Howe takes aim at media and education on Israel

Veteran newspaper editor Alan Howe has told a Jewish community audience that shifting attitudes towards Israel will take sweeping reform, beginning in schools and universities.

“This is a root and branch change in Australian society that we’ve got to undertake, and it starts at the universities and in the schools where poison is taught as fact,” he said.

Howe, a former editor of The Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun who now writes for The Australian, was interviewed on stage by AJN senior journalist Bruce Hill at an Armchair Society event run by B’nai B’rith and the Lamm Jewish Library of Australia on October 20.

Asked whether a more balanced view of Israel was likely soon, he replied: “Not in the short term.”

He agreed that many younger journalists had become activists.

“Very often they are, and those activists don’t work for us,” he said.

He blamed poor editing and recruitment, saying that in about 22 years editing Melbourne’s Herald Sun titles he never hired a graduate from a journalism school.

He urged young people hoping to enter journalism to read two books: G.V. Carey’s Mind the Stop and Harold Evans’ Newsman’s English, which codified the brief, disciplined style British newspapers developed when wartime shortages cut the Daily Mirror to four pages.

“Read those two books, and you’ll be head and shoulders above the pack,” he said.

Howe called Anthony Albanese the worst prime minister Australia has had and criticised his response to October 7.

Of Albanese’s appearance at Bondi Beach a week after the December 14 attack, he said: “He looked absolutely diminished, and he should have been ashamed of himself.”

He said the Australian Press Council had found against him over a column in which he described the Hamas members who abducted the Bibas family as the “gorillas of Gaza”, and that The Australian’s appeal had also failed.

He called the outcome “the world turned upside down”.

Howe said some non-Jewish journalists saw certain Jewish figures in publishing as “overcorrectors”, who leaned away from Israel to avoid appearing biased.

He said Jews could no longer gather publicly in safety without extensive advance policing.

On the future of the industry, Howe said newspapers had already moved online successfully.

“They’ll survive,” he said.

Asked about editorial independence, he said proprietors chose editors they trusted, but added: “Rupert Murdoch has never ever said to me to take an angle on a story.”