The ABC would have voted for Obama a third time

On Monday Media Watch dedicated a segment to how Australian media outlets have shown anti-Palestinian bias when covering the war on Gaza.

It focused on how the News Corp and Nine newspapers failed to report on Israel’s killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab, her family, and the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics who tried to rescue her. It also mentioned a recent study by Islamophobia Register Australia analysing Australian media outlets’ coverage of Gaza, which found that “the ABC was the only outlet to provide any posts that passed the ‘humanising test’ for Palestinians”.

“The big Australian newspapers we looked at failed to cover the Gaza conflict fairly, in terms of giving equal weight to both sides,” concluded Media Watch host Paul Barry. Speaking of The Australian, Barry said: “we think their coverage has been shameful”.

The segment received a lot of praise. Part of this, I imagine, was out of relief that the ABC had published something half-decent about Gaza after the last few months, in the same way people used to fall over themselves to praise Andrew Bolt or Alan Jones on the rare occasions they said something worth listening to.

Pointing out that The Australian is a racist media outlet is like sharing a John Oliver clip in 2015. It’s a very easy thing to do if you want to get people on social media sharing your story with comments saying something like “☝️☝️☝️THIS”.

But the outpouring of acclaim for Media Watch felt more than a bit off given how the ABC has conducted itself in its reporting on the war on Gaza to this point.

For me anyway, the ABC has come to embody a more genteel, “nice” form of racism that permeates certain sections of upper-crust Australia. It’s not the racism of roided-up dickheads yelling at people of colour on public transport or voting One Nation or having an Australian-flag cape. It’s the racism of the writers’ festival; the dinner party; the Letters to the Editor.

It’s a form of racism that’s horrified to hear itself called by name, because the kind of people who practise it it can’t imagine racism as something done by people with master’s degrees and button-up shirts — by people like them. For them, racism isn’t a set of prejudices or an overarching political and social system. It’s an aesthetic.

It’s in Media Watch’s assumption that fair and accurate coverage of the war on Gaza requires “giving equal weight to both sides,” as if one “side” hasn’t built an apartheid state to systemically kill and brutalise the other. It’s in an episode of Q+A from 2018, where host Tony Jones asked novelist Michael Mohammed Ahmad to “clarify” that he wasn’t trying to incite violence during a discussion about race and identity in literature.

It’s in Sarah Ferguson’s interview with Steve Bannon; in Patricia Karvelas asking Australia Palestine Advocacy Network head Nasser Mashni if he condemns Hamas; in the treatment of Stan Grant and Antoinette Lattouf and countless other journalists and staff of colour who the ABC has thrown under the bus.

It’s in opening paragraphs like this one, published this week:

The ABC is not a monolith. It’s a very large media company, within which are many people who are trying to report the truth of the war on Gaza. But, as I’ve covered before, those people are up against a cohort of senior management hellbent on stopping them, and a wider organisational culture that has failed miserably on issues of race and racism in the past and seems intent on learning nothing about how to change.

Yes, the ABC publishes a lot of excellent journalism, including about Gaza. That’s beside the point — publishing good journalism is what any self-respecting media outlet is supposed to do, let alone a publicly-funded one. The weight of all that “good” reporting doesn’t negate the coverage that perpetuates the sort of racism Media Watch apparently finds so shocking. A restaurant that serves delicious meals to half its customers and gives the other half food poisoning is a bad restaurant.

This piece is a great case study on who gets cited for being “intolerant” and who doesn’t. Zionist group chats are trying to get people fired for opposing a genocide, and the head of Australia’s biggest Jewish advocacy group is openly encouraging Zionist employers to discriminate against staff who post about Gaza on social media, but the burden of being “tolerant” is still overwhelmingly put on Palestinians, Muslims and people of Middle Eastern heritage.

More broadly, I’m of the opinion that Australia’s declining “social cohesion” is a good thing, in that people have less trust in the institutions that have been screwing them over for decades and are starting to look for alternatives. To my mind, hand-wringing about “social cohesion” is just upper-crust types feeling uncomfortable that the plebs are getting unmanageable. It’s no coincidence that establishment journalists feel nervous about this, given people now trust journalists less than they do life insurance companies.

It’s also rich for Karvelas, of all people, to hand-wring about growing some-say-intolerance in the community.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t draw your attention to this line. If I had to read it, so do you.

I’m so sorry.

What I’m looking at

• In Rafah, the final – and most deadly – stage of this genocide is upon us

• Why the Israeli military has a 100% failure rate “eradicating” Palestinian violence

• An American education: Notes from UATX