Hi there, Tia Quinn back with you for a new edition of Fourth Estate. It's great to have you come again after our post Winter Break. This is always coming to you from the studios of Tuxia in Sydney, on Gadigal Country. A year has now passed since the latest uprising of violence in the Middle East, and the war seems no closer to ending.
It's a conflict that has raged on for decades and decades, but certainly is its most violent iteration, and in recent weeks Israel has now expanded its incursion into Lebanon. Another war which has been raging at the same time has, as we've discussed many times on this programme in newsrooms, with journalists continually clashing with management over language. Language is all important in our profession, and mainstream media has often been accused of reporting on this most bloody conflict in a voice that is frequently described as passive. The common accusation against the media is that this language dehumanises Palestinian suffering in an attempt to downplay the crimes of the Israeli government.
So lots to talk about, and joining us to do so is Paul Barry, he's the host of the ABC's Media Watch, and prior to this spent many years as an investigative reporter with Four Corners, the Sydney Morning Herald, and also his host of Witness on Channel 7. Paul, thanks so much for being with us. It's a pleasure, thanks, Tina. And joining us from London is Minachi Ravi, who's the executive producer of Out of Zeros, The Listing Post.
Minachi, welcome to Full Estate. Thank you very much, good to be with you all. Minachi, I might go to you first as I've just been watching a recent episode of The Listing Post, entitled Inside Western Media's Coverage of Gaza. Now, there were a number of journalists from CNN, the BBC, and The New York Times, who spoke anonymously to your programme for this episode.
Can you tell us a little bit about what it was that they told you, what you heard from them? Before I get into the details, Tina, I just want to mention that this episode took months of work from a very dogged team. We spoke with multiple sources across the newsrooms of CNN, BBC, and The New York Times, in addition to others. The producers of this were Daniel Turi, Manazafaruki, and Tariknatha.
And I'm mentioning them because I think it's important they are credited for the work they did, which no other organisation has managed to do. What we found in our discussions with these multiple sources is a sense of fear and deep sensitivity around the reporting of this story. The story of Israel and Palestine has always had its complexities this time around. During the year of this war, all of the factors that complicate the telling of the story have been amplified.
So we had journalists from the BBC, for instance, telling us that editors are reluctant to pursue certain stories that reflect too badly on Israel. In some cases, those stories would just not get published. Equally, there would be stories that are newsworthy, that journalists represent to their editors. Very often, those editors would not argue that they were indeed newsworthy, but they would be multiple excuses made for why they couldn't be pursued.
Another key thing we found across newsrooms was a softening of language when it came to describing Israel's actions. The argument often made was that softer language was more accurate, even when the journalists themselves made the case to their editors, that the softer terms were less accurate. And you really see this when you compare the reporting of Israel and Gaza versus Russia and Ukraine. In the case of the Gaza war, Israel, which is the occupying power, is often more likely to be believed, often more likely to be taken at face value.
In Ukraine, it is the occupied side, the Ukrainians who are given that benefit of the doubt. And you find often, as these journalists told us, that when they were reporting on Russia and Ukraine, there was often no hesitation to not just use strong language, but to use stronger language at times. So yes, like I said, there is a real sense here that the stories incredibly sensitive and editors are really having to hold a line, even when they cannot explain it to their journalists. Did they point to reasons for what they felt was bringing this about?
What did they feel the motivations are for this sort of policing of language or this oppression of journalism? You know, it's difficult for us to divine what someone is thinking, what the pressures on them are when they're not being explicit about it. So I think the first thing we have to say here is everything that I say is my interpretation of what people have told us, right? My understanding of what's at play here.
I should also say that the listening post, which is Al Jazeera's media analysis and critique show, we've been doing this job for nearly two decades. And obviously, assessing the quality of journalism on Israel and Palestine has been a significant part of the work we've done. But in our two decades of work, we have chronicled the very sharp impact of politics, ideology, pressure, manipulation, all of these come to bear. So when you ask, why has there been such a policing of language?
It is because of all of these factors. And especially so during this war, it has been Israel's own very effective push to make sure that their line and their messaging gets primacy. And when they are questioned or when they are interrogated to push back incredibly aggressively, you have to also understand that most of these Western media organizations are working in Western nations, which are strongly allied with Israel. In the case of the United States, in the case of the United Kingdom, in the case of Germany, all of these countries are actively providing military aid to Israel.
There is an establishment view on Israel and its actions, and penetrating that wall of consensus is a real challenge, which is why so many editors find themselves facing off with their journalists. Paul Wen saying the same sort of issues arise here in our own reporting of this conflict. Your thoughts? Well, sir, I'm looking at a report in the Australian from a couple of days ago, shelling or aerial attack on a schooling Gaza where displaced people were sheltering and 22 people were killed.
The Australian reported as more than 20 reported reported, reported killed in Gaza school attack. It says at least 22 people were killed in the recorded shelling of a school. Not to say just shoulder it. It's quite clearly Israeli shell bits.
It's quite clearly Israelis have killed 22 people in this attack, but the report is neutral. So that's one example of passive language. You're another one. It's one in Sky UK.
It's rail names, teenage soldiers called Hezbollah drone attack as quote 23 died in Gaza school strike. So this is the same incident. Now, first of all, the teenage soldiers get first billing. There are four of them.
They get killed in the Sky News thing first. They're more important than the 23 who died in Gaza. It doesn't say how the 23 dying Gaza, but they are in fact the victims of an Israeli attack. So that again is passive language.
It is putting the teenage soldiers first. It's saying that teenagers, women and children have died in this Gaza school strike. It's the same thing about them. So that's kind of a couple examples.
But look, I think you need to ask the question of why is this so? There's a three reason that you can bear the list. I think the first is Israel has managed to instill fear inter-journalists about reporting this war by equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. So it says that any criticism of Israel is inciting hatred against Jews.
And therefore, I think journalists are very, very nervous about going to criticize Israel because they will be accused of inciting hatred of Jews. And the world has taken Jews for many years and absolutely in appalling fashion. And the Jews have every reason to feel vulnerable and hated and not to want that to happen ever again. But we quite, criticism of Israel without this emitism is an honest.
And I think it's one reason why Israel looks very scared about the way they report. I think the second thing is that Israel is managing the media at large that Gaza and Palestinian sources can't be trusted because Hamas are terrorists and basically Gaza and people who live in Gaza are terrorists too. And therefore, you can't trust any figures that they say. So when it said that 40,000 people have died in Israeli bombings, they say you trust the figures and so the media is prepared to accept that.
So everything is now reported, reportedly killed. This number have reported he died. So there's again a real nervousness about the reporting of what's happening. And the third thing is that people, journalists, western journalists have not been able to go into Gaza.
So they can't see for themselves what's happening. There's plenty of snuff coming out on social media that they could rely on. But because of all this doubt about whether it's trustworthy, they're not using it and they're not reporting it as fact, they're reporting it as claims. So now you've got a different situation that Israel is backing Lebanon and you've actually got some journalists from western journalists going in there.
You look at the Sydney Morning Herald that asked two days and the difference is amazing. There's a couple of articles by Matthew Knott and Kate Gerety, who's a photographer, where buildings in Lebanon have been hit by Israeli airstrikes and 2,000 people thereabouts in each of them have been killed. And Matthew Knott and this is the dog of the Kate Gerety are in there talking to the people, talking to everyone around them, finding out what happened, getting the personal news and finding that there is no connection or apparently no connection to Hezbollah. And these people are innocent victims of Israeli strikes.
Now that we haven't had that sort of reporting from western journalists in Gaza because western journalists haven't been allowed to get in there and they've been relying on Palestinian journalists and there is this narrative that Israelis manage to push that Palestinian journalists can't be trusted, Palestinian figures can't be trusted and so western journalists and western media have been unable to really get in there and do what journalists normally do which is tell you what it's like to be on the end of this. And I think that's one of the major reasons why the media hasn't done its job very well. But in what you're saying there, doesn't that lay there quite a big issue with the central narrative that apparently Palestinian journalists and Arabic journalists can't be trusted with telling their own story? Why is it that it takes western mainstream journalists to go there and say yes, this is happening when we have Palestinian journalists that have been on the ground showing us really compelling damning imagery of what's happening in their region.
Why isn't that enough? I absolutely agree with you. What I'm trying to explain is why I think it's happened. That raw material is there and people who, the young people who use social media much more than older people do are getting a totally different picture of what's happening because they get this stuff day after day after day and the mainstream media for some reason, I'm trying to explain why, isn't prepared to go there, isn't prepared to use that material in a way that it should.
It's absolutely overwhelming. It's devastating. You watch that stuff, you cannot disbelieve it but somehow the mainstream media has been convinced that it's not reliable, it's not trustworthy, it can't be used and that's just obvious. There's very strict editorial policies around reporting on Gaza within all media organizations, especially public broadcasters like the ABC and like the BBC.
I mean actually, how much do you think that's played into things? Actually, I would say that those stringent conditions around their journalism, those standards, I would say that they are used often as a justification for some of the reporting but I cannot say that that has influenced the reporting as much as they say it has. Let me try and explain this. I thought Paul really synthesized it brilliantly.
He laid out a series of reasons as to why the Western reporting we see on Israel and Gaza is as it is. One of the points he made was this climate of fear and that fear has been instilled by a very powerful and persuasive Israeli official narrative which pushes back with great aggression and accusations of antisemitism when they are being interrogated. But let me say it is not just the Israeli state, right? You have Western nations and Western governments and Western editors falling in step behind this line of reasoning.
For example, it was Joe Biden, the President of the United States, who said that he has no faith in the numbers being released from Gaza of the numbers dead. This is despite the fact that those very numbers are used by the State Department in their reports on what they see happening in the occupied territories. That casting of doubt on what has been known to be a credible fact of deaths and injuries, that casting of doubt really doesn't do anything to help the climate within newsrooms. The fear is palpable when the producers for the listening post spoke with journalists from a bunch of newsrooms across the Western world.
The one thing we really could perceive was a sense of fear and caution. If I could give an example, Tina, early into the war, there was the story of the beheading of babies by Hamas, a campaign of mass rapes, unborn babies being cut from their mother's abdomens. All of these stories made the rounds. And there were many news outlets that carried these pieces with hardly the requisite amount of verification that these stories require.
Why did that happen? Why did these newsrooms, which have such stringent standards for good quality journalism, why did they fall into that trap? It's really because, firstly, nobody wants to be a denier of atrocities. Certainly not when those atrocities are claimed by Jewish victims, right?
Nobody wants to do that. And yet, you don't want to be a denier. You cannot not do your journalism. What has happened, however, is that that narrative of atrocities, outlandish exaggerated atrocities, they took hold so strongly within Western media.
And those claims continue even now to be pushed by Israeli spokespeople so much so that no journalist feels they have the standing to put their head above the parapet and interrogate and ask really where's the evidence? Why do we not have evidence? Why have we not been able to back it up? Why has an independent investigation not been allowed?
They're not allowed to do that. Forget the fact that they are afraid. Most of the time, their newsrooms do not empower them to conduct these kinds of interrogations. These interrogations, by the way, are no problem when it comes to having a Palestinian guest on the air, for example, they get interrogated all the time.
They are cross-questioned all the time. And there is no problem with cross-questioning as long as it is done equally to all the parties in this war. If I may just make one more point, please, based on what we've heard, there's a real distinction that we should make between the journalism we see being done out in the field and what we see being done in the studios. And that distinction became incredibly apparent to us as we did the researching and reporting for this episode of the listening post.
Often, CNN, BBC, New York Times, a bunch of other outlets, they have some really stellar correspondence out in the field who can see the reality of what's happening and are willing to report it. The contrast comes from people sitting inside studios. An example is what we heard in the BBC, right? They said some of the producers working at the news desk felt there was such a stark lack of empathy from presenters in the studios that they were genuinely nervous about putting vulnerable Palestinian guests on air to speak with them, because it was such an aggressive stance that was being taken.
It's not just about empathy here. It's also about the quality of the journalism that was being pursued as a result. So that distinction is something that I should make clear because many of these outlets have great correspondence, but their reporting is diluted, undermined and crushed at times because headquarters has a view on matters and that view is what we prevail. Right.
I'm guessing you're referring to entities that we've seen conducted by journalists and presenters on BBC hard talk and news night. Paul, I'm sure you can agree that what those BBC producers have described there. We've seen merit here in Australia on programs like 730 on Q&A. Our aren't our journalists.
I guess as you call them have shown a lot less empathy towards Palestinian guests while at the same time showing a lot less scrutiny to Israeli guests that they've had on the program. They've done a lot less of holding their feet to the fire. Why do you think there's this divergence, this seemingly double standard? Well, you go back to October 7th of the media dot method that and every interview with the Palestinian who had nothing to do with the mass was begun with the UK de-infinite mass.
Sometimes that question would be asked six or seven times until the right answer was given. And sure, you have to condemn what happened on October 7th. It was absolutely horrific at a walk rhyme and there's no question you could do anything else. But that became the mantra for everybody.
And this feeling that you've got to be seen to be tough on Palestinians and you've got to be seen to be tough on you don't have to be seen to be tough on Israel. But that's reflected in the politics in this country. I mean, you look at what the Republicans have been saying, you look at what the narrative has been in the tabloids. It's all about how awful pro-Palestinian demonstrations are and how threatening pro-Palestinian demonstrations are and what a terrible threat and danger to us if someone is waiting a Hezbollah or a Hamas flag.
That takes the attention away from what's happening over in Gaza or in Lebanon, where people are just being threatened thousands of people. It may be 30,000 rather than 40,000 let's assume that the figures are wrong, but it's thousands of people are being killed, tortured, maimed, blown up, whatever. And we're not concentrating on that. The media here isn't concentrating on that and the politicians here are concentrating on that.
I find it totally bizarre. I must say, if you're just joining us, you're listening to Fourth Estate on the Community Ready Network. I'm Tina Quinn and my guests this week are the ABCs Paul Barry and the Al Jazeera Networks, Manachi Ravi. So 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th with some experts saying the real death toll could be several times higher than this figure.
And more journalists have been killed covering this conflict over the last 12 months, then died during World War II. Yet some of these figures are being called into question by both media organizations and government. Now, Manachi, your program revealed that BBC staff is specifically pointed to examples of how language used by long trusted NGOs like Human Rights Watch were put under significantly more scrutiny than a lot of the figures and claims that were being made by Israeli guests. And Paul, I draw a comparison again here to Australia where we had a journalist at the ABC who was dismissed from her position.
And the reason that was given was that she re-shared a post from Human Rights Watch. That was the reason given at the time. Yeah, that's still before the court. I mean, she took it on to her dismissal case against the ABC.
Her name is that for that. I'm sure you're familiar with that. She was just a standing presenter on a radio show. She was not talking about Gaza on a radio show, but she did retweet something from onto Human Rights Watch.
I think it was about Israel using starvation as a weapon of war. And I think it was a report that they had produced. It was a report that the ABC was actually prepared to report on and give airtime too. So what she was doing was sharing that.
It's a very strange decision, I must say. And I don't think it's one that's going to look good in the ABC's history. And I don't think the surprise of the court case goes in favor of the ABC, frankly. Another element, of course, in that story is that it was revealed that a group of Jewish lawyers had orchestrated an email campaign which was directed towards the ABC chair and the managing director in which they were putting pressure on our ABC management to dismiss Antoinette Lautue.
Now, the ABC have, of course, maintained that those emails had nothing to do with their decision to dismiss Antoinette Lautue. But these revelations have, of course, opened them up to accusations that they bound to the pressures of an interest group. Now, how damaging do you think accusations like that and incidents like this to the profession of journalism? That's a difficult question.
Look, I look at what's happening. I look at the journalism that's now coming out of Lebanon from the Sydney Morning Herald and from the ABC's John Lyons and ABC's John Lyons all through this conflict. And I think there's a great room for hope. I think that's what's happening there is absolutely horrific and appalling.
But the journalism that's reporting on it is exceptional. It's really, it's precisely what they should be doing. It's telling people what it's like to be in that killing zone. And it tells the human stories of war instead of this bullshit that we get from politicians about how war is necessary and war is justified and war is moral.
This is the reality of war. And that's what journalism should be about telling people. So I'm not too pessimistic about it. I think one of the reasons why it has been so bad is that Israel has banned any Western journalists getting into cars.
I think that's kind of a sort of excuse for why it means they're bad at least. And I don't think it's a very good excuse, but it is a little bit of an excuse. And I'm optimistic that it will get better. So, but generally, I mean, how do you remain impartial or unmoved or unable to reach conclusions when you see what's happening over there?
When you see women, children and doctors and health workers and emergency workers and UN workers being killed in these strikes, how do you as a journalist sit back and go, well, either this is fine or this we don't need to reach any sort of judgment on this? I think that's very difficult. I personally find it very difficult myself and journalists not to become emotionally involved in it. So I don't know how you deal with that, frankly.
I think we do have luckily these circumstances. We don't find it very often. And I think just comparing one of the things that strikes me is, you know, when you look at Ukraine and no one has a problem going, what is happening in Ukraine is absolutely obscene. And what the Russians are doing is completely obscene and horrific and must be condemned.
And yet we can't somehow apply that judgment to what is happening in Israel. So I think that's a point brought up by many people when they voice their complaints about coverage of this conflict is that there is no other conflict in the world that seems comparable in the way that we cover this. We're often accused of omitting by the use of language. It's almost, you know, omitting crimes by the way we report on this.
You do bring up a really interesting point though, in terms of the correspondence that are on the ground who have been doing some really brilliant work for these organizations. And I mean, actually, I actually wanted to go to you on this because for this recent episode of The Listening Post, it's careful to point out that these Western media outlets are not monoliths, that many mainstream journalists do indeed try to speak truth to power and that they're reporting his undercut claims made by the Israeli government and has in fact exposed war crimes. What did some of these journalists tell your program about how difficult it's been for them to do this sort of work? From the sounds of it has not been easy whatsoever.
No, it hasn't been easy. And that's because, as we have said, you know, there is an establishment view and it is imposed at so many levels. It is so pervasive. What we heard was deep frustration from journalists who say that they are not able to pursue stories that are clearly newsworthy.
They have no disagreement from their editors. The editors are not saying that they're not newsworthy. However, there are multiple excuses to not pursue those stories. That's one thing we heard very clearly.
And yet, we've seen some great work. For example, I can tell you about CNN's work out of Staitemann, which is a military facility in Israel. They were the ones who exposed the torture of Israeli journalists happening there. I should say all of this was reported by Palestinian journalists way before any of the international news outlets caught it.
So what CNN did and it did so doggedly was to pick up testimonies both from Israelis within the military facility and no doubt from Palestinians who have been reporting it assiduously for so long. They took that, they packaged it up convincingly and they put it out. And that is good journalism. It's the kind of journalism that cuts through the clutter.
But I should reiterate again, Palestinian journalists who are no less well versed, how do I say, in the craft of journalism are doing this work. They are not being heard. They are not being accorded with the respect and credibility that they deserve. But they have been doing the work.
If it's all right, can I also pick up on something that Paul said earlier? He spoke about how can you see what is happening and not feel empathy? How can you see what is happening and is a journalist not feel emotional about it? And in fact, I find that very often the pushback to any empathetic journalism about the Palestinian situation is met with this argument that, oh, there is a level of emotional manipulation happening here.
You see the pictures on social media, you see people crying, you see people be refed. And this is your emotion speaking. I should say, in the case of most journalists doing the best journalism on the war, they are not being led by emotion as much as they're being led by the plain and simple fact. The facts are there in front of us.
They are being chronicled by journalists in Gaza who are refusing to allow the threat to their lives and their families to get in the way of their work. And furthermore, all of us can see the complete abrogation of international law here. These are not matters of subjectivity or emotion, actually. They're very clear.
International humanitarian law is being violated not once, not twice, but repeatedly. And it is only fair that journalists be able to report that. But the climate of fear is such and weaponized anti-Semitism has been so powerfully used that it has seriously dented the quality of journalism that Western audiences are getting. It is to the detriment of all of us.
How much do we think that racism is what's underlying much of the issues here? Because historically, for decades upon decades, we've seen Western media dehumanize people from Arabic and Middle Eastern backgrounds. We saw it with how the Western media covered the Iraq War. We've seen it now for years upon years when it comes to coverage of Israel and Palestine.
It's always coverage told from mainly Western eyes, which often dehumanizes Palestinians and dehumanizes people from Arabic and Middle Eastern backgrounds. The whole world has been humanized, Palestinians. The whole Arab nations, the Israelis, the Americans, everyone, no one has had any regard to Palestinians. No one has given them a hearing.
No one has defended them. So that is a going back many, many years. But what's happened in this topic is that people who are being killed are not being humanized. We're not hearing the stories of, you know, we hear endless is the wrong word, but we hear many, many stories about the victims of Hamas and that terrorist attack.
And rightly so, their plight was horrific. And what happened to them was completely unjustified. But we don't hear that. Or we haven't heard that about the people who've been bombed in Gaza.
42,000 of them. Now, maybe 20,000 of them were Hamas fighters, maybe 10,000. Whatever the figure, that still is an awful lot of men, women and children and old people and doctors and health workers and UN workers. And we have not heard those humanizing stories about what it is like to be on the end of that.
That's 20,000 people. So I agree with you that they haven't been humanized. I think it's more in that specific sense that we haven't heard, we haven't heard what's happening there. We haven't been, it hasn't been thrust into our face.
We've just had these high moral arguments about whether it's justified or whether it's a moral war or whether it's saving Western civilization. You know, the reality is that people have been killed, blown apart, pushed out of their homes. Two million people have been made homeless in Gaza. 100,000 people have been wounded, 40,000 people have been killed.
These are horrific, horrific figures. The media doesn't tell us this, or it doesn't keep on telling us this, and it doesn't give us the information that can make us feel this. And that's where the problem lies, I think. You're not sure you're starting to sense, especially after the events of recent weeks, that the dial is perhaps shifting at all the tone of the coverage of shifting.
This is a tough one, really, because there have been sparks of quality coverage scattered across Western media output through this war. All right? I don't think the shifting of a dial at this point is going to be proportionate to what has happened, what has unfolded so far. Journalists in Western media organizations are not blind, they are not immoral, they are not unable to see what's happening.
They have seen all of it, they know what they're reporting, and they know the failures and flaws of their reporting. If good quality, empathetic, fact-based reporting is coming through, it is because they have pushed against a system that doesn't allow for this kind of journalism on this particular story to happen with the frequency that it should. So do I see the dial shifting? Actually, I don't.
I have seen good journalism kind of make its way out, squeeze its way out across this world. I don't see a huge shift at the moment. And as long as we are not able to assertively and aggressively hold to account, not just Israel, but also its allies, I just don't think that some amount of empathetic reporting is going to help. You see, because you need a whole universe of robust journalism to do the duty to do the journalistic job here.
And that's not going to change with an empathetic story or a humanizing story. It has to be across the board. We need to be able to kill the double standards and the hypocrisy which has seeped its way into journalism and do the job that we have done so well, for instance, on Ukraine and Russia. It is possible.
We are capable of it. So that's what needs to happen. So we've got time for a bit. I'd like to thank our guests on Fourth of the Snake this week, Paul Barry.
Thanks, Gina. And M'lakshi Ravi. Thank you. Thank you very much.
And thank you for listening to the program. This edition of Fourth of the Snake was recorded at the studios of Twizzer and heard across the country on the community radio network. We'll be back with more next week, of course. But in the meantime, you can stay in touch with us via X, formerly known as Twitter.
Our handle is Fourth of the Snake. And if you'd like to catch up on any of our previous episodes, you can head to the Fourth of the Stake podcast, which can be found wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. Don't forget to leave us a rating and a review, and also subscribe. It helps other people find us as well.
I'm Tina Quinn. Please do so well, stay safe, and we'll catch you next time on Fourth of the Snake. Bye, bye for now.