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.