Sky News Australia and The Australian have accused the ABC of distorting a speech by Donald Trump on the day of the attack on the US Capitol, 6 January 2021.
Their commentator Chris Kenny called the treatment of the speech in a Four Corners episode an “almost identical act of deception” as the edit of the BBC’s Panorama program that led to the resignation of the British public broadcaster’s director general and head of news last week.
On Wednesday the ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, is due to appear at the National Press Club, where he may face questions over similarities or otherwise between the two programs.
So what are the words under debate, and does the ABC have a case to answer?
What did the two broadcasters do?
Both Panorama and Four Corners used excerpts from Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. While the BBC spliced together two sentences almost an hour apart, the ABC edited a single grab, omitting some repetition and a complete sentence between two statements.
The BBC edit
The episode of Panorama in question was broadcast shortly before the 2024 US election. The edit was highlighted in a dossier from a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee that was leaked to the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
Trump’s speech was edited by Panorama to put together two sentences that were said 54 minutes apart, making it appear as though he was telling his supporters they would walk to the US Capitol and “fight like hell”.
The edit suggested Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
The word “fight” is used throughout the speech, but not directly after Trump’s suggestion of walking to the Capitol.
The BBC has acknowledged its program wrongly edited grabs from the speech and has apologised. Its chair, Samir Shah, said the editing of two clips from separate parts of the speech gave the impression “of a direct call for violent action” from Trump.
The Four Corners program
Reported by Sarah Ferguson, Downfall – The Last Days of President Trump was broadcast on the ABC on 1 February 2021 and is still available on iView.
Ferguson spoke to multiple witnesses and used footage taken by rioters to explore the motivation for the attack.
Four Corners used a single grab of Trump’s speech from which 10 seconds were edited – the sentences struck through below.
And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our constitution.
Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you
, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.
Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
An ABC analysis in response to News Corp claims last week concluded it was a minor edit that did not mislead audiences as to Trump’s meaning. The quote also reflects accurately the broader message Trump conveyed to the crowd over the speech, which lasted more than an hour.
What have the critics of the ABC claimed?
Kenny, The Australian’s associate editor who first made the allegations against Four Corners on his Sky News program, believes the words removed by the ABC left the impression Trump had urged the violence.
“Four Corners pretended to convey to audiences what Trump encouraged protesters to do at the Capitol that day. Yet in his only direct advice to protesters, the president urged cheering on and peaceful patriotism,” Kenny said.
“They have clipped up the speech to suit their narrative rather than reality, and the true meaning of what Donald Trump was saying that day.”
Inconveniently for Kenny’s argument, he himself wrote on 7 January 2021 that Trump “fomented and encouraged” the lawlessness and that “no excuse ought be offered for any protester breaking the law nor any leader inciting them”.
Over more than a week, the Murdoch platforms have assembled known ABC critics to back up their claim of systemic bias at the broadcaster, and in an editorial suggested ABC leaders follow the BBC’s lead and resign.
The Liberal senator Sarah Henderson called for a Senate inquiry into the editorial failings of the public broadcaster; the former ABC director Joe Gersh, columnist Tom Switzer, former Liberal leader Alexander Downer and founding editor of Quillette, Claire Lehmann, all bought in to the narrative.
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How has the ABC responded?
The ABC rejects Kenny’s claim that the ABC committed “the same journalistic sin” as the BBC, saying the way it quoted Trump reflected accurately the broader message conveyed to the crowd over the hour-long speech.
The managing director, Marks, the news director, Justin Stevens, and the ABC Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, quickly rejected the allegation by News Corp, saying the edit in the Four Corners program did not change the meaning of that section of the speech and did not mislead the audience.
Stevens told his team in an email: “The opportunistic attempt to seek to engineer a similar crisis here to the BBC’s is transparent and doesn’t stack up.”
Does the News Corp allegation against the ABC carry weight?
Alan Sunderland, a former editorial director of the ABC, said it was the job of news reporters to select newsworthy elements from speeches that are relevant and significant, in a way that does not misrepresent those original speeches.
“It is not the job of news reporters to report on every comment made or every issue raised, but to select the newsworthy elements in ways that do not mislead,” he told Guardian Australia.
Sunderland said a 2021 editorial in The Australian, much like Four Corners, published edited, selected elements of the speech and “summarised their impact by saying ‘it would be hard to imagine a more incendiary act by an incumbent US President than to exploit passions that were running so high’.”
“Neither source suggested that the president had deliberately and specifically urged or instructed protestors to invade the Capitol building and commit acts of violence, but both chose selected, edited elements of the speech to provide a sense of its impact and import. In my view, neither did so in a way which was misleading or inaccurate.”
On Monday the ABC’s Media Watch devoted the program to the BBC crisis and came to the same conclusion: there was no basis for the claim the ABC was similarly guilty of deceptive editing.
The host, Linton Besser, said: “Rather, it seems, this was a naked attempt to draw the ABC into a public broadcasting crisis 17,000km away, which smeared without foundation some of the ABC’s finest reporting.”
Kenny returned fire on Tuesday, saying the Media Watch analysis was as “ethically challenged and intellectually barren as the original sin”. He issued his own fighting words: “It will not be the end of the matter.”
