Antoinette Lattouf's unlawful sacking exposed the power of lobbying on the Australian media

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Last weekend, I wrote a piece about the news-gathering model and media literacy.
It mentioned how governments, militaries, and lobby groups try to stop the media telling stories, and it wondered if news audiences would like major media outlets to talk about it more:
"They might be shocked to learn about the orchestrated bullying that goes on, which is designed to discourage editors and journalists from reporting on certain topics and framing stories in certain ways, even speaking to certain people," the piece said.
"Would it improve media literacy if the media wrote about these issues openly and regularly?"
Then, three days later, we heard relevant news.
On Wednesday, the Federal Cout ruled that the ABC had unlawfully sacked journalist Antoinette Lattouf, in December 2023, for reasons including that she held political opinions opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
Justice Darryl Rangiah found external pressure from "pro-Israel lobbyists" had played a role in the ABC's decision.
Ms Lattouf had been employed by the ABC on a small five-day contract, as a fill-in summer radio host.
But Justice Rangiah found that soon after Ms Lattouf presented her first program that summer, the ABC began to receive complaints from members of the public.
"The complaints asserted she had expressed antisemitic views, lacked impartiality and was unsuitable to present any program for the ABC," he wrote.
"It became clear that the complaints were an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists to have Ms Lattouf taken off air."
For journalism students, it's an important case study. Many of you would have discussed it in class last week.
But everyone should read Justice Rangiah's judgement.
It details what went on behind the scenes at the ABC when the email campaign against Ms Lattouf began, and how it contributed to a "state of panic" among some senior ABC managers (many of whom have since left the organisation).
It also showed how such pressure campaigns work.
Not only had pro-Israel lobbyists sent dozens of emails to the ABC calling for Ms Lattouf to be taken off air, but their complaints found their way to News Corp's The Australian newspaper, which then told the ABC it was planning to report on the fact that the ABC had received complaints (which fed the growing panic inside the ABC).
That's how the game is played.
After the Federal Court's ruling was published on Wednesday, the ABC's new managing director, Hugh Marks, said the ABC had let down its staff and audiences.
"Any undue influence or pressure on ABC management or any of its employees must always be guarded against," he said.
A large number of articles were also written about the court's ruling.
Alan Sunderland, a former editorial director of the ABC, said the public broadcaster had lessons to learn from the saga.
"The world these days is filled with those who seek to control, bully and pressure public interest journalism in all its forms," he wrote.
"The role of senior managers is to stoutly resist that pressure, and protect journalists from it as much as possible."
Paula Kruger, the chief executive of Media Diversity Australia (and a former ABC radio host), made other points.
She said news audiences had to trust that news outlets were capable of telling truthful stories, but the impact that that orchestrated pressure campaign had on the ABC had "shaken trust internally and externally".
"You break trust with the broader community when an interest group can go to the top of an organisation and get its way. Lobbyists skip the process that everyone else must follow," she wrote.
She also raised the topic of media literacy and trust.
She said we often talk about ways to improve the public's media literacy, but the decline in trust in the media should not be a problem for audiences to fix; it was the responsibility of news organisations.
"Silencing one side of the story isn't success. Shutting down voices isn't 'social cohesion,'" she wrote.
"But silencing and shutting down were the preferred responses of senior ABC management under pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists. We need a different approach to our most difficult conversations."
That last point is worth thinking about.
In last weekend's article, I made a reference to Hannah Arendt's famous 1971 essay on the Pentagon Papers.
But she wrote another essay, in 1967, that deserves a reference today.
In that earlier essay, Truth and Politics, Arendt famously argued that "objectivity" and "impartiality" were revolutionary concepts that helped to usher in the modern world.
In fact, she left her readers with the impression that those concepts were pillars of so-called "western civilisation":
"The disinterested pursuit of truth has a long history," she wrote.
"I think it can be traced to the moment when Homer chose to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and to praise the glory of Hector, the foe and the defeated man, no less than the glory of Achilles, the hero of his kinfolk [...]
"Homeric impartiality echoes throughout Greek history, and it inspired the first great teller of factual truth, who became the father of history: Herodotus tells us in the very first sentences of his stories that he set out to prevent 'the great and wondrous deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory'.
"This is the root of all so-called objectivity ... without it no science would ever have come into being."
So, according to Arendt's logic, if we allow ourselves to be intimidated into privileging certain voices when reporting on major global conflicts, and silencing other voices, we'll be abandoning a pillar of "western civilisation".
And that was the same essay in which Arendt wrote her famous line about the disorienting affect that relentless propaganda can have on the human brain.
"It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established," she wrote.
"In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed," she said.
Arendt said we could try to keep our bearings in the world — and combat such propaganda — by building and protecting "certain public institutions" that revered truth above politics.
And she said an independent judiciary, the historical sciences and the humanities, and journalism were among them.
But let's wrap things up.
It's naive to think "the media" is always and everywhere obsessed with "the truth." There are plenty of players in the media that are motivated by other things.
But consider the editors and journalists that really do try to tell the truth.
As we discussed last week, there's a global multi-billion-dollar industry dedicated to capturing, controlling, and confusing the "trusted stories" the media tells every day:
Different governments, militaries, multi-nationals, and lobby groups are always trying it on.
The ABC was involved in a different controversy six years ago when concerns were raised internally about Adani's apparent ability to squash an ABC radio story about the economics of Adani's Carmichael mine.
Readers say once they start noticing things like that about the media, it can damage their trust in the media's stories.
If you spend any time on social media these days, you may have also noticed how millions of people are now teaching each other about the subtle ways in which media outlets use language and imagery to privilege certain perspectives and diminish others in their daily news reports.
The type of critical media analyses you'll get in every journalism and communications degree at university has jumped out of the academy and onto peoples' phones.
For example, consider the headlines below and see if you can spot the differences in language:
Why is the language in the first headline so passive and vague? Why is the language in the second headline active and precise?
Modern audiences are regularly engaging in that kind of media "decoding" in private now, while they're doom-scrolling, so it presents an opportunity for media outlets to start having deeper conversations with their audiences about the way things work, if they choose to.
Those conversations could be uncomfortable for some. But they may lead to more truthful storytelling.