Media view on antisemitism, Islamophobia kills social cohesion

“Could have been better handled”.

That’s one way — editor Ben English’s way — to describe The Daily Telegraph’s effort to prompt an ugly racial incident as part of a long-planned “Undercover Jew” story.

It’s also apt for the still-unfolding revelations of the debacle at the ABC surrounding the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf in response to a campaign falsely accusing her of antisemitism by pro-Israel lobbyists. That campaign was highly effective, with complaints bounced around the top of the ABC, from chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson on down, resulting in a sacking that had a “step missing”, as Anderson himself admitted. That step being a basic requirement of natural justice.

Both events typify why, for all the posturing, we should ditch the pretence we care about “social cohesion”.

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The Telegraph stunt is unsurprising: News Corp’s entire business model is based on the successful fostering of division. It sells its audiences a diet of fear, resentment and anger directed at a long list of enemies — liberals, elites, the “woke”, Labor, the Greens, scientists, non-white people, Muslims, trans people. It makes money from convincing its audiences an extended gallery of villains is coming to take away all the good things white people have.

Muslims, in particular, must be constantly dehumanised as irrational, violent Others. In the News Corp worldview, Israel stands in as an honorary white nation in a sea of barbarism, the bleeding edge of Western civilization that must be defended at all costs, including by relentless expansion of its borders at the expense of Palestinians. It’s still within living memory that The Australian under Chris Mitchell provided balanced coverage of the Palestinian conflict and rejected efforts by the Israel lobby to intimidate it. These days, there is only the existential threat to all civilization posed by Palestinians.

The wave of heinous antisemitic attacks in Sydney wasn’t sufficient for News Corp; it had to explore ways to manufacture more hostility. Perhaps the strange failure of the Dural caravan story — which the Telegraph revealed, thus cruelling investigations — to stand up as a planned mass-casualty attack frustrated them.

But there have been other racist incidents that News Corp could have focused on — except that they failed to fit its narrative of Muslims as sinister monsters. Last week Islamophobic graffiti appeared on John Stewart Pathway in Sefton in western Sydney — the same suburb where Islamophobic graffiti appeared in December. Back then, that was sufficient for the premier to condemn it and for multiple outlets to cover it. This time, there was one, passing mention in The Australian, but the rest of the media ignored it, despite the constant coverage vile antisemitic graffiti receives when it appears in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

Ditto a physical assault on two Muslim women, including one who was pregnant, in Epping shopping centre in Victoria last Thursday. A similar disgusting attack on visibly Jewish women would, rightly, have received extensive coverage. But again, minimal coverage, and none in commercial media.

In December, a day after an arson attack on a bus belonging to an Adelaide Islamic school, Coalition Senator Dave Sharma declared that Islamphobia in Australia was “fictitious“. It seems that the media — in which Sharma’s claim passed virtually unnoticed — broadly agrees. If it’s not fictitious, it certainly doesn’t appear newsworthy.

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It’s a bit hard to have social cohesion when major institutions not just manufacture division, but visibly have a double standard that speaks to how differently different sections of the community are regarded and valued.

Double standards are at the core of the ABC’s bungling of the Lattouf case. Does anyone seriously believe that, had Lattouf been a well-known supporter of Israel, who had defended Israel’s onslaught against Palestinians, a complaint campaign against her would have not have been handled completely differently? Emails from the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network or from outraged critics of Israel would not have been the subject of late-night discussions between the chair — a micro-manager who insists she was not micro-managing — and managing director, but forwarded to the ABC’s complaints-handling unit and left to be resolved in the usual way. No ABC chair or managing director would have thought them worth wasting their time on.

This double standard is particularly damning at the ABC, which has a mission of social cohesion, its role being to bring Australia together (current chair Kim Williams calls the ABC the national “campfire”), in contrast to News Corp’s business model of creating division. If the double standard on display in the Lattouf case is typical of ABC management generally, then Palestinian-Australians, and those who expect the ABC to operate as a genuinely independent national broadcaster, can only regard it as Their ABC — a national broadcaster beholden to powerful lobby groups, rival media companies and right-wing campaigns to silence dissenters.

At a time when politics is more divisive than ever, when Peter Dutton has successfully ridden the fostering of division and resentment nearly to the prime ministership, and when Labor has itself weaponised antisemitism against the Greens and its own critics of Israel, the task of fostering social cohesion falls to other institutions. But the media is incapable or unwilling to play any such role. Everyone preaches social cohesion, but we all know it’s Us against Them.

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