Is the ABC being captured by the Murdoch press? Paul Begley evaluates the case of the latest ABC hire by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp.
Ex News Corp editor Clare Armstrong recently jumped ship to become chief digital political correspondent at the ABC.
Armstrong is replacing Jacob Greber, who was taking up Laura Tingle’s job on 7.30. For the previous nine years, Armstrong had held the role of chief political editor for News Corp’s capital city tabloids.
While at News Corp, Armstrong’s byline appeared on one of the more fanciful stories put out by former PM Scott Morrison’s unrelenting PR machine.
When US President Joe Biden announced an exit strategy from Afghanistan in May 2021, he set a short deadline of 31 August, forcing American allies to get their acts together swiftly to ensure their people were not left behind when full control was ceded to the Taliban.
As the deadline for evacuations from Kabul drew to a close, a story appeared under the byline of Clare Armstrong in the 27 August issue of News Corp’s Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph under the headline ($): ‘Australia’s last plane out of Kabul held so mum and child could be rescued’.
The story purported to set out what happened when Prime Minister Scott Morrison personally held up the departure of the last Royal Australian Air Force plane out of Kabul for crucial extra minutes so an Afghan mother and baby could board. The story concluded with the sentence: “Once the mother and child were located and loaded onto the plane, Mr Morrison gave the clearance for wheels up, and the flight left Afghanistan”.
A link to The Daily Telegraph story was posted on Twitter (X) by Armstrong. While ‘likes’ were posted to her feed by 364 people, numbers in excess of 3,700 posted ‘replies’, some of which were from Australian military personnel and former serving personnel. They shared one thing in common:
they did not believe the story.
The military people went so far as to say it was simply not possible, there being no way military protocols would allow a civilian, even a civilian prime minister, to be put in contact with the pilot of a military aircraft to be cleared operationally for “wheels up”.
The real story
The Armstrong story was not picked up widely, perhaps because other media outlets saw it as a beat-up. That said, The Saturday Paper in the Schwartz Media stable ran a post-mortem on it some weeks later in which Karen Middleton sourced its background.
While it might have been concocted in the Prime Minister’s office and fed to Armstrong, who reported it without a trace of scepticism, according to Middleton, the Prime Minister had arranged to hold the plane up. However, he did so in order to allow an Afghan man, woman and child to board the RAAF flight, and was assisted in the task by the Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Campbell.
As Middleton tells the story, General Campbell happened to be in a meeting with Morrison at the time, and was instructed to hold the plane up until the Afghans boarded. General Campbell communicated with the military personnel on the plane but was written out of the Armstrong story, elevating Morrison’s role in it, as was the Afghan man accompanying the woman and child.
At the time leading into a problematic election, Morrison was burdened by a well-recognised “woman problem”. Here was a chance to make an adjustment to a crisis with Morrison emerging as the beneficiary. By deleting the Afghan man boarding the plane with the woman and baby, there was no distracting presence getting in the way of the favoured narrative. In its retelling by Armstrong,
Morrison became the sole saviour of the woman and her child.
The “wheels up” order attributed to the PM appeared to be a flourish Morrison’s people couldn’t resist, and Armstrong didn’t push back, dutifully reciting it verbatim in her published rendition of the story.
That flourish had the added benefit of contributing to the fictional idea of a character called ScoMo, who we had come to know as a man of many parts: a lifetime Sharks rugby supporter, a beer drinker, a ukulele player, a women’s hair washer, a welder, a barramundi chef, an army shell handler, a hydrogen researcher, and thanks to Armstrong, a military aircraft commander.
The anatomy of fake news
A standard strategy commonly used in drafting New Corp stories has been to base them on a kernel of fact, while tweaking details to achieve a desired result. It’s a strategy that goes back a long way.
A 1975 story about Gough Whitlam’s Treasurer, Dr Jim Cairns, was published in Murdoch’s The Daily Telegraph. A photograph was prominently placed in the front pages of the paper that showed Cairns having breakfast on a balcony with his private secretary, Junie Morosi, a glamorous woman strongly rumoured to be Cairns’ mistress. The picture appeared under the headline ‘Breakfast with Junie”. The kernel of fact in the photograph was that Cairns was, in fact, having breakfast with Morosi.
Missing were the other two parties at the breakfast, who were out of shot, namely Morosi’s husband, David Ditchburn and Cairns’ wife, Gwen.
The point of the fabricated photograph was to smear Whitlam’s government.
In an ideal world, Armstrong may have seen the light and decided to depart the dark side of a discredited media empire that owns Fox News and the New York Post, and whose proprietor was shamed into closing London’s News of the World in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal of 2011.
Alternatively, the Armstrong appointment can be seen as a move to further populate a Murdoch Trojan Horse that has flourished at ABC Australia with executive and presenter appointments under chairs Ita Buttrose and Kim Williams, both News Corp executive veterans, alongside former deputy ABC chair Peter Tonagh.
To date Armstrong has been given the benefit of the doubt, despite her parting story for New Corp that faithfully ran a large picture of Anthony Albanese under a lurid page-one headline that bellowed: “A WIN FOR HAMAS”.
In a spirit of generosity, Crikey’s media writer Daanyal Saeed ran his story on the Armstrong appointment with a headline that characterised her as being “poached ($)” for the ABC politics job, suggesting the national broadcaster was lucky to get her.
Two cliches seem more apt: the jury is out, and time will tell.
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