The News Corp hate machine continues to pile on Antoinette Lattouf — today savaging her for her excellent journalism with Crikey’s Cam Wilson in investigating what turned out to be unverified claims that pro-Palestinian protesters committed the criminal offence of chanting “gas the Jews”.
It’s understandable that News Corp and its mathematically predictable outrage merchants would be offended by objective, critical journalism. But the focus has naturally been elsewhere when it comes to Lattouf — in particular, the ABC’s disdain for objective, critical information about the Israeli government.
The ABC has engaged in desperate, almost comical attempts to wriggle out of what looks to be an open-and-shut case of unfair dismissal of Lattouf, including insisting first that it did terminate her and then that it had not terminated her, suggesting the bothsideism that characterises much of its political coverage has spread to the broadcaster’s legal department. Central to the ABC’s argument is that Lattouf, in violation of her contract with the ABC, shared a “controversial” post on social media, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Israel’s deliberate use of starvation as a tactic in Gaza. The HRW post was so “controversial” that ABC journalists reported it within 12 hours of release and then followed it up the day Lattouf was terminated.
(News Corp’s Chris Mitchell later attacked HRW over the claim, presumably not realising that, erm, HRW is good enough for his successors at The Australian when it comes to Russian atrocities.)
All of this was gleefully reported by The Sydney Morning Herald, taking delight in the difficulties of its competitor — and ignoring that Nine newspapers’ coverage of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass slaughter that has been inflicted on Palestinians by the IDF has been abysmal by the standards of the ABC, and that Nine management has censored its own journalists who had the temerity to call for balance in the coverage of Israel’s campaign.
The more basic problem, however, was unearthed by Nine’s revelation of the activities of a lobby group for a foreign government, “Lawyers for Israel”, in seeking to pressure the ABC’s chair and managing director to sack Lattouf.
Imagine the reaction if a group calling itself “Lawyers for China” tried to pressure the ABC to sack staff critical of the Xi regime, or “MAGA Lawyers” lobbied the ABC to sack anyone critical of Donald Trump. But lobbying and propagandising for the Netanyahu government in Australia is so normalised that such activities barely attract attention.
Worse, here we are back at the exact problem that bedevilled the ABC during the Coalition’s years in government, when systematic Liberal Party attempts to cow and intimidate the ABC saw then-chairman Justin Milne, in response to direct pressure from the then-government, urge then-managing director Michelle Guthrie to sack Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn, who had both offended Liberal sensibilities (Milne later claimed he was “taken out of context”).
The problem wasn’t merely Milne but some of the ABC’s highest executives, who were happy to play the utterly inappropriate role of acting as a postbox for partisan complaints about journalism, and in doing so failing to back their own staff.
The only proper way for the ABC to deal with lobbying by politicians, or by self-appointed representatives of foreign governments, or any other lobby group, is to direct it to the ABC’s independent internal complaints handling area — now bolstered by an ABC Ombudsman.
That is also the only pragmatic way to deal with such lobbying, because attempts by senior figures, up to the chair, to deal with such lobbying themselves is fraught with risk, as Milne discovered, and a recipe for perceptions that the ABC is cowed and responsive to political pressure.
The Lattouf case confirms that that is exactly what is now the case under outgoing chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson. Inevitably, it has come unstuck, just as caving in to previous bouts of politically motivated lobbying came unstuck — all to the detriment of the ABC, and to perceptions of the ABC.
Do you think the ABC is too vulnerable to outside lobbying and political pressure? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
