On Israel-Palestine, Australian journalists have abandoned their professional duty

The journalists who signed a letter rejecting “both-sideism” have swallowed propaganda not compassion, writes JULIE SZEGO.

At this stage, I might as well confess that being a journalist has given me a smug feeling of superiority over the years. Not a sense of superiority over everyone— please don’t misunderstand. Just over people in the other wordy professions: academics, PR consultants, bureaucrats, arts administrators, all of them. I watched these guys propagating weasel language and virtuous platitudes and thanked the gods I had landed in a trade forced to grapple with reality and report on it clearly. Without fear or favour, you know the drill.

And even in the awful new normal post-October 7, as people who call themselves journalists followed in the footsteps of professors at the most prestigious universities, of committee members at Australia’s academic union and of editors at literary journals and signed open letters that either disappeared the slain and tortured Israeli victims or implied they had it coming, I somehow thought the profession's leaders would stand their ground.

This was blind faith, I admit. When, in 2021, hundreds of journalists signed a petition calling for the media to “Do Better on Palestine” and abandon “both sidesism” reporting — which for the signatories evidently meant pretending Hamas and its rockets never happened, and Israel was therefore on a random bombing spree of Gaza — the journalists’ union, the MEAA, gave its de facto endorsement to the document.

Still, I thought, the barbarity of October 7, and its perfect victims, if I can put it that way — socialists, warriors for peace, young leftie ravers — surely meant that this time it’s different. That the custodians of journalistic values would see the conflict in all its painful contradictions and extoll nothing more than the profession’s sacred duty to scrutinise and bear witness.

 Then, in an ominous sign, the union put out its own statement calling for a Hamas-Israel ceasefire. And last week things finally degenerated after Patrick Abboud, the host at the Walkley awards, the academy awards of journalism, exhorted the audience to agitate for a ceasefire — a call that damages the profession as much as it leaves Israel’s war cabinet unmoved.