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CANBERRA - Australian television's two top commercial current affairs shows are trying to scrape off the mud from their latest appalling bid to outdo each other in the ratings.
Previously descending into high farce over attempts to rescue a 6-year-old Papuan boy from ritual murder and cannibalism at the hands of a man-eating tribe - a story panned by a number of anthropologists - channels Nine and Seven took opposite corners over drug-smuggler Schapelle Corby.
Seven's Today Tonight championed former Corby intimate Jodie Power and her claims of drug-growing and smuggling by the Corby clan. Nine's A Current Affair has been in Corby's corner. They clashed over allegations that Corby bribed her way out of Bali's Kerobokan jail - where she is serving a 20-year term - and picnicked at a popular beach.
Now they have been hurling dirt over the apparent use of a dead diplomat's name to lure Corby's sister Mercedes into an "ambush" where reporters could demand she take a lie-detector test to determine the truth of her denials of Power's claims. It was, A Current Affair's Tracy Grimshaw said, a cynical and sickening attempt to engineer a confrontation between Mercedes Corby and Power. A Current Affair's report, Today Tonight replied, was a pack of lies. The Sunday Telegraph quoted Colin Chapman, the private investigator used to trick Corby into the trap, as saying telling lies was part of his job.
At the centre of the outrage is Liz O'Neill, the spokeswoman for the Australian Embassy in Jakarta who was killed in last week's plane crash.
The Today Tonight reporter who confronted Mercedes Corby had covered the crash two days previously. Today Tonight wanted to convince her to take the test in what reporter Brian Seymore described as a "chat, like mature adults ... we're not monsters".
Corby agreed to meet, following Chapman's claim to have been given a "bombshell" that would help her sister by the husband of O'Neill. Chapman claimed to be from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. "It was a most disgraceful tactic," A Current Affair said. "Today Tonight was prepared to dishonour the dead."
Corby was greeted by Seymore, five TV cameras and Power. She fled. "This is a complete fabrication, a total distortion of what took place," Today Tonight said. Chapman denied using O'Neill's name and posing as a Foreign Affairs officer and said he had taken three lie-detector tests. Medication he was taking had spoiled the tests.
Viewers have not been impressed. Both channels were hammered on the News Ltd website, being described as "equally pathetic", "both full of trash", and as purveyors of gutter journalism.
