When interviewing a guest, journalists are free to ask whatever questions they want. But they can’t have their own facts.

The ABC’s Sarah Ferguson is in a privileged position, as anchor of the network’s premier TV current affairs program, 7.30.

She and her production team are free to choose whom they interview and ask any question they want.

We, as viewers, live with whatever bias they have, or simply switch off.

But Ferguson should not be allowed to make misleading statements, such as the false summary of the Chinese Communist Party’s role in World War II she provided in her interview with former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr on Wednesday 3 September.

As Carr summarised the Chinese story — the Japanese invasion of China that began in 1931 and ultimately led to one million Japanese troops being tied down fighting the Chinese — Ferguson chimed in:

“Well, there’s no question that that was a significant event, and I think it’s fair that we should point out to viewers that, of course, as you know, it was the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang, who defeated the Japanese, not the guerrilla forces of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Her statement is propaganda at its best, denigrating the role of the communist fighters of the day and, of course, belittling today’s Chinese Communist government.

In fact, the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists formed a temporary alliance to tackle the Japanese and neither can claim to have solely defeated the Japanese.

Here I must provide a few sources. Take, for example the account by the Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, Odd Arne Westad, in his book Restless Empire. On page 256 he says the Chinese Communist Party had been promoting a Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese United Front from 1935 onwards and by the spring of 1937 there was a form of limited co-operation to fight the Japanese in place between the Nationalists and the Communists.

On page 261, Westad says the........

© Pearls and Irritations