Media must sort the wheat from the chaff when reporting Jewish advocacy groups

The haphazardness of who is approached, and the weight they are given, reflects a lack of judgment and care.

In the old days, though not necessarily the good old days, when the Australian media wanted a comment from advocacy groups in the Jewish community, they went to the accepted leadership and advocacy groups – that is, if those groups hadn’t already shared their views with them.

Those groups? The representative groups such as Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (NSW JBoD), Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV); and the advocacy groups who are not representative but have gained the ear of the media - the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) and the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC)

There were always a lot of smaller groups, representing more specific perspectives, inhabiting the landscape. They rarely got much notice, rendered largely invisible by an “old media” world where journalists and advocates knew who was who, and by a relatively stable Israel-Palestine conflict.

But the advent of social media, a clutch of younger media gatekeepers, a severe lurch to the far-Right in Israel and rise of extremist, antisemitic groups have seen a new range of Jewish advocacy voices appear on the mainstream radar.

Some will welcome this as an overdue unbottling; others may look at it with dismay, concerned that these voices do not “represent” the mainstream Jewish community, if there is such a thing.

The past month has been a good example. When news broke in January that NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet had worn a Nazi uniform to his 21^st birthday party, Nine News went to the NSW JBoD but it also did a TV interview with Jews for Jesus, a small fringe group disconnected from other Jews, which has been around for years and seen widely as a source of humour but not much else.