FOUR CORNERS - 19/03/2001: Catch Me If You Can - Lies Exposed

Follow developments in this story on Kevin Curnow.

Four Corners presented this story as an expose on fraud, but the very story presented was fraudulent. This is an expose of the lies of Four Corners and Sally Neighbour. Martin Gates wrote the following story and it deserves the widest possible circulation. It brings into question the ethics and standards of journalists who write for the Australian Broadcasting Corporations's flag ship current affairs program Four Corners. To maintain credibility and relevance, the ABC must have in place the regulatory mechanism that stops its programs setting themselves above the law and acting as judge and jury.

Read this and weep at the depths that Australian journalism have sunk to - and Sally Neighbour leads the sinking ship with her abusive journalistic style that treats truth as an irrelevance and dresses lies as reality to make a good 'show'. When will she realise that she is not writing for some throw-away sensationalist rag but actually has to be thought and effort into her work. The web is full of adverse comments in respect of Neighbour - and it does look like she really has reached her use by date.

FOUR CORNERS CURRENT AFFAIRS

Well past the use by date

by Martin Gates

 

The Australian Broadcasting Commission has for many years hosted the current affairs program Four Corners. It has had a checkered history, ranging from the exceptionally good to the extraordinarily bad, dependent on the quality of the reporters it employs and the approach that they bring to stories and the presentation of the facts in a cogent and transparent manner.

 

All current affairs programs thrive when they are renewed by the constant infusion of new blood to keep the output and the focus fresh and relevant to the material they are presenting. They whither when there is no turnover of reporters and the stories fall into the class of repetitions of tabloid approaches of little substance.

 

Unfortunately for the ABC, Four Corners is falling into the withering class and this article examines a case in point – the beyond use by date of Four Corners reporter Sally Neighbour.

 

Sally Neighbour does not make her CV public. That is not unusual amongst reporters as they have often been trained on the job and have very limited academic qualifications. No reporter would want this known as the people they interview are usually much better trained and qualified than they are and it is embarrassing to have to admit that when challenged. The only historical CV that Four Corners admits to is –

‘Sally Neighbour first joined Four Corners in 1996 after a term as a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong and Beijing. She rejoined the program late in 2000 after a stint at Lateline.’

If this were the only CV she has, then she miraculously appeared in 1996 as a foreign correspondent. Not only is that unbelievable but it likely hides a much lesser tale she does not want to expose.

 

At best this is failing to address the issue and at worst, it is simply hiding matters. None of which seems to make much difference but Sally Neighbour has a journalistic history of attacking CVs when she goes to great lengths to hide her own.

 

What Neighbour does trumpet is that she has been awarded several Walkley Awards as evidence of skill and capacity. What she does not go on to say is that she has had a very long association with the management of the Walkley Awards and the clear lack of perceived transparency that causes puts all of the awards into a suspect class. After all, if there was nothing to hide, would she not admit to the connections? Not so apparently.

 

Neighbour’s writing skills are not substantive. Certainly, as a journalist she can stamp out a piece in the usual word formula fairly quickly, but when faced with a longer piece of reasoned argument, she fails to hit the mark and  her journalistic writing skills have come into serious question. Neighbour is adversely mentioned on many websites.

Sally ‘Turd Dropper’ Neighbour

‘Its bad enough she gets to deposit her turds in Australian papers like the Age and sometimes the Australian. Looks like she hit the big time now, because CNN discovered her thanks to her talent for spotting politically correct flying body parts… We need to take a closer look as to what kind of ‘research’ Sally does. What we have seen so far is not impressive. Ideological blinkers and the obligatory left wing bias don’t substitute for cold facts, reason and common sense.

These are not the comments anyone would expect with respect to a balanced journalist.

She has also been attacked by community groups for her lack of objectivity and inability to comprehend the substance of a story.

‘Your ABC – Don’t bet on it!

Community Group Shafted by 4 Corners

You really have to wonder. 4 Corners are supposed to have a good reputation. 4 Corners are supposed to work with integrity. But can 4 Corners be trusted to properly cover a story and more importantly look after and respect the sources of the information that they present to the Australian public? I think not. Sally Neighbour... apparently chose not to properly investigate, claiming in an email to me that the issue was "too complicated". I thought investigative journalists were supposed to unravel complicated issues.‘

By far the biggest concern is her investigative skills as she has now demonstrated over a period of years a substantial lack of discernment with respect to content as well as a naivety that has allowed her to be conned into supporting major international frauds. Possibly the issues were too complicated for her, but better is expected of a supposed major and senior journalist. There is a major example of this in her reporting with respect to the collapse of Balangarri Aboriginal Corporation (BAC) and Kevin Curnow in particular.

 

BAC was a major resource agency that represented 13 or more Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley and Kevin Curnow was its coordinator. In January 1999 he was terminated while on leave when a management takeover was organized by some white staff and the non-full blood Aboriginals. Many months later, the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission cut off all funding and it was placed into liquidation. Importantly, at the time of his termination BAC had over $800,000 in the bank. At the time of the liquidation, the coffers were bare.

 

The liquidators placed all of the blame on Curnow which was a little extraordinary since he was not even there when the money was spent and the decision to liquidate was based on ATSIC’s decision to stop funding because of a total lack of faith in the new management.

 

In March 2001 Neighbour ran a major piece on BAC and laid all of the blame at Curnow’s feet and went on at length in the program that this was a matter of a most major fraud that could only result in severe penalties for Curnow. Shortly thereafter, she was awarded a Walkley Award for the story – one of the many suspect awards.

 

Then came the problem for <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Four Corners and Neighbour. The police did investigate her claims. They had to because they had been so loud and so public. The problem was that they could not substantiate a single one of them. That made the almost self-award of a Walkley look exactly what it was – a major put up job by Neighbour. Her reputation immediately nose dived as she could not deliver the goods. She walked the walk but could not talk the talk.

 

Neighbour made other reports in the post-2001 period, but none matched the venom she had expended on BAC and Curnow. Until 2009 when she was contacted by Shahid Yusuf from Pakistan.

 

Yusuf is the head of a Canadian company called Fincon that has been active in Pakistan in various consulting areas for several years but had fallen on hard times because the company could not deliver on its promises and the contracts dried up. Yusuf tried to get the Urban Institute, a major US think tank, to expend many millions of dollars buying from him the delivery of financial management software he alleged he had. The problem was that he did not have any such software and Urban Institute developed its own within a short time. Yusuf was desperate and commenced proceedings in the Pakistan District Court against Urban Institute alleging theft of his software because, as Yusuf told everyone, he could make the courts do what he wanted and the Urban Institute would pay him out rather than risk a court case. Kevin Curnow was named in the proceedings as he headed the Urban Institute‘s operations in Pakistan even though he had nothing to do with the case.

 

Yusuf scoured the web trying to find information useful to his case and found the Four Corners report from 2001. He immediately arranged others to contact Neighbour and to run a follow up piece on Curnow in the Australian newspapers. This Yusuf would use to force a settlement of the case and he tried vainly to do so.

 

Neighbour duly filed a piece in The Australian and finally nailed her colors to the mast. The piece was a short restatement of her earlier work, but it contained possibly the greatest journalistic faux pas of this, or any other century. Neighbour had to get over the fact that the police could find no substance in any of her allegations against Curnow and so she hit upon the bald and outrageous statement that the sole reason that Curnow was not charged and jailed following her story was that the Australian police do not investigate if the amount is less than $5 million. It is hard to believe that a quality reporter would carry such a ludicrous statement to press, but she did, because there was no other way of covering the lack of substance of her earlier stories and the weak foundations of her Walkley Award.

 

This would all not count too much as reporters are exposed all the time but Neighbour did a lot more than just mis-state the facts. In the case of Balangarri, she either missed or intentionally hid the true substantive story of how the infighting after Curnow was terminated lead to the cancellation of an $18 million acquisition of traditional lands from white owners that had already been approved. How a reporter misses $18 million is hard to fathom.

 

More importantly, by allowing herself to be duped so easily by Yusuf, she directly lead to Curnow leaving his post in Pakistan. Again, not much of an issue really, except for the fact that Curnow had proved himself over many years to be an able and effective operator in very difficult environments and the US government was relying on his skills to implement major governance reforms that would assist in legitimizing government. When he left it fell into a heap as there are few people in the world capable of operating as Curnow does and the replacements were, while able enough in their own way, simply not up to the task. The result of Neighbour’s witch-hunt and naivety is the further weakening of the Pakistan state.

 

Neighbour has been too long in place at Four Corners and she should have been ejected when it was clear that the 2001 story was a beat up. Now her actions are becoming the focus of a growing swell within the web that are turning the light on her having passed the use by date by many years.

 

For Four Corners to survive into the future it needs to cull dead wood and not be a home for weak and exhausted. Send her to pasture and get fresh blood or whither on the vine of irrelevance with her – this is the choice for Four Corners but it seems institutionally incapable of making any decision, meaning Neighbour stays and they will whither together.

http://gmartingates.newsvine.mobi/_news/2009/05/06/2781121-sally-neighbour-four-corners-well-past-the-use-by-date

http://www.hancock.forests.org.au/docs/06oct.htm

http://gmartingates.newsvine.com/_news/2009/05/05/2779015-australian-hack-sally-neighbours-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-us-and-allied-interests-in-af-pak-region-

 

http://gmartingates.newsvine.com/_news/2009/05/05/2780507-australian-four-corners-just-cant-deal-with-criticism

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/australian-reporter-embroiled-pakistan-fraud

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/four-corners-19-03-2001-catch-me-if-you-can-lies-exposed

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/kevin-curnow-sally-neighbour-and-george-clooney

http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2009/04/dc-nonprofit-accuses-pakistani-company-of-trade-libel.html

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/australian-reporter-face-us-court-over-trade-libel

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1723156/us_think_tank_attacked

_by_pakistan.html