ABC’s self-vetting like ‘marking own homework’

Australia’s public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, need to appreciate the ramifications of misreporting news on the Israel-Palestine conflict – and more comprehensive training would go a long way towards deepening that kind of understanding.

This was a key point made by Jillian Segal, the federal government’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism, in her testimony to the media phase of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion this week.

When the ABC reported in 2023, in the early weeks of the Gaza war, that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital with some 500 killed, and it later turned out to have been fired on from Islamic Jihad brigades in Gaza, the broadcaster’s correction was far less prominent than the story it had splashed, she charged.

Segal recounted the ABC taking days to remove an online story sourced from the BBC in 2025, which featured claims that 14,000 babies would starve in Gaza if food aid was not delivered within 48 hours.

The BBC had far more quickly pulled the story after it was disowned by the UN.

These were just two examples of a trend in the ABC’s news coverage, she said.

“[If] Israel misconducts itself and Jewish Australians are blamed, [that’s] terrible,” Segal told the RC, “but we can’t control what Israel does.

“But if Israel is even not misconducting itself, whether it’s the bombing of the hospital or the killing of 14,000 children, but that is reported … we have more blaming, which is really unfair.”

Israel-Gaza was a war instigated by the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack - and in a war there will be “bad things on both sides”, she argued. And yet, it is the perception of a large section of her stakeholders, the Australian Jewish community, that there is “disproportionate” emphasis on what Israel had done in Gaza.