Now-removed Four Corners episode is ‘remarkably similar’ to this book

August 7, 2026 — 3:00am

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In this week’s On Background, a similar story at the ABC’s embattled Four Corners, News24’s impartial-free-zone, News Corp unplugs its phone line and a tech journalist is caught out using his same old tricks.

A road/highway well-travelled

On Tuesday, after another broadside from his former colleagues at the ABC, via Media Watch, and mounting questions relating to his journalism during a four-year stint at the network, sacked reporter Mahmood Fazal came out swinging in his own defence, once again.

“One week I’m too involved in the street … the next week, I just got my mates to play roles … So which is it?” Fazal said, in an Instagram post captioned “Beethoven had his critics, too!”

What it appears that Fazal is missing, a handful of ABC staff have pointed out, is that it is not a case of one or the other. It is a case of both.

But like Beethoven, who was accused of taking heavy inspiration from Mozart when producing his finest work, Fazal is also now accused of doing the same, in being inspired by the work of another journalist to report the now-removed Meth Highway Four Corners episode. Fazal denies any wrongdoing.

On Background sources pointed out the episode – which was taken down after allegations surfaced over the veracity of the appearance of Fazal’s friend Ben Aitken as a meth cook named “Brendan” – is remarkably similar to the contents of a book Meth Road, published by Allen & Unwin just six months earlier.

Written by British journalist Conor Woodman and published in October 2023, the book traces Australia’s meth epidemic all the way back to its source in the jungles of Myanmar for the first time.

Not only does the episode have almost the same name and narrative arc, the two journalists begin their stories with an anonymous domestic meth cook in Australia, then find themselves in the border towns of Mae Sai and Tachileik, a popular smuggling passage at the Thailand and Myanmar border where they speak to a distributor, lab worker and others, focusing on the United Wa State Army, a militia with a stronghold in the area.

ABC investigations boss exits amid sacked reporter saga

In some instances, the people both spoke to are the exact same, those being Jeremy Douglas from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and Khuensai Jaiyan, a local journalist and former PR officer for Khun Sa, a former drugs kingpin in the........

© WA Today