The genocide will not be televised

Journalists who signed a letter of concern around bias surrounding coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict can no longer report on the issue, accused of being biased by their employers.

Sydney Morning Herald Editor Bevan Shields rolls round in the mud during an expenses paid trip to Israel. (Source: Twitter)

Israels actions in Gaza after the terror events on October 7 have been front and center in global news cycles. Since the attacks that killed over 1200 Israelis and saw over 200 kidnapped and bought across the border into Gaza by Hamas, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has carpet bombed the Gaza strip every day since. As a result of an unprecedented and unrelenting attack on the most densely populated civilian population on the planet, the illegal action has seen the most horrific devastation of civilians in living memory, resulting in over 14,000 civilian deaths, with over six thousand of them being innocent children.

Over a month into what experts and UN officials are labeling an outright genocide in Gaza, a couple of weeks after being told that the entire lot of them are uneducated and misinformed at the National Press Club, Nine, the publication that houses Matthew Knott and Peter Hartcher among their chickens, announced that all of their employees that signed a letter of concern regarding bias coverage of Palestine, were themselves biased, and no longer able to contribute to opinion about the war. All this occurred in an environment where Matthew Knott could pen fantastical, editorially endorsed and ‘unbiased’ stories based on accounts by compromised military aligned hawks about some Tolkenesque war with China in three years, and Peter Hartcher could write, totally unbiased, that “Israels higher moral standing comes with duty for restraint”. Now two editors at the Nine papers, Tori Maguire and Bevan Shields, who both attended ‘unbiased’ paid trips to Israel, had the self-perceived impartiality and nerve to issue a decree arbitrarily restricting those under their employment who signed of a letter calling for more impartiality, from reporting on the conflict.

Over at the ABC, after they cleared themselves of the charge of bias after 900 complaints regarding the handling of the Israel-Gaza discussion during the QandA program on November 13 hosted and produced by former Murdoch veterans Patricia Karvelas and Alice Workman, instead of reassuring its staff that the national broadcaster did not share the subjective views of their corporate contemporaries, senior management chose to shadow in behind Nine with their own version of the decree. Keeping in line with the corporates who now seem to set the national benchmark for the content, caliber and cadence of the national discussion, Director of News Justin Stevens warned ABC staff not to jeopardise their own impartiality by calling on the need for more of it (due to the lack thereof of it) regarding the coverage of the enveloping genocide in Gaza.

Israel had been known for what they call “mowing the lawn” over the years of escalating conflicts in Gaza, using the phrase to explain the periodic incursions by the IDF into Gaza to displace the population under the guise of counter-terrorism operations, a practice objectively reported on over the years in journalism from Australia. But as the response to the horrors of October 7 by the IDF became rapidly disproportionate, it appeared that the lawns were being cut in ways not yet imagined via indiscriminate carpet bombing. Yet, absent has been the analysis from the Australian press usually led by the national broadcaster to keep the continuity of the seventy-five year crisis, indicating a fairly abrupt shift on the issue from the editorials in our shallow media landscape. 

With regards to the widely understood Israel-Palestine conflict, and due to the alarming lack of objective coverage, the country now reads the Saturday broadsheets and watches the ABC knowing that the information has been filtered by a process of elimination, featuring a current system of management that removes those who challenge the bias on display, to presume that in a genocide, both sides of the reprehensible act are valid, and anyone who challenges that system is biased in their own right. The Zionist lobbies in Australia may have won some friends in the media and political class through their paid holidays that act as PR campaigns for an apartheid state in breach of dozens of UN resolutions, but it has not translated to the public, who seem to rank the severity of thousands of dead children in an illegally occupied territory under an ongoing genocide far higher than making sure that both sides get a fair go in the editorials.

The minority held excuses for continuing this unnecessary carnage are waning in the hearts and minds of a majority of global audiences but continue to be propped up by the mainstream press in Australia who fumble with Zionist pundits and IDF officials trying to justify dead babies in a hospital or the highest civilian death per minute rate in living memory. Meanwhile, the numbers of unnecessary innocent dead stack up daily in the thousands, as the citizens of countries in the east and the west try to find the words to comprehend the horror. In Australia, the people currently do so without the aid of the legacy media, including the public broadcaster they fund with their taxes.

The press acts like the world started on October 7, when audiences and news consumers have been viewing the conflict through formed ideas over decades, some of which have been guided by the reporting of the very media outlets that now about-face on their own journalistic history around the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Many understand that Palestine is occupied illegally, that its lands are encroached on by illegal settlers, and that the people of Gaza live in something akin to an open-air concentration camp. For years we have seen fairly balanced reporting led by the ABC on the illegal action of Israel. Now, in the era of Ita Buttrose, where former corporate heavies now host, produce and edit key influential political programs and sit on the boards, redefining the narrative by revising history, omitting the realities of the devastation, and silencing those who dare speak up about it.

Some of the executive decisionmakers in Australian media outlets who have accused staff of bias for signing a letter calling for more impartiality of Gaza coverage have been on paid trips to Israel. (Source: Giselle Haber)

Back when Bevan Shields was rolling around with David Lipson, Ben English and Shari Markson in the Dead Sea mud flats, were they able to see and understand this complex and visceral history while being chaperoned around occupied lands by Israeli government officials who paid for their holiday? The likes of Bevan Shields now cancels the voice of journalists expressing concern about the information bias towards Israel, how can decisions be made by people like him? Under the disingenuous pretext of eliminating bias when their own is in question, he and his ilk eliminate the last of the opposition to it, leaving their bias to define the bias’s among the biased, in a media landscape that had atrophied among the most concentrated press environment in the world next to China and Egypt.

The Gaza crisis has revealed the moralistic chasm within the Australian media, exemplifying the cultural Terra Nullius that pervades journalism on this chunk of earthen island at the bottom of the world. Instead of correcting at the firm behest of UN experts, geographical neighbors, members of the public and its own journalists, the executive press glean the side of the narrative that accommodates the illegal and brutal actions of a renegade nation state, trudging on with a narrative that defies humanity to hear the disproportionate opinion of those who justify a genocide. The abrogation of the press to accurately inform the human population of the genocide in Gaza is a dereliction of duty for the media class, further damaging the damaged reputation of Australian media outlets, among a public getting wiser in the information age.