The ABC lets Conway sing out of tune on Gaza

Is the ABC guilty of failing the Australian people by not applying a balanced view on Gaza. The recent interview of the self-proclaimed Zionist musician is evidence of this.

Of all the experts qualified to inform the public about the conflict in Gaza, Deborah Conway seemed an odd choice (Source: ABC)

Musician Deborah Conway joined Patricia Karvelas on the last broadcast of RN Breakfast for the year to speak about the complex and horrific events unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. Conway, who has yet to relive the highs of her 1992 ARIA award winning album ‘Bitch Epic’, who now plays paid backyard gigs at eastern suburban 60^th birthdays to make a crust, was somehow deemed a relevant subject matter expert to do press on the humanitarian catastrophe, proceeding to justify the horrific loss of civilian life in Gaza that has occurred every day since the Hamas attacks of October 7.

Conway’s appearance follows ABC Director David Anderson issue of high-decrees, illustrating the need to ensure the ABC remained “everything to everyone” while reporting on what has been labelled a genocide by the UN. Fresh from a stint on The Bolt Report, where Conway offered an opinionated, subjective and personal take on the situation, it was somehow deemed pertinent by management to invite her onto RN Breakfast, where she proceeded to demonstrate more concentrated enmity towards the children of Gaza in fifteen minutes than fellow singer-songwriter and pandemic “expert” Tina Arena managed to show towards Dan Andrews at the peak of the Dan-bashing COVID era.

Called onto the program to comment on activism sparked by the conflict within the arts community, Conway took no time to pivot the discussion back to her personal takes on the conflict. Conway cited unverified antisemitic chants purported to have been shouted by groups protesting at the Sydney Opera House. In response to being asked by Karvelas about the disproportionate amount of children casualties, “we know they’re not Hamas, right?”, Conway responded, after a brief pause, "It depends on what you call kids". And before giving the host a chance to moderate, Conway shunted out the same old message about Hamas being responsible for the deaths, proceeding to state that Israel “don’t want to commit war crimes”, before going off on a distasteful tangent of alternative theories relating to real civilian tolls and what qualifies as a massacre.

Nearly as many civilians have been killed in Gaza since October 7 as were killed in the entire twenty-year Afghan war. More journalists have been targeted and killed than any other conflict on record. More children have been killed in this short conflict than any other in modern times. The ABC has a duty to report the tragedy in Gaza to the people of Australia as it stands in reality, not as it should be to others, and with the real images and clips of the human devastation in Gaza are so readily available, perhaps voices Zionists like former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, Israeli government advisor Mark Regev, and dusty, narcissistic singer-songwriters like Deborah Conway have said enough.

The fifteen minutes seemed to last for an eternity, as a self-professed Zionist took all the rope she could, and demonstrated why the opinions of singer-songwriter supporters of Israel’s abhorrent actions in Gaza are not pertinent to the public interest, the very public interest the ABC pertains to shape as per the charter. Out of all the opinionated and self-entitled artists that you could get, why would the ABC seek out the views of one of the few self-proclaimed Zionists in the arts community, and one of the few that supports the current cadence of the operation of the IDF in Gaza? What was the ABC thinking to roster someone as divisive as Conway?

The program continued in a similar vein, retrospectively amplifying the callousness of Samantha Maiden and Jacob Greber who disingenuously and ill-informedly presumed before Conway’s appearance on the program that support for Gaza from the masses of Australians was from disingenuous and ill-informed “mummy bloggers” and “uni students” that “couldn’t find Gaza on a map”.

With RN Breakfast (Karvelas) allowing Zionist guests like Conway to rabbit on every week, QandA (Karvelas) allowing unhinged Zionists to defend colonial apartheid in the name of a fair debate, and Insiders (also sometimes Karvelas) starting every analysis on the destruction of Gaza with “Israels right to defend itself”, the conflict has revealed the broken nature of the ABC current strategy with reporting in the national interest.    

A few weeks ago, ABC Director of News Justin Stevens sent out warnings to staff who dared sign a letter of support for Palestine, warning them that they risk their journalistic impartiality if they didn’t align with David Anderson and his view that both sides of a genocide should be treated seriously. As executive news heavies across the country, some of whom had expenses paid trips to Israel, decided the fates of journalists, and sent out warning letters to people doing their job, Israel continued its daily destruction of the most concentrated civilian space in the region, and Debora Conway got her chance to square the circle on the ABC.

These actions are designed to shift the DNA of the national broadcaster, each factor and portion of incremental change adds up to shift the baseline of the ABC, augmenting its nature and pinning its ethos to the concentrated corporate news outlets who subjectively strive to shift the national discussion away from what it is, to what they think it should be. The ABC used to set the tone, now its plays a small target media entity looking for clicks and profitability in the realm of the privately owned media empires it so admires.

As a result, the ABC hasn’t shown the decomposing babies in incubators at Al-Nasr hospital, it hasn’t felt the public needs to know about the execution of unarmed women and children killed at point blank UN school in North Gaza, its journalists haven’t had the courage (or permission) to make a statement based on what they see with their own eyes: the deadliest and most brutal concentration of civilian death in modern conflict.

By squaring the circle on a genocide, the ABC is abrogating its responsibility as per the charter and slighting the Australian public, many of whom are concerned about the horrific human toll in Gaza. In the rabbit warrens and collectives within editorial and production teams at different programs at the ABC, there has always been a diversity of approach to the tradecraft – a strength in the way it goes about things. However, that strength has waned in the era of Ita Buttrose, it has shifted under the leadership of former Murdoch board appointments, and transformed under the delivery of former Murdoch staff that run flagship programs and host influential platforms that shape the form of the national discussion, the ABC has lost itself at the hands of those who benefit the most from losing it.