Palestine, Israel, the Australian media and the international rules-based order
Justice & Advocacy
“The influence of the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on our commercial and public media and Australia’s media concentration demonstrate that our media regulatory framework needs fixing to ensure that the public interest is protected for democracy’s sake and to ensure that power is impartially scrutinised, so the rights of all humans are protected, including those of Palestinians,” says Director of News Michelle McDonald
While driving into work earlier this month I turned on commercial radio to listen to some music. As I tuned in, a news item about Iran and Israel started. The report framed Israeli citizens as the sole victims of the recent strikes, noting how many people had been killed in Tel Aviv, while omitting how many people had been killed in Tehran. The news item also failed to mention that Israel has an estimated 90 nuclear warheads and that while Iran has signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Israel refuses to sign it. The news item also quoted a United Nations representative condemning Iran’s strikes, but not Israel’s unlawful pre-emptive attack.
Curious, I researched online and discovered a Nova Podcast on the smoothfm website that made some similar omissions before it played a recording of Israel’s Prime Minister, which introduced Prime Minister Netanyahu as “addressing the Iranian population directly to explain his actions”. In the voice recording Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “Israel’s fight is not with you, brave people of Iran, whom we respect and admire.” I found it beyond bewildering that Prime Minister Netanyahu could be presented on Australian radio as being in empathetic and respectful solidarity with the Iranian people.
I then researched smoothfm and discovered that it’s operated by Nova Entertainment, which is owned by [a private investment company of] Lachlan Murdoch. At that point I was no longer bewildered.
Lachlan’s father, Rupert, of course owns News Corp, which is a company that owns more than 50 per cent of Australia’s national or capital city weekday dailies, including The Courier Mail and The Australian. Australia has one of the most concentrated newspaper industries in the world, largely due to News Corp’s market share.
And, largely because of this concentration, former Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called “Murdoch…an arrogant cancer on our democracy” and former Coalition Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has described News Corp as “an absolute threat to our democracy”.
Since Israel commenced its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, people who are usually disengaged about international affairs have started asking me “What’s the deal with the Murdoch media’s bias?” They seem unable to process the disconnect between history’s most documented genocide — the first genocide to be live-streamed on phones worldwide — and the Murdoch media’s genocide denial. So, I tell them that a 2013 Business Insider story reported that “A local subsidiary of the New York-listed company Genie Energy…whose shareholders include…Rupert Murdoch” was given “exclusive rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights”, which is Syrian territory that Israel illegally occupied in 1967 and has annexed since 1981.
In 2011 US-based media watchdog organisation, Media Matters, reported that while Murdoch was on the Genie Energy advisory board, the Murdoch-controlled Fox promoted a Genie Energy oil shale project in Israel without disclosing the financial conflict of interest.
The 2021 book, Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment, by veteran journalist John Lyons, thoroughly unpacks the influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” on the Murdoch media. Lyons writes, “When I refer to the ‘pro-Israel lobby’, I include the Israeli Embassy in Canberra, several of the formal lobby groups, and several individuals who are affiliated with these groups — activists who support the continuing expansion of [unlawful] Israeli settlements in the West Bank” (para 1, p.6).
Lyons goes on to say that “…the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the single issue — the only issue — which the [Australian] media will not cover with the rigour with which it covers every other issue (para 2, p.6).” For example, Lyons writes this about The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council’s executive director Colin Rubenstein: “Having worked at News Corp for seventeen years, I know there are only three people who can tell the editors of The Australian what they can or can’t use: Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch and Colin Rubenstein. Only one of them doesn’t have Murdoch as his surname. That’s power (para 2, p.22)”.
In January the Jewish Council of Australia reported that its executive officer Sarah Shwartz was “subjected to a strategic, coordinated and racist campaign by the Murdoch press, far-right social media accounts and right-wing pro-Israel groups” after she spoke at a Queensland University of Technology symposium about “how the Jewish community is diverse and not a monolith”, illustrating her point with an obviously satirical reference to “Dutton’s Jew”, which “was about Peter Dutton’s racist conception of Jewish people, not actual Jewish people.” It appears that progressive Jewish folk are not exempt.
In Dateline Jerusalem, Lyons unpacks anecdote after anecdote about the influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” over other Australian broadcasters, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which is supposed to serve as our nation’s public service media organisation.
More recent events show the undue influence of “pro-Israel lobbyists” over the ABC. On Wednesday the Federal Court found the ABC breached the Fair Work Act by terminating journalist Antoinette Lattouf’s employment in December [in 2023], “for reasons including that she held a political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza” — which she demonstrated by sharing a Human Rights Watch Instagram post reporting that Israel was using starvation as a “weapon of war” in Gaza.
The court also found the decision to sack Lattouf was due to the ABC’s concerns about a possible story in The Australian and because a “decision was made to appease the pro-Israel lobbyists who would inevitably escalate their complaints about the ABC employing a presenter they perceived to have antisemitic and anti-Israel opinions in such a public position.”
The court case revealed an organised email campaign by pro-Israel groups who threatened litigation and demanded that then-ABC chair Ita Buttrose and then-managing director David Anderson fire Lattouf.
Instead of respecting basic media ethics, including independence, and respecting Lattouf’s basic industrial rights, the ABC capitulated, with Anderson writing “I think we have an Antoinette issue. Socials are full of antisemitic hatred”.
I’d like to finish by saying this, holding the state of Israel to account is legitimate, as it is for any state. When the Buddhist state of Bhutan is held to account for its repression of the largely Hindu Lhotshampa people, journalists are not widely accused of being “anti-Buddhist”. When the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is held to account for not protecting the rights of Christian girls, journalists are not widely accused of being “Islamophobic”. Thus, it is not “anti-semitic” to hold Israel to account for its human rights violations, including for the apartheid and genocide it’s committing as part of its unlawful military occupation in Palestine.
The influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” on our commercial and public media and Australia’s media concentration demonstrate that our media regulatory framework needs fixing to ensure that the public interest is protected for democracy’s sake and to ensure that power is impartially scrutinised, so the rights of all humans are protected, including those of Palestinians.
This speech was given outside the ABC’s headquarters in South Bank, Brisbane, at a “Free Palestine” gathering on Sunday 29 June 2025.
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