Staff warned that language in the national broadcaster’s coverage ‘favoured the Israeli narrative over objective reporting’.
Staff at Australia’s national broadcaster warned that its coverage of the war in Gaza relied too much on Israeli sources and used language that “favoured the Israeli narrative over objective reporting”, internal communications reveal, shedding new light on bias claims that convulsed the outlet.
In a summary of a meeting on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s coverage of the war, staff detailed concerns that coverage displayed pro-Israel bias, such as by accepting “Israeli facts and figures with no ifs or buts” while questioning Palestinian viewpoints and avoiding the word “Palestine” itself.
The three-page summary, which Al Jazeera obtained via a freedom of information request with the ABC, is undated, but its contents correspond with a meeting of 200 staff that was held in November to address concerns about the broadcaster’s coverage.
While the broad thrust of concerns aired at the meeting was reported by Australian media in November, the document contains extensive detail about staff’s complaints and previously unpublicised examples of alleged pro-Israeli bias.
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We’re worried the language we’re using in our coverage is askew, favoring the Israeli narrative over objective reporting. This is evident in our reluctance to use words such as ‘War crimes’, ‘Genocide”, ‘Ethnic cleansing’, ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Occupation’ to describe the various aspects of the Israeli practices in Gaza and the West Bank, even when the words are attributed to respectable organisations and sources
More than a little gross if you ask me that they’re happy to use strong emotive language in reference to the actions of Hamas, but refuse to do the same when it’s war crimes done by an apartheid state with strong US and Australian backing.
“If you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality, don’t work at the ABC,” [ABC Chair Kim] Williams told the Fourth Estate podcast.
That’s all very well to say, Ms Williams, it when the ABC is clearly not living up to its own ideals, it, and all the other lame quotes by ABC spokespeople in the article, fall incredibly flat.
We expect better of our national broadcaster.
Shameful conduct by ABC executives. Time for a roll I say.
