ECAJ complaint over 60 Minutes report on settlements

AJN STAFF

THE Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has lodged a complaint with the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes over a report it screened on West Bank settlements.

The segment, titled Hate Thy Neighbour, which was screened on Sunday September 20, appeared heavily weighted towards Palestinians’ accounts of settlers’ activities and contained major factual errors.

The Nine Network is yet to respond to the complaint.

ECAJ president Robert Goot issued a statement in which he said Palestinians “have made no secret of the fact that they seek to harness [media] coverage whenever possible in support of their cause as a tactic in their long-term struggle against Israel’s existence. This makes it all the more important for journalists to maintain the highest professional standards when reporting on any aspect of these conflicts”.

In a letter to the program’s executive producer, Goot complained about coverage of an incident in which Jewish settler Zev Braude opened fire on a group of Palestinians “without provocation”.

The 60 Minutes report stated that “all charges were dropped and he walked free” and that settlers like Braude “have become a law unto themselves”.

Goot pointed out that the Jerusalem Magistrates Court was told Braude was looking for his son, and when he was surrounded by rock wielding Palestinians, he fired two shots into the air. Braude was prosecuted by Israeli police and was acquitted by the court after the due legal process had occurred.

The report “made no semblance of an attempt to provide [Braude’s] side of the story or the judge’s findings,” wrote Goot.

“Instead of presenting all the relevant material to viewers and giving them the opportunity to form their own opinions, you decided to both restrict the material to one side of the story only and to tell viewers what to think. In our view, your report constitutes a serious abuse of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’ Journalists Code of Ethics.”

According to the letter, in another major factual error, reporter Liam Bartlett incorrectly stated that Jewish settlers are “building new towns on Palestinian land”, when in fact the expansion is occurring within existing settlements — and on land that is not Palestinian, but is recognised by the United Nations as disputed territory.

Goot said: “The reporter misused his authority as a supposedly objective narrator to say that ‘hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers are moving into the West Bank’. The use of the present tense makes this statement quite misleading. No settlements have been established under Israeli government authority since 1996.”