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How Al Jazeera went undercover at NRA for doco

Former Dateline producer explains how he got inside NRA meetings for explosive doco.

Former Dateline executive producer Peter Charley has detailed how he orchestrated two undercover reporters into the National Rifle Association of America for the Al Jazeera documentary How to Sell a Massacre.

Charley created the fake pro-gun group Gun Rights Australia, and appointed Rodger Muller as its founder & president.

Writing for ABC he wrote:

It all started in 2015 with a ride to the airport. I was driving from Washington DC to make a flight overseas when I heard a report on the radio of yet another mass shooting in America.

As details of the killings were being broadcast, I happened to be driving through Fairfax, Virginia, right past the headquarters of the National Rifle Association of America.

I glanced at the building and wondered, “What are they saying in there about what I’m hearing out here?”

The NRA’s public reaction on a massacre tend to follow a pattern: stay quiet for as long as possible and then, if the media persists, attack them as anti-gun activists, even “silent enablers” of the tragedy.

So, I decided to find a way to get into the organisation to hear for myself what America’s most powerful gun lobby group says behind closed doors about such events.

Muller’s mission was to befriend officials within the NRA by expressing concern about Australia’s laws being too strict, using concealed cameras and microphones to record unguarded discussions.

In the process he filmed meetings between One Nation chief of staff, James Ashby, and Steve Dickson, One Nation’s Queensland leader with NRA organisers.

Charley also hired a second undercover reporter Diana Armata*, who presented herself as Muller’s communications director.

She constructed and maintained the Gun Rights Australia website and helped build a layered back-story for Mr Muller which involved a series of videos filmed in Australia and the US in which he called for a ‘sensible debate’ about the roll-back of the post-Port Arthur laws.

You can read more here.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has since criticised the documentary as a “hit piece” and referred it to ASIO. James Ashby and Steve Dickson have blamed their discussions as being “on the sauce.”

Part 2 of How to Sell a Massacre screens 8pm Thursday on ABC.

* not her real name.

5 Responses

  1. So he was undercover to investigate the NRA & these 2 One Nation idiots stumbled along & got caught up in it. This is like something out of a comedy.

  2. Trying to get to the NRA through One Nation sounds bizarre. More likely trying to stop The Shooters Party and One Nation winning seats in Australia and getting lucky when they were invited meet the NRA. If the Russian state media set up a fake environmental group and used it to infiltrate the Greens and publish selected damaging conversations they recorded would the ABC think that was a great story?

    1. “Muller’s mission was to befriend officials within the NRA by expressing concern about Australia’s laws being too strict”. What started out 3 or more years ago changed course when some muppets from Australia popped up on the scene.

    2. Stop using the “What if”or “What about” excuses.

      The story is about a Far-Right Wing party selling out their own country for monetary and/or political gain.

      Greens and Russia have nothing to do with this story.

    3. Oh, please. AJ is a global news outfit, you really think they are sitting around plotting ways to bring down a minor political party in Australia? It clearly started as an NRA investigation, and then morphed when the two One Nation clowns dropped a scoop in their lap.

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