When journalism becomes public relations

Australians needs courage from their institutions, honesty from their media, and journalism that returns to its core duty of holding power to account.

The Australian mainstream media continues its descent into irrelevancy and complete compromise, especially when it comes to its coverage of Israel and Palestine. Once seen as important check on the excesses of political and corporate power, much of media press is now less concerned about the truth and more about siding up with and protecting those vested interests. The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, has been running many stories that align almost perfectly with the messaging from pro-Israel lobby groups, and when the inaccuracies or distortions are exposed – as occurred last week – they’ve been quick to retreat or quietly amend these articles without any accountability at all. This pattern isn’t just a bit of casual sloppiness: it’s an insidious link between media organisations, powerful lobby groups, and the political class.

Journalists who report in a way that expresses even the smallest and tokenistic support for Palestine, are punished, sidelined or sacked, as journalist Antoinette Lattouf found out in 2023, when she lost her job for social media comments that were made outside of her actual job that were deemed to be too sympathetic towards Palestine. In a similar incident, cricket journalist Peter Lalor was sacked for offering comments about the acts of genocide committed by Israel, even though – again – his comments were made far away from the confines of a broadcast studio. These experiences show how, in Australia, press freedom is conditional and transactional: a robust interrogation and discussion of almost every other issue that we can think of, but non-existent when the subject of Palestine is brought up.

This selective application raises a deeper question about the industry itself. Journalism is meant to be fearless, reporting without favour and prepared to confront the powerful – speaking truth to power; that’s the main game. When reporters are forced out for telling uncomfortable truths, even when they’re speaking these truths in some distant parts of social media, the profession risks collapsing into little more than a public relations scheme for those in authority – Orwell’s suggestion that “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed” still remains relevant: when journalists fail in that duty, they are no longer journalists at all, but propagandists, and we’re seeing a lot of that within Australia’s mainstream media.

The contrast with the experience of Palestinian journalists could not be more different. In Australia, those who speak up risk losing their careers. That’s bad enough but in Palestine, they risk losing their lives. Hundreds of reporters, photographers, and media workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank while performing the craft of journalism.

Conversely, any unwavering support for Israel carries no professional penalty in Australian newsrooms – in fact, it’s actually encouraged – while the slightest micromillimetre of deviation away from Israel and in support of Palestinian rights is career-ending. If such standards were applied evenly, there would be very few journalists left in mainstream Australian media at all – while that might be a good thing, it just means that at the moment, there’s not much difference between a journalist and a propagandist.

Manufactured lies and commercial considerations

The tension between the ethics of journalism and commercial reality has always shaped the media landscape – we did see a lot this after Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1975, where reports by the Fairfax journalist David Jenkins were frequently filed but rarely published – but nowhere is it more extreme than the reporting on Israel and Palestine.

News executives know that advertisers can be quick to withdraw their campaigns if their coverage begins to question Israel’s actions or show sympathy for Palestinian civilians – or be dealing with yet another Zionist lobbyist from the wealth class screaming down the barrel of the phone to demand the sacking of a journalist who might have written something mildly critical of the state of Israel.

This commercial pressure shouldn’t override the fundamental obligation to truth, yet too often it does. For most news executives and journalists, it’s just a job: just do as you’re told, reduce the paths of resistance, and everyone can just go home at the end of the day, safe in the knowledge that the entire editorial team will still be on the invitation list for Christmas drinks in Bellevue Hill. The result is a media culture where maintaining relationships with powerful lobby groups and protecting advertising revenue takes precedence over accuracy, fairness, and integrity.

This pressure sometimes manifests itself in subtle editorial choices, but at other times it crosses into outright fabrication. The episode involving the Herald’s recent report on Hamas is an excellent example of how propaganda becomes the news. The outlet published a story claiming that Sheik Hassan Yousef, a founding member of Hamas, had praised Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for recognising the state of Palestine. The problem was that the claim was obviously false: Yousef has been imprisoned in Israel for many years, with no ability to communicate freely with the media, let alone deliver their commentary to a gormless and compromised journalist in Australia, chewing their lunch looking out over the splendid views of Sydney’s Pyrmont Harbour. Yet the story ran in the Herald in loud headlines and was soon amplified across the country by News Corporation (of course), the ABC, The Guardian and SBS.

It took little more than a basic search to establish that the story was fabricated – no Arabic or English source material existed, and no credible journalist had made such contact. Yet the piece was framed as though direct contact had been made with the journalist in question, Matthew Knott. When the fabrication was exposed, primarily through independent commentators on social media and independent journalists who know how to use basic search engines on the internet, the Herald quietly rewrote the article without acknowledgement of the error. Instead of a transparent correction, the story doubled down and was reshaped to obscure their failures.

This continued on the ABC’s Insiders, where Nine Media’s James Massola – a colleague of Knott’s – attempted to smooth over the debacle by suggesting it was a “cock-up” rather than deliberate propaganda, just reworked as a minor mistake and no big deal: it was better to offer lame excuses than admit to an obvious failure. In contrast to this feckless behaviour, journalists in Gaza and conflict zones all around the world put their lives on the line to hold power to account.

What do Australian journalists do? Too many are in the role of stenographers for state power, presenting propaganda as fact and happy to be part of the very structures they should be interrogating ruthlessly. The cost of their inaction isn’t only to individual careers and reputations – there won’t be any problems for these mainstream journalists; they’ll be able to retire in a life of comfort and be able to regale to each other about all the times they managed to trick the public – but the true cost is to public trust in journalism itself.

If it wasn’t for independent media, these falsehoods and fabrications would have gone unnoticed, and recorded as fact. And many Australians still rely on mainstream media as a record of fact at face value, even though it’s a reputation that is totally undeserved. This grip on the so-called “truth” means that propaganda – if repeated often enough – becomes indistinguishable from reality and an accepted part of the truth, even though it’s not.

A story about Hamas allegedly praising Albanese just fell apart after a simple inspection by social media and citizen journalists, but the damage had already been done: the Herald’s actions left an impression that the recognition of Palestine is linked to terrorism, and that supporting Palestinian statehood is also supporting extremists. That was the goal of the Sydney Morning Herald, and they achieved this in spades.

It’s not just misleading but it’s also destructive of the body politic – even if Hamas were to welcome international recognition of Palestine, it shouldn’t invalidate the decision of the Albanese government. But the story was framed to discredit Albanese’s move by association with terrorism, and not to inform the public: it was propaganda, pure and simple, dressed in journalism.

By stripping away any subtlety, the mainstream media ensures that audiences are offered little more than binary choices between black and white, or of good versus evil: there are no shades of grey in this discussion – to quote George W. Bush, “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. This is not journalism, but the construction of a narrative that serves political power. And unless independent voices continue to question and contest these distortions, Australia will be left with little more than manufactured lies masquerading as the truth.

Silencing Palestine beyond the newsroom

As we have seen many times, the reach of the conservative pro-Israel lobby in Australia reaches far beyond the newsroom and, because control over media narratives is never going to be enough, cultural spaces have to become the battleground. Universities, writer’s festivals, and literary gatherings – institutions traditionally dedicated to free expression and a contest of ideas – are increasingly being pressured into silence, with the aim of not just stifling criticism of Israel, but to erase Palestine from the public conversation altogether.

The Bendigo Writers Festival was established in 2012 and celebrates writing and storytelling by “bringing together writers, readers, and creative thinkers from diverse backgrounds and genres”. It’s a successful regional event and over the past 13 years, it has invited many authors and intellectuals from Australia and all around the globe to discuss the contemporary cultural issues in this complex world we live in. But no event is too small or too far away for the belligerent and chauvinist Israel lobby to shut down any discussion about Palestine.

Perhaps thinking that they were in the back streets of Gaza City and ready to launch yet another rocket attack on innocent civilians, a pro-Israel academic group known as “the 5A” mounted an aggressive campaign against the participation of Palestinian–Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah. Just days before the festival, 5A accused her of antisemitism and extremism, branding her “a racist” and “a direct threat to the Jewish community in Australia”. 5A has long lobbied universities to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, and after their pressure in Bendigo was successful, Abdel-Fattah withdrew from the event in protest – how could she not? – and more than 50 other writers followed suit, objecting to a new code of conduct that banned “inflammatory” or “divisive” topics.

Randa Abdel-Fattah. Photograph: Jennifer Wong/ABC.

The boycott left the festival in ruins due to the last-minute intervention by 5A, and the cowardly acceptance of this pressure from La Trobe University. What should have been three days of debate and celebration of ideas, descended into chaos, with panels removed and programs cancelled.

Universities should be a place of intellectual inquiry, not rolling over at the first sign of external pressure. Worse still, many Australian institutions have become complicit in their quest to save face with these Zionist tyrants, sacrificing their own principles to avoid controversy. And while conservative groups dominate the discourse, the voices of progressive Jewish Australians – many of whom oppose the occupation and support Palestinian rights – are routinely ignored.

But a democracy that silences writers, punishes journalists, and rewrites news to appease lobbyists is a democracy that has lost confidence in its own values. The 5A group claimed that the Bendigo Writers Festival was not “a safe space” for Jewish people, but where was the safety for everyone else who was subjected to this imperious and bigoted assault on their freedoms to listen to perspectives from Palestinian people? Why is their safety – or the safety of Palestinian people – never up for consideration?

This intellectual dishonesty breeds resentment, mistrust, and fear, while wiping out the possibility of honest engagement. It’s a disturbing development in Australian public life: one where power dictates what can be said, who can speak, and what stories can be told, whether it’s within the mainstream media, or a literary festival in a regional city.

If there is to be any hope of reversing this development, Australians needs courage from their institutions and honesty from their media; that universities foster debate rather than suppress it, and that journalism return to its core duty of holding power to account. Otherwise, what is the point? For too long, these Zionist lobbyists have dictated the limits of acceptable conversation. To defend free expression is not to endorse every idea, but to protect the space in which ideas can be contested in. The alternative is silence – preferred, of course, by the Zionist lobby – but as history has always shown us, silence is the ally of the oppressor.