The ABC ‘is part of the problem’

Controversies engulfing British public broadcaster the BBC have shone renewed light on Australia’s ABC and its alleged failure to live up to the impartiality clause in its charter. 
The turmoil at the British public broadcaster was been driven by a leaked internal review that identified among other issues the way it edited a speech that US President Donald Trump made on January 6, 2021 and significant shortcomings in its reporting of the Israel–Hamas war, including concerns about selective story treatment, omission of Israeli perspectives and the amplification of unverified claims from Hamas-linked sources.

The BBC’s director-general and its head of news resigned earlier this month after the review was leaked to the UK Daily Telegraph.

The episode has resonated in Australia, where the ABC faces similar scrutiny over its coverage of the Middle East conflict and its handling of issues affecting the Jewish community.

The taxpayer-funded media giant has also been accused of editing Trump’s speech in a similar way.

Joe Gersh, a Melbourne businessman and former ABC board member, has been increasingly speaking out in recent years about the ABC’s shortcomings.

“The way in which the conflict in Gaza is treated by the ABC and other media outlets directly affects the way in which the Jewish community is perceived in Australia, and indeed its safety,” he told The AJN. “The ABC’s coverage of the conflict hasn’t adhered to its standards of impartiality.

“But worse than that, to my mind, is that the ABC in my view has been missing in action on the subject of antisemitism in Australia. And I’ve said on a number of occasions that the reason that the ABC is not part of the solution is that indeed, it’s part of the problem.”

Gersh noted how the BBC had been called to account “in quite a dramatic way”.

“And that ought to be a wake up call to the leadership of the ABC, to say the concerns of the Jewish community and indeed of many others, need to be taken into account, not only because it’s a breach of the ABC’s charter, but also because its own credibility, its own centrality as a source of impartial news, has been severely challenged of late,” he said.

The ABC’s reporting of the Israel–Hamas war has often lacked context, at times airing unverified Hamas claims — including the false allegation that Israel bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023, later shown to be a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that struck a car park and caused far fewer casualties than the claimed five hundred — while treating Israeli statements with greater scepticism.

The flawed report from the compromised UN Commission of Enquiry earlier this year that accused Israel of genocide was reported with no serious analysis or critical background on its authors.

“I think the ABC has had a problem with Israel for a long time,” broadcaster and columnist Rachael Kohn told The AJN this week.

Kohn spent 26 years working in ABC radio, producing shows including The Spirit of Things and The Ark.

“Israel was, in my experience, never really approached as a legitimate and interesting democratic country in and of itself. It was always problematised,” she recalled.

“There is this sense that Israel is only seen through this lens of conflict and occupation, a term that is always used.”

She added that the consensus in the ABC was that Israel was always at fault.

“There was this constant narrative about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and never really strong investigative analyses of problems within the Palestinian community, within the PA, PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah,” she said.

“It’s the degeneration of what journalism actually is or supposed to be. It’s turned from true reporting into just these opinion laced narratives.”

Guests were given airtime “without the so-called balance of an Israeli point of view,” she added.

“It was a glaring bias and a glaring difference in the way people who were critical of Israel were treated.”

Conservative commentator Gerard Henderson, who has been writing his “Media Watch Dog” column for almost 40 years, said the problem stems from the ABC being a “conservative free zone”.

“It’s also a staff collective where the staff run the joint, and that’s always been the case,” he said.

“So it’s not surprising that the ABC, like the BBC, is hostile to Israel.

“The staff is very much on the left, which is one problem,” he continued, “and then the second problem is the people they choose to interview, or the people they put on panels all reflect that.”

The ABC “very rarely admit errors or make clarifications,” he said, “and when they do, it’s invariably up on their website, which virtually no one looks at … very rarely do they make an on air correction”.