Ferguson was out to show how Trump was Rupert Murdoch’s creation and puppet, his tool to “destroy democracy”, by quizzing various disaffected former Fox News employees about the low nature of their former boss. One of those was the cable network’s former military analyst, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret), who, with little prompting, had this to say:

Rupert Murdoch today is doing direct harm to my country. And it bewilders me that there’s no mechanism to stop him. I am not in favour of censorship of ideas. I’m in favour of combating lies.

and this

The green room over the last several years into the Trump administration, when I left, the guests got more and more bizarre, more distasteful. The green room started to be like the bar scene in the first Star Wars film. These people are freaks. And then you realise you’re one of the freaks …

…People with no qualifications, who could not even speak cogently, who could only speak the lines they’d memorised praising Trump as though he were a heathen god that had to be appeased with slavish rhetoric.

4Corners knows how to get good quote, no doubt about it. Trouble is, the show fails when a little context would come in handy — in this instance, having lionised Peters for turning his back on Murdoch, the precise reason for the military man’s departure was never laid out. His full letter of resignation can be read here, but this is the key element in that self-penned hero-gram to Peters’ estimation of his own unimpeachable insight (emphasis added):

…As a Russia analyst for many years, it also has appalled me that hosts … now advance Putin’s agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign. Despite increasingly pathetic denials, it turns out that the “nothing-burger” has been covered with Russian dressing all along.

And by the way: As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that the Steele dossier rings true–that’s how the Russians do things … The result is that we have an American president who is terrified of his counterpart in Moscow.

So there you have it: Peters quit Fox because he believes — or did so at the time — the same crazy and thoroughly discredited claim that the Steele dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, proved Trump was Putin’s creature because Moscow hookers were reported to have urinated on a bed in which Barack Obama once slept.

This is, of course, what Ms Ferguson also believes and on which the ABC  spent what cannot have been less than a $1 million (and probably a lot more) to shuttle Mrs Tony Jones and her camera crew around the world for that initial three-parter. One can only wonder if the unpicking of that thread by subsequent US government investigators made 4Corners wary of repeating such tosh all over again, If so, the omission of Peters’ reason for handing in his notice is a case study in either incompetence or, as some would see it, dishonesty by omission.

The only difference between the former soldier and a professed journalist is that, when Peters talks piffle, the Australian taxpayer doesn’t have to pick up the bill for room service.

— roger franklin