The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is one of the most difficult, solution-resistant conflicts the world has confronted. For journalists, it is shaping up as one of the most difficult, confronting and ethically challenging conflicts to cover.
There’s been discontent expressed by audiences and journalists at what they say is biased coverage of the conflict. Audience complaints to the BBC have been split fairly evenly between those complaining the coverage is biased towards Palestinians and those who believe its biased towards Israel. There’s no available statistics for complaints made to the ABC, where two weeks ago some journalists went to management to complain that spokespeople from Israeli- and Palestinian-aligned organisations were held to differing standards.
The ABC ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, has investigated four audience complaints and found no breach of ABC editorial policies. But staff concerns over the ABC’s reluctance to use words such as ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘apartheid’ or ‘occupation’ have led ABC news management to put in place an editorial hub to advise journalists on language, which appears to have quietened the concern. As the head of ABC News, Justin Stevens, reminded staff, journalism is a difficult gig. It’s one that requires you to leave your personal views at the door.
A few academics in the UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences held a forum last week to discuss news media coverage of the conflict, and interrogate whether it has been biased. It brought together speakers largely supporting the Palestinian perspective to discuss how journalists, globally and in particular in Australia, were scoring. Overall, the verdict was ‘not well’. There was a strong belief expressed that journalists, here and abroad, were diminishing the Palestinian perspective on the latest outbreak of violence, and they had failed to bring context to the reporting, leaving audiences with the belief that the latest outbreak of conflict was actually its first instance – that the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was not the result of decades of oppression and what United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, calls the effective imposition by Israel of apartheid on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.
I argued that the lack of context reflects the exit from journalism of highly experienced journalists, particularly those with foreign-correspondent skills who know and understand the complexity of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. There is also a problem around language, but with western journalists by and large locked out of Gaza, it is an enormous burden to place on those reporters reporting from Israel to demand they label every bombardment of Gaza as evidence of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Those are judgments for international courts to make. And finally, whilst some journalists unhappy with the coverage might believe it fair not to interview representatives of one side or the other (depending on where their biases stand), that veers perilously close to advocacy, which is not the purpose of journalism. Deplatforming diminishes the suffering of those who are denied a voice. The job of journalists covering conflict is to report objectively, using verified information, rejecting propaganda, applying context and knowledge of history to deliver an accurate picture that does no harm to either side. It’s a tough gig. Falling short of this standard is failure.
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director