The devastating United Nations report this week into the deliberate targeting and murder of Palestinian children by Israel is not very newsworthy in Australia apparently.

On Tuesday, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel released a harrowing report finding that Israel has deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children.

The 94-page report documented children being shot by snipers, targeted by drones, denied medical treatment, subjected to starvation and detained in conditions involving torture, sexual violence and severe abuse.

• READ MORE: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children — Al Jazeera
• Jale Moala: Why is the UN credible when Fiji agrees but not when it’s inconvenient?
• UN report must mark a turning point for accountability for Palestinian children

The commission concluded that the deliberate targeting of children was one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent.

These are extraordinary findings backed up by an in-depth investigation by a UN body, and one would think it would be of substantial public interest worthy of front-page headlines, but Australia’s mainstream media doesn’t seem to think so.

The ABC made somewhat of an effort by bringing on global affairs editor Laura Tingle to discuss the commission’s findings on its news programme. However, half of their article covering the report was dedicated to parroting Israel’s defence of the indefensible and was buried at the bottom of their website.

Guardian Australia was the only other mainstream Australian outlet to cover the UN report until yesterday. Again, it was buried, and the article has since been relegated to the bottom of its home page.

The Nine newspapers caught up two days late, with The Sydney Morning Herald framing it: “commissioned experts” (not simply the UN) had “accused” Israel … and repeated the “claim” of genocide. A significant portion of the article was dedicated to Israel’s denial of the report’s findings.

As for the rest of the media, Karl Stefanovic’s podcast interview with a right-wing racist grifter is apparently much more newsworthy.

Pacific Media Watch reports: Major New Zealand media outlets that covered the UN Commission of Inquiry report about the deliberate targeting of children included the public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and largest media website Stuff.

Also, leading advocacy groups in the country, such as Save the Children New Zealand, issued media releases urging global accountability in response to the report.

The Save The Children statement in New Zealand said the UN report must mark a turning point for the world to stop turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinian children and hold perpetrators to account.

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award. Republished from Michael West Media with permission.

Good on the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) for its submission to the Royal Commission.

The New Zealand Jewish Council is so very different to the Jewish Council in Australia. The latter has far larger numbers and more clout, over there at least.

The NZ Jewish Council has clout and applies it. It is heavily involved in New Zealand media, some members are journalists, and it has long been running a hasbara propaganda campaign.

• READ MORE: Conflation of Jewish identity with Israel driving antisemitism, Jewish Council says in submission to royal commission
• Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?
• Other Israeli propaganda reports

‘The JCA submission says two important drivers of antisemitism are the “growth of far-right, neo-Nazi and conspiracist movements, which represent a significant and often overlooked threat to Jewish communities, and the aggressive actions of the state of Israel and conflation of Jewish identity with Israel”.’

— The Guardian

Freebies to Israel if you play the toxic game — dehumanise Palestinians, deem them all terrorists, and declare Israel the promised land for one people, not the other.

The New Zealand Jewish Council spreads lies. I know this for a fact. One of its key members who is lauded in New Zealand film and television defamed John Minto, a humanitarian, called him antisemitic, I challenged that and asked him to provide evidence.

Of course there was none. This man who is Jewish and influential in entertainment and journalism defamed Damien O’Connor and said he was antisemitic. Again I challenged him and asked for evidence. There was none.

Zionism inflates antisemitism
I have news for Zionists and their allies in the media who are doing this. Conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism inflates antisemitism. They know it.

It is not fair, is not sensible, rational or compassionate. It is baiting and inciting.

The NZ Jewish Council applies one law for Jews and one for Muslims, different standards completely. One can be the victim, the other is never the victim, in its view.

I previously supported the NZ Jewish Council when I witnessed media bias in a programme featuring a former Waffen SS officer who praised Hitler and claimed he did not know about what happened to the Jews. It was impossible not to know about the systemic murder of masses of Jews, then and now.

When the evidence points to the contrary, the journalist should call it, everytime. Evidence.

This Gaza genocide. More than 75,000 killed — children, little children, babies, women, aid workers, journalists. A target on their backs for being Palestinian.

I have been appalled at the NZ Jewish Council’s double standards, its staunch sense of entitlement, its clear political view that the only good Jews are Zionists, its supremacism.

Stalwart Zionists
The NZ Jewish Council is run by and supported by stalwart Zionists. It does not represent humanitarian Jews because it is Zionist, because it fails to call out a genocide which has murdered tens of thousands of infants, aid workers, and more journalists than World War One and Two combined and the total number of recent wars.

Genocide is not a conflict, it is not a war. The massacres have been carried out since the Nakba. It was always the plan.

Jews have fought against Zionism, literally. The Bund. Jews against Zionism.

Not all Jews are Zionists and the NZ Jewish Council fails to recognise it and support those who support all people equally.

I know about antisemitism. When I worked in a shop I was asked if I was Jewish, when I asked why the question was asked, I was told by the customer that they would never buy from a Jew. My grandfather’s people hid their Jewishness due to anti-semitism.

My aunt was yelled at in the street: ‘You black Jews are all the same’. I know the difference between antisemitism and pro-colonisation Zionism, one supports equality and the other robs other people of their rights.

I stand firmly with the most oppressed people in the world, Palestinians, and for the dismantling of the state of supremacism, apartheid and genocide, a state which always had a policy of steal the land, assimilate those who won’t resist, and exile and exterminate the rest.

And this is why I say it is antisemitic to support the Zionist state. When we free Palestinians we free ourselves from the chains of one kind of victimhood. The victimhood that leads people to become persecutors and create more victims. Zionism.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Opposition New Zealand MPs say former TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman was “hounded” into resigning, after a “witch hunt” while public broadcasters are under “immense pressure” from the governing coalition.

There has also been an outpouring of reaction from other broadcasters and commentators.

Many were grieving over the loss to political journalism, some questioning the support TVNZ gave its reporter and others stating it should not have been a sackable offence.

• READ MORE: TVNZ’s ‘first wahine Māori’ political editor Maiki Sherman resigns
• The Maiki Sherman saga: What actually happened — Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
• ACT leader David Seymour is seeking to undermine public broadcasting — Steven Cowan
• Oceania and global media freedom reports
• Other Maiki Sherman reports

Others have argued the scrutiny and pressure applied by the media should also apply to its own reporters.

Sherman resigned last Friday following a period of scrutiny over an incident during pre-Budget drinks in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ office a year ago.

She had used a homophobic slur against Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr in response to “deeply personal and inappropriate remarks,” she said. She apologised at the time and informed her manager.

The resignation also came after a suspension from Parliament due to breaching parliamentary rules by pursuing an interview with National’s chief whip Stuart Smith, during a period of scrutiny on Luxon’s leadership.

Written in support
Prior to her resignation, veteran political journalists Richard Harman and Audrey Young had both written in support.

Harman told The Post there was a “bit of a public beat-up of Maiki going on at the moment” and that TVNZ should back its reporter.

Young wrote in her column in The New Zealand Herald at the end of April the level of hate against Sherman was “just incredible” and “clearly goes well beyond journalistic critique”.

The day the story about the incident in Willis’ office broke in a blog written by Ani O’Brien, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour told reporters if the content was accurately reported, “it’s absolutely disgraceful”.

“But the fact that it hasn’t been a story for nearly a year is in itself a disgraceful double standard, and I think we should all just be glad that one woman with a substack actually made it a story, because we all know that in the same circumstances, a member of Parliament would have got wall-to-wall coverage night after night after night, don’t we?”

At the time, he suggested Parliament’s speaker should consider Sherman’s access to Parliament.

Opposition politicians speak out
Labour MP Willie Jackson said Sherman had been “hounded” into resignation after she “made a mistake”.

He acknowledged her as a “trailblazing” wahine Māori broadcaster, and despite a “number of run-ins with her over the years” was very proud of her.

“It’s a shame TVNZ let her down so badly, deciding obviously with pressure from this government, that her position was untenable.”

Green MPs Hūhana Lyndon and Steve Abel also spoke out.

Lyndon said the right “came out hard to hunt her down” and suggested considering the context where public broadcasters under “immense pressure and threats” from ministers of the coalition government created a “chilling effect”.

Abel called it a “witch-hunt” and said something was “rotten” in New Zealand with right wing politicians targeting journalists.

He also said TVNZ bosses needed to be questioned, because Sherman’s statement implied she no longer had the backing of her employer.

“Why would the bosses in a public media institution whose duty is upholding the principle of free and independent media not be backing a journalist who has clearly been targeted for political reasons.”

‘Deeply upsetting to witness’
Te Pāti Māori MP, and former broadcaster, Oriini Kaipara also took to social media, calling Sherman’s treatment “deeply upsetting to witness”.

“Maiki is one of the sharpest political journalists in the country. Intelligent, fearless, composed, and uncompromising in holding power to account.

“Her rise mattered. Not just professionally, but culturally.

“So many Māori, especially wāhine and rangatahi, saw themselves in her. Many only turned the news on or anticipated any political story because of Maiki.”

Kaipara said it felt “personal” and reeked of “foul play”.

Voices from outside Parliament
There had also been an outpouring of support, including from Māori broadcasters, and questions about double standards.

Scotty Morrison gave a mihi during Te Karere’s show the day the news broke, acknowledging the loss for TVNZ and the brilliance of Sherman’s work.

Miriama Kamo wrote on social media, acknowledging the pressure of the high-profile job while Sherman juggled being a mother to six kids as well. Kamo also questioned how TVNZ had supported its reporter, and how it planned to “address the vacuum her departure has left”.

Broadcaster Moana Maniapoto said “somewhere someone is raising a glass,” and the resignation was not good news for the public in election year.

Former Māori Party chief-of-staff Helen Leahy wrote the relationship between the press gallery and politicians was never an easy one.

“But you don’t get the breaking news by sitting noho puku [sitting still]. You don’t get a leader opening up and being vulnerable without mutual respect. Maiki would persevere.”

Political commentator Liam Hehir queried a double standard, asking why comments of a prominent journalist at a work-function were “inherently off limits”.

On X, pollster David Farrar wrote the resignation was “sad”.

“I don’t think one regrettable moment should cost you your job. We need less cancel culture, not more.”

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote that at a party in the Minister of Finance’s office, “where one assumes alcohol flowed”, there was an exchange between journalists.

“The aftermath — one was later hounded from her job. The other wasn’t. All in the context of public media being undermined. Shameful.”

‘Rules broken all the time’
Former political editor Duncan Garner wrote that after nearly 20 years inside Parliament, he knew how the place worked.

“The rules were broken all the time. By journalists. By MPs. By ministers. By people who later got promoted, protected, forgiven, knighted and sent off to cushy jobs.

“So why Maiki?”

And blogger O’Brien — who posted the original blog breaking the story — said for years journalists and commentators, including Sherman, had “enthusiastically participated in a culture where politicians and public figures were subjected to career-ending moral scrutiny for comments or conduct less severe than this”.

“The modern media class has normalised the idea that professional ruin is an acceptable and even righteous outcome for personal failings.

“It is difficult now to object when that same standard is turned inward.”

Politik blog political writer Richard Harman posted online saying this was the “most hostile environment within which to be a political journalist I have known in my 55 years as a journo”.

“The mob is ruling at the moment. They have tasted blood. Who will they turn on next?”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

SPECIAL REPORT: By Michael West and Stephanie Tran

Amid revelations of Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, the Australian government and media have entirely lost control of the Israel narrative.

As thousands massed around the country tonight to protest against the visit of President Herzog, the government’s claims of fostering “social cohesion” are a shambles.

The mainstream media, too. Any remaining shred of credibility shattered.

• READ MORE: Herzog’s visit to Australia builds conflict not social cohesion – Wendy Bacon
• Jonathan Cook: The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth about Gaza
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Amid the soft-shoe interviews published over the weekend, did any of them bother to ask Herzog whether he was the Herzog in the email from Jeffrey Epstein?

The Herzog “coming to the island this weekend” with former Israel PM and Epstein confidante Ehud Barak?

It appears not. What of the “ceasefire” in Gaza, where dozens are still being slaughtered daily, or the destruction of UN infrastructure, West Bank land theft, allegations of organ harvesting of Palestinians, and prison torture? Any questions?

There is no record of it from the “journals of record”.

Instead, blatantly peddling the tired rhetoric of the government and Israel lobby, critics of Herzog are branded by Herzog in the Murdoch press as

waging a brainwash campaign against Jews.

While in the Nine papers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald debunked critics as “futile fury” and had the Israel president calling for a new dawn which would “reignite the passion and love between our nations”.

The plain fact of the matter is that Australians, like most people in the world, don’t like genocide.

They don’t like apartheid either, or lies.

By the time Isaac Herzog turned up at the International Convention Centre (ICC) this evening for “an evening of light and solidarity”, hundreds of thousands of Australians were protesting across the country.

How long can politicians and lobbyists continue to peddle the line that the protesters are tearing up the social cohesion, not themselves?

Herzog sponsors – IDF links
Sponsoring tonight’s dinner at the ICC are Australian charities involved in funding the IDF, which is in turn accused of myriad war crimes and genocide.

Founded in 1927, the ZFA describes itself as the peak body representing Zionist organisations in Australia, with more than 200 affiliated groups. It is the Australian branch of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO)

In its 2024 financial report, the federation said it was dependent on funding from the WZO and Keren Hayesod for “the majority of its revenue used to operate the business”. The ZFA also maintains an office in Israel.

The WZO has long played a role in Israeli settlement policy.

Israeli advocacy group Peace Now says the WZO’s Settlement Division, funded by the Israeli government, has since the 1970s helped plan, finance and manage illegal settlements and outposts in the West Bank, including administering land transferred to settlers.

Ties to UIA and JNF
The ZFA’s constitution commits it to supporting the fundraising of two bodies it calls the “National Funds”: Keren Hayesod — United Israel Appeal (UIA) and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael — Jewish National Fund (JNF).

It states that one of the Federation’s objects is “to support the fundraising activities of the National Funds”, and that state Zionist councils must take steps to ensure the “maximum success” of United Israel campaigns.

An investigation by Michel West Media found that UIA and JNF have been funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-deductible donations to Israel, where some of these funds are used to fund the IDF and illegal settlements.

The ZFA is also the organisation behind the racial discrimination case against journalist Mary Kostakidis over social media posts relating to the genocide.

The federation has publicly rejected United Nations and International Court of Justice (ICJ) findings critical of Israel.

It described a UN Commission of Inquiry finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza as “a baseless and biased assault on truth and justice”, and rejected the ICJ advisory opinion that Israel has committed a “plausible” genocide in Gaza as “politically driven” and “deeply flawed”.

The ZFA did not respond to requests for comment.

Scope for Herzog arrest
“There is both a legal scope and a moral duty to arrest Isaac Herzog on arrival,” said Chris Sidoti, a Commissioner on the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem and Israel, in a live broadcast on The West Report.

Despite these concerns, Herzog’s visit has proceeded as planned. When asked about Sidoti’s remarks and the ICJ’s findings on genocide, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said, “President Herzog is being invited to Australia to honour the victims of Bondi and to be with and provide support to Australia’s Jewish community.”

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award.

Canadian photojournalist Valerie Zink has resigned after eight years with Reuters, criticising the news agency’s stance on Gaza as a “betrayal of journalists” and accusing it of “justifying and enabling” the killing of 245 journalists in the Palestinian enclave.

“At this point it’s become impossible for me to maintain a relationship with Reuters given its role in justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza,” Zink said today via the US social media company X.

Zink said she worked as a Reuters stringer for eight years, with her photos published by many outlets, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and others worldwide.

• READ MORE: I can’t in good conscience continue to work for Reuters given their betrayal of journalists in Gaza
• Valerie Zink: Why I resigned from Reuters — Against The Current
• Other reports on the media and Gaza

She criticised Reuters’ reporting after the killing of Anas al-Sharif and an Al Jazeera crew in Gaza on August 10, accusing the agency of amplifying Israel’s “entirely baseless claim” that al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, which was “one of countless lies that media outlets like Reuters have dutifully repeated and dignified,” she said.

“I have valued the work that I brought to Reuters over the past eight years, but at this point I can’t conceive of wearing this press pass with anything but deep shame and grief,” Zink said.

Zink also emphasised that the agency’s willingness to “perpetuate Israel’s propaganda” had not spared their own reporters from Israel’s genocide.

“I don’t know what it means to begin to honour the courage and sacrifice of journalists in Gaza, the bravest and best to ever live, but going forward I will direct whatever contributions I have to offer with that front of mind,” Zink highlighted, reflecting on the courage of Gaza’s journalists.

“I owe my colleagues in Palestine at least this much, and so much more,” she added.

I can’t in good conscience continue to work for Reuters given their betrayal of journalists in Gaza and culpability in the assassination of 245 our colleagues. pic.twitter.com/WO6tjHqDIU

— Valerie Zink (@valeriezink) August 26, 2025

‘Double tap’ strike
Referring to the killing of six more journalists, including Reuters cameraman Hossam Al-Masri, in Israel’s Monday attack on the al-Nasser hospital in Gaza, Zink said: “It was what’s known as a ‘double tap’ strike, in which Israel bombs a civilian target like a school or hospital; waits for medics, rescue teams, and journalists to arrive; and then strikes again.”

Zink underlined that Western media was directly culpable for creating the conditions for these events, quoting Jeremy Scahill of Drop Down News, who said major outlets — from The New York Times to Reuters — had served as “a conveyor belt for Israeli propaganda,” sanitising war crimes, dehumanising victims, and abandoning both their colleagues and their commitment to true and ethical reporting.

She said Western media outlets, by “repeating Israel’s genocidal fabrications without determining if they have any credibility” and abandoning basic journalistic responsibility, have enabled the killing of more journalists in Gaza in two years than in major global conflicts combined, while also contributing to the suffering of the population.

The new fatalities among the media personnel in Gaza brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 to 246.

Israel has killed more than 62,700 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.

Last November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its war on the enclave.

Republished from Anadolu Ajansi.

I never knew Anas al-Sharif personally. But somehow he seemed to be part of our whānau.

We watched so many of his reports from Gaza that it just appeared he would be always around keeping us up-to-date on the horrifying events in the besieged enclave.

Although he actually worked for Al Jazeera Arabic, the 28-year-old was probably the best known Palestinian journalist in the Strip and many of his stories were translated into English.

• READ MORE: Tributes, condemnation pour in for slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza
• ‘A very dark morning’: Pain and grief as funerals held for Al Jazeera staff killed by Israel in Gaza
• Another Gaza injustice. Israel targets Anas in Al Jazeera media crew of 5
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

It is yet another despicable act by the Israeli military to assassinate him and four of his colleagues on the eve of launching their new mass crime to seize and demolish Gaza City with a population of about one million as part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to occupy the whole of Gaza.

In many ways the bravery of al-Sharif — he had warned several times that he was being targeted — was the embodiment of the Palestinian courage under fire when UNESCO awarded the 2024 World Press Freedom Award collectively to the Gazan journalists.

But it wasn’t enough just to “murder” him and his colleagues — as the Al Jazeera channel proclaimed in red banner television headlines — Israel attempted unsuccessfully to try to smear him in death as a “Hamas platoon leader” without a shred of evidence.

The drone attack late on Sunday night hit a journalists’ work tent near the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, killing seven people. Among those killed beside al-Sharif were fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Noufal.

Call for UNSC emergency session
Al Jazeera later said a sixth journalist, freelancer Mohammad al-Khaldi, was also killed in the strike. Reporters Without Borders said three more journalists had been wounded and called for a UN Security Council emergency session to discuss journalist safety.

Al Jazeera condemns the assassination of its journalists by Israeli occupation forces

Al Jazeera Media Network condemns in the strongest terms the targeted assassination of its correspondents Anas Al Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqea, along with photographers Ibrahim Al Thaher, and… pic.twitter.com/0otP6IYIgC

— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) August 10, 2025

In a statement, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network condemned in “the strongest terms” the killing of its media staff in “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom”, noting that the Israeli occupation force had “admitted to their crimes”.

“This attack comes amid the catastrophic consequences of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, which has seen the relentless slaughter of civilians, forced starvation, and the obliteration of entire communities,” Al Jazeera said.

“Anas and his colleagues were among the last remaining voices from within Gaza, providing the world with unfiltered, on-the-ground coverage of the devastating realities endured by its people.”

Five Al Jazeera journalists killed in Gaza by Israel’s “psychopathic liar” — Marwan Bishara Video: Al Jazeera

Ironically, the killings came hours after Netanyahu told media he had decided to “allow” some foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip.

“In fact, we have decided, and I’ve ordered, directed the military, to bring in foreign journalists, more foreign journalists,” Netanyahu told a news conference in Jerusalem.

Israeli authorities have in the past barred any foreign media from entering the Gaza Strip, while it has been deliberately targeting and killing local Palestinian journalists.

Other attacks on Al Jazeera
The deadly strike on Anas al-Sharif and his four colleagues is not the first attack on Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza since the start of Israel’s current war on the Palestinian territory in October 2023

Israeli forces have previously killed five Al Jazeera journalists: Samer Abudaqa, Ismael al-Ghoul, Ahmed al-Louh, Hossam Shabat and Hamza Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, as well as many of the family members of Al Jazeera journalists.

The Israeli military has been systematically killing journalists, photographers and local media workers in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war in an attempt to silence their reports.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has verified the killing of at least 186 journalists since October 7, 2023. At least 90 journalists have been imprisoned by Israel.

But some media freedom groups put the casualty figure even higher. The Government Media Office in Gaza, for example, reports that 242 journalists have been killed.

The Israeli military have frequently accused journalists of being “terrorists” without evidence.

According to Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza, Anas al-Sharif was a “loved by everyone, by his entire community”.

‘Enormous influence’
“He’s held enormous influence there, and that’s precisely why Israel murdered him.

Shehada told Al Jazeera he had “looked into the allegations” that Israel produced, trying to smear him as a Hamas militant, adding that “the allegations were completely contradictory.” He added:

“There’s zero evidence that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities, in any armed actions, aided or abetted any kind of these hostilities. None at all. His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Israel banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside Israeli territory and the occupied West Bank, Hoda Abdel-Hamid said: “When you read the statement issued by the Israeli army, which was well prepared before all this happened, it’s almost as if it is bragging about it.”

It had been alleged by Israel that Anas al-Sharif was a member of the military wing of Hamas, and the army claimed that it had found documents in Gaza that proved their point.

“It includes some links to content that anyone could have printed,” she said. “This has been going on for a few weeks, ever since Anas started reporting on the starvation in Gaza, and he had such a huge impact on the Arab world.

“Immediately after, a spokesman for the Israeli army in Arabic… posted a video on social media, accusing al-Sharif of being a Hamas member and threatening him.”

‘Knew he was at serious risk’
Abdel-Hamid said she had been going through his X feed.

“He knew his life was at serious risk, and he repeatedly wrote that he was just a journalist, and he wanted his message to be spread widely, because he thought that was a way to protect him.”

Posted on his X account in case he was killed was his “last will” and final message. He wrote in part:

“I entrust you with Palestine — the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace.

“Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.

“I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland . . . “

This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my…

— أنس الشريف Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) August 10, 2025

Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said that last October Israel had accused al-Sharif and “a number of other journalists of being terrorists without providing any credible proof”.

“We warned back then that this felt to us like a precursor to justify assassination, and, of course, last month… we saw again, a repeated smear campaign”, she told Al Jazeera.

“This is not solely about Anas al-Sharif, this is part of a pattern that we have seen from Israel… going back decades, in which it kills journalists.”

Accusations repeated
Al-Sharif had warned last month about the starvation facing journalists — “and we saw then the accusations repeated.

“Of course, now we are seeing a new offensive, plans for a new offensive, in Gaza, the kind of thing that Anas has been reporting on for the best part of three years.”

The medical director of al-Shifa Hospital said that Israel had killed the journalists to prevent coverage of atrocities it intended to carry out in its Gaza City seizure.

“The [Israeli] occupation is preparing for a major massacre in Gaza, but this time without sound or image,” Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya told Turkiye’s Anadolu news agency.

“It wants to kill and displace the largest number of Palestinians in Gaza City but this time in the absence of the voice of Anas, Mohamed, Al Jazeera and all satellite channels.”

‘Fabrications don’t wash’
Al Jazeera’s senior analyst Marwan Bishara warned that “Israel’s lies” about al-Sharif endangered journalists everywhere, saying that the “best response to the killing of our colleagues is by continuing to do what we do”.

“I want to correct one thing [about Western media reports], and I need our viewers and readers around the world to pay attention:

“It doesn’t matter whether what Israel said about al-Sharif is correct or not.

“It’s an absolute fabrication. It’s wrong. But it doesn’t matter.

“Because if every American journalist who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been killed because there’s a suspicion that they worked for the CIA; if every French and British journalist would be killed because they work for the MI5 or something like that, then I think there will be no Western journalists working in the Middle East.

“It’s not OK to kill a journalist in a tent of journalists because you accuse him of something.

“If you accuse him of something, you take him to court, you make a complaint, you follow certain procedures, with the network, with the [International Federation of Journalists], and so on and so forth.

“You don’t kill a journalist who has been doing their job for months on, day in, day out, night and day, and claim later that they work for Hamas.

“That doesn’t wash.

“It’s wrong, it’s a lie, it’s a fabrication as usual, but this psychopathic liar should not get away with killing a journalist and simply attaching an accusation to it.

“It doesn’t wash, because otherwise, every single Western journalist covering a war that a Western government is involved in is going to be a target.

“Why?

“Because Israel has done it.”

In January 2024, three months into the war, I wrote an article for Declassified Australia about “Silencing the messenger” when I made the point that while “Israel killed journalists, the West merely censored them”.

I wrote that it was time for journalists to take a moral stand for truth and justice, and although I expected a strong response, the feedback was merely tepid. It was as if Western journalists did not comprehend the enormity of the Gaza crisis facing the world.

It is shameful that New Zealand journalists and media groups have not come out in the past 22 months with strong denunciations of Israel’s war on both journalists and truth – and the genocide against Palestinians.

Protesters demonstrated outside several major US media outlets in Washington this week condemning their coverage of the genocide in Gaza, claiming they were to blame over misinformation and the worsening catastrophe.

Banging pots and pans to spotlight the starvation crisis, they accused the media of “complicity in genocide”.

Banners and placards proclaimed “Stop media complicity in genocide” and “US media manufactures consent for Israel’s crimes”, as the protesters demonstrated outside media offices that included NBC News and Fox News.

• READ MORE: With the UK and France moving toward recognising Palestine, will Australia now follow suit?
• ‘Battle for the truth’: Pro-Israel bias inside UK newsrooms revealed
• Israeli social media campaign denies there is starvation in Gaza as death toll mounts
• More Israeli war on Gaza reports

But the irony was that while the protests appeared to have been ignored or overlooked by national media in the US – and certainly in New Zealand, they were strongly reported by at least one global news agency, Turkey’s Anadolu Agensi.

The protests echoed a series of statements by various news media organisations, such as Agence France-Presse concerned about the safety of their journalists from both under fire and the risk of starvation, and media freedom advocacy groups.

The Doha-based global television news network Al Jazeera, that has been producing arguably the best and most honest news coverage of Gaza and the occupied West Bank – which earned it being banned last year by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority from reporting inside their territory — called for global action to protect Gaza’s journalists.

It said in a statement that Isael’s forced starvation of the besieged enclave that threatened Gaza’s entire population, including those “risking their lives to shed light on Israel’s atrocities”.

At least six Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.

Death toll passes 60,000
On Tuesday this week, the world noted a grim milestone in Gaza, with the Health Ministry announcing that the death toll had surpassed 60,000 (this does not include the tens of thousands of people buried under the rubble and missing, presumed dead).

Put in perspective, that is one in every 36 people in Gaza killed, and more than 90 people on average slaughtered every day.

Also, 1157 people have been killed near the notorious Israel and US-backed Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation food depots condemned as “death traps”, while 154 people have died from starvation, 89 of them children with the numbers rising.

Israel’s genocide – ‘Everyone in Gaza is starving’       Video: Al Jazeera

An episode of the weekly media watch programme, The Listening Post, took up the theme as well, criticising the failure of many high profile Western news services from adequately reporting the horror of Israel’s devastating and cruel policies.

“When trying to stave off starvation becomes part of the job. What it means to be a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. The stories they are determined to tell, the incredible risks they are prepared to take,” said host Richard Gizbert when introducing the programme. He wasted no time firing a few caustic shots.

“What is unfolding in Gaza now has the appearance of a final solution, orchestrated by Israel and the United States, Israel’s other ally: The transformation of parts of the Gaza strip into starvation and concentration camps, a place where famine has been turned into a weapon of war,” he said.

“Reporting on the reality of this genocide can amount to a death sentence. Palestinian journalists can easily identify with the suffering they are documenting since they too are going hungry.

“They have been targeted because for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, like other genocidal leaders before him, starving a population is much easier to do when no one is watching.

Perpetrator ‘left out’
“Across Western mainstream media, news outlets have been unable to ignore this story of mass starvation in Gaza. But in report after report, they have made a habit of leaving out a key detail – naming the perpetrators of the famine, Israel.

“The missing actors, the sanitised language, the use of the passive grammatical voice, it is all part of the playbook for far too many international news outlets and that is exactly what the few Palestinian journalists still standing are out to tell the world.”

Gizbert explained that “journalists in Gaza already have the world’s toughest assignment”:
“Job one for almost 22 months now has been survival; job two, telling heartbreaking stories; documenting a genocide while under fire.”

Like, for example, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Anas al-Sharif who was reporting live from outside Al Shifa medical complex when a woman behind him collapsed at the hospital’s gate.

Al-Sharif, who had reported on the genocide of his own people for more than 650 days without rest or complaint, through Israeli occupation airstrikes, drone attacks, and countless “scenes resembling hell”, suddenly could not take it anymore.

He broke down: “People are falling to the ground from the severity of hunger,” al-Sharif said through his tears. “They need one sip of water. They need one loaf of bread.”

Al-Sharif has also been threatened by the Israeli military, accusing him of being a “Hamas militant”, an accusation strongly denied by Al Jazeera, denouncing what it called Tel Aviv’s “campaign of incitement” against its reporters in the Gaza Strip.

Discredited for bias
Many Western mainstream media – including BBC, CNN, Sky, ITN, and Australia’s public broadcaster ABC — have been repeatedly discredited for their “pro-Israel bias” by scores of journalists who have acted as whistleblowers about the actions of their own news organisations.

According to a Declassified UK report, for example, the journalists working for a range of outlets from across the political spectrum have “painted a consistent picture of the obstacles faced by reporters who want to humanise Palestinians or scrutinise Israeli government narratives”. The US media is also under attack and has been putting up a lame defence.

Last week, more than 100 aid groups warned of “mass starvation” throughout Gaza — predictably denied by Israeli government in the face of overwhelming evidence — with their staff severely impacted by shortages and serious implications for journalists already being threatened with targeting by the Israeli military.

Israel faces growing global pressure over the enclave’s dire humanitarian crisis, where more than two million people have endured 22 months of war. UN Security Council member France has led a group of countries announcing that they plan to recognise the Palestinian state at the UN in September, with United Kingdom, Canada, Malta and Finland among those following with the total number now almost 150 of the 193 UN member states.

A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that “our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away”. The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through UN-led mechanisms.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh reported from Amman that the Israeli government had accused the UK of supporting the establishment of a “jihadi” state and of derailing efforts to reach a ceasefire.

“But really,” she said, “the Israeli media, for example, is describing this as a political tsunami, a realisation of how significant the tide is, and how improbable it is to turn it back to countries withholding recognition because Israel said it doesn’t want it.”

Calling for sanctions
She also noted how 31 high-profile Israelis, including the former speaker of the Knesset, a former attorney general, and several recipients of Israel’s highest cultural award, were calling on world governments to impose crippling sanctions on Israel to stop the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and their expulsion

“This was taboo just a few days ago and has never really been done before, certainly not at this level of prominence of the signatories,” Odeh added.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) added its voice to the appeal by aid agencies to call for an end to Israel’s starvation of journalists and other civilians in Gaza, backing the plea for states to “save lives before there are none left to save.”

In a statement on its website, the CPJ accused Israel of “starving journalists into silence”.

“Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence. They are not just reporters, they are frontline witnesses, abandoned as international media were pulled out and denied entry,” said CPJ regional director Sara Qudah.

“The world must act now: protect them, feed them, and allow them to recover while other journalists step in to help report. Our response to their courageous 650 plus-days of war reporting cannot simply be to let them starve to death.”

‘Bearing witness’ videos
Also, last week the CPJ launched a “bearing witness” series of videos from Gaza giving voice to the challenges the journalists have been facing. In the first video, Moath al Kahlout described how his cousin had been shot dead while awaiting humanitarian aid.

As Israel partially eased its 11-week total blockade of Gaza that began in May, CPJ published the testimony of six journalists who described how “starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness” had threatened their ability to report.

Among highlights cited by the CPJ:
• On June 20, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif — the journalist cited earlier in this article — posted online: “I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment . . .  Gaza is dying. And we die with it.”
• Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, told CPJ that she fainted consciousness after doing a live broadcast on July 20 because she had not eaten all day. She regained consciousness in Al-Shifa hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters were starving.
• Another Palestinian journalist, Shuruq As’ad said Thabet had been the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week, and posted a photograph of Thabet with the drip in her hand.
• During a live broadcast on July 20, Al-Araby TV correspondent Saleh Al-Natour said: “We have no choice but to write and speak; otherwise, we will all die.”

Little of this horrendous state of affairs has made it onto the pages of newspapers, websites of the television screens in the New Zealand mainstream media which seems to have a pro-Israel slant and rarely interviews Palestinian journalists or analysts for balance.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

• READ MORE: November 2 – International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists
• One journalist killed every four days in 2022-23, most cases unpunished: UN
• RSF condemns Israeli accusations and calls for protection for Al Jazeera journalists

For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.

That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.

That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.

While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.

Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.

In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.

Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.

These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.

Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.

In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.

Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.

In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.

One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.

What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.

CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”

Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.

After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”

Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.

Banned from Gaza
Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.

This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.

Don’t hold your breath.

Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.

Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.

That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.

Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.

The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.

The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.

In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.

But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.

The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.

After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.

The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.

Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.

An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.

Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.

Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.

That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.

As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”

Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.

Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.

According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.

Whistleblowing journalists
Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.

Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.

According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.

She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.

Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.

Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.

An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.

Upside-down values
These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.

Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.

For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”

Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.

It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.

With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.

Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.

And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.

But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.

Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.

It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.

It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.

Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.

Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.

Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.

Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.

The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.

Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.

Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.

Their electronic devices were seized too.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.

It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.

The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.

The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.

This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.

Once again the world is being turned upside down.

Echoes from history
The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.

This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.

His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.

Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.

The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.

Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.

A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.

Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.

The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.

The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.

That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

Democracy Now!

This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I am Amy Goodman, with Juan González:

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post newspapers are facing mounting backlash after the papers’ publishers announced no presidential endorsements would be made this year. The LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and The Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

National Public Radio (NPR) is reporting more than 200,000 people have cancelled their Washington Post subscriptions, and counting.

• READ MORE: Two of the US’s biggest newspapers have refused to endorse a presidential candidate. This is how democracy dies
• Other US presidential elections reports

A number of journalists have also resigned, including the editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, who wrote, “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”

Veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein have also resigned from the L.A. Times editorial board.

At The Washington Post, David Hoffman and Molly Roberts both resigned on Monday from the Post editorial board. Michele Norris also resigned as a Washington Post columnist, and Robert Kagan resigned as editor-at-large.

David Hoffman, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his series “Annals of Autocracy,” wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”

David Hoffman joins us now, along with former Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza.

David Hoffman, let’s begin with you. Explain why you left The Washington Post editorial board. Oh, and at the same time, congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize.

DAVID HOFFMAN: Thank you very much.

I worked for 12 years writing editorials in which I said over and over again, “We cannot be silent in the face of dictatorship, not anywhere.” And I wrote about dissidents who were imprisoned for speaking out.

And I felt that I couldn’t write another editorial decrying silence if we were going to be silent in the face of Trump’s autocracy. And I feel very, very strongly that the campaign has exposed his intention to be an autocrat.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, is there any precedent for the publisher of The Washington Post overruling their own editorial board?

DAVID HOFFMAN: Yeah, there’s lots of precedent. It’s entirely within the right of the publisher and the owner to do this. Previous owners have often told the editorial board what to say, because we are the voice of the institution and its owner. So, there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s wrong here is the timing. If they had made this decision early in the year and announced, as a principle, they don’t want to issue endorsements, nobody would have even blinked. A lot of papers don’t. People have rightly questioned whether they actually have any impact.

What matters here was, we are right on the doorstep of the most consequential election in our lifetimes. To pull the plug on the endorsement, to go silent against Trump days before the election, that to me was just unconscionable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mariel Garza, could you talk about the situation at the LA Times and your reaction when you heard of the owner’s decision?

MARIEL GARZA: Certainly. It was a long conversation over the course of many weeks. We presented our proposal to endorse Kamala Harris. And, of course, there was — to us, there was no question that we would endorse her. We spent nine years talking about the dangers of Trump, called him unfit in 5 million ways, and Kamala Harris is somebody that we know. She’s a California elected official.

We’ve had a lot of conversations with her. We’ve seen her career evolved. We were going to — we were going to endorse her. And there was no indication that we were going to suddenly shift to a neutral position, certainly not within a few weeks or months of the election.

At first, we didn’t get a clear answer — sounds like it’s the same situation that happened at The Washington Post — until we pressed for one. We presented an outline with — these are the points we’re going to make — and an argument for why not only was it important for us, an editorial board whose mission is to speak truth to power, to stand up to tyranny — our readers expect it.

We’re a very liberal paper. There is no — there is no question what the editorial board believes, that Donald Trump should not be president ever.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to —

MARIEL GARZA: So, it was perplexing. It was mystifying. It was — go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Mariel, I wanted to get your response to the daughter of the LA Times owner. On Saturday, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika Soon-Shiong posted a message online suggesting that her father’s decision was linked to Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Nika wrote, “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process.

“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she wrote.

Her father, Patrick Soon-Shiong, later disputed her claim, saying that she has no role at the Los Angeles Times. Mariel Garza, your response?

MARIEL GARZA: Look, I really don’t know what to say, because I have — that was — if that was the case, it was never communicated to us. I do not know what goes on in the conversation in the Soon-Shiong household. I know that she is not — she does not participate in deliberations of the editorial board, as far as I know. I’ve never spoken to her.

We all know how she feels about Gaza, because she’s a prolific tweeter. So, I really can’t say. And this is part of the bigger problem, is we were never given a reason for why we were being silent.

If there was a reason — say it was Israel — we could have explained that to readers. Instead, we remain silent. And that’s — I mean, this is not a time in American history where anybody can remain silent or neutral.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Hoffman, this whole issue has been raised by some critics of Jeff Bezos that his company has a lot of business with the US government, and whether that had any impact on Bezos’s decision. I’m wondering your thoughts.

DAVID HOFFMAN: I can’t be inside his mind. His company does have big business, and he’s acknowledged it’s a complicating factor in his ownership. But I can’t really understand why he made this decision, and I don’t think it’s been very well explained. His explanation published today was that he wants sort of more civic quiet, and he thought an endorsement would add to the sense of anxiety and the poisonous atmosphere.

But I disagree with that. I think, like in the LA Times, I think readers have come to expect us to be a voice of reason, and they’ve looked to endorsements at least for some clarity. So, frankly, I also feel that we’re still lacking an explanation.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, you have subtitle, the slogan of The Washington Post, of course, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It’s being mocked all over social media. One person wrote, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend.”

David Hoffman, your response to that? But also, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your series “Annals of Autocracy,” and you talk about digital billionaires, as well, and what this means. How does this fit into your investigations?

DAVID HOFFMAN: You know, I would hope everybody would understand and acknowledge that we’ve done a lot of good for democracy and human rights. You know, I’ve had governments react sharply to a single editorial. When we call them out for imprisoning dissidents, it matters that we are very widely read.

And that’s another reason why I feel this was a big mistake, because we actually were on a path, for decades, of championing democracy and human rights as an institution.

And, you know, I have to tell you, I wrote a book in Russia about oligarchs. I understand how difficult it is when you have a lively and independent group of journalists. And ownership really matters. And, you know, we’re not just another widget company.

This is actually a group of very, very deep-thinking and oftentimes very aggressive people that have a desire to change the world. That’s the kind of journalism that The Washington Post has sponsored and engaged in.

In 2023, we published a series of editorials that took a look deep inside how China, Russia, Burma, you know, other places — how these autocracies function. One of the findings was that many of these dictatorships are using technology to clamp down on dissent, even things as tiny as a single tweet.

Young people, young college students are being thrown in prison in Cuba, in Belarus, in Vietnam. And I documented these to show how this technology actually isn’t becoming a force for freedom, but it’s being turned on its head by dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Hoffman, Washington Post reporter, stepped down from the Post editorial board when they refused to endorse a presidential candidate; Mariel Garza, LA Times editorials editor who just resigned.

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

This programme is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

INTERVIEW: John Menadue talks with Michael Lester

Michael Lester: Hello again listeners to Community Radio Northern Beaches Community Voices and also the Pearls and Irritations podcast. I’m Michael Lester.

Our guest today is the publisher and founder of the Pearls and Irritations Public Policy online journal, the celebrated John Menadue, with whom we’ll be so pleased to have a discussion today. John has a long and high profile experience in both the public service, for which he’s been awarded the Order of Australia and also in business.

As a public servant, he was secretary of a number of departments over the years, prime minister and cabinet under a couple of different prime ministers, immigration and ethnic affairs, special minister of state and the Department of Trade and also Ambassador to Japan.

• READ MORE: Other Pearls and Irritations articles

And in his private sector career, he was a general manager at News Corp and the chief executive of Qantas. These are just among many of his considerable activities.

These days, as I say, he’s a publisher, public commentator, writer, and we’re absolutely delighted to welcome you here to Radio Northern Beaches and the P&I podcast, John.

John Menadue: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for the welcome and for what you’ve had to say about Pearls and Irritations. My wife says that she’s the Pearl and I’m the Irritation.

ML: You launched, I think, P&I, what, 2013 or 2011; anyway, you’ve been going a long while. And I noticed the other day you observed that you’d published some 20,000 items on Pearls and Irritations to do with public policy. That’s an amazing achievement itself as an independent media outlet in Australia, isn’t it?

JM: I’m quite pleased with it and so is Susie, my wife. We started 13 years ago and we did everything. I used to write all the stories and Susie handled the technical, admin, financial matters, but it’s grown dramatically since then. We now contract some of the work to people that can help us in editorial, in production and IT. It’s achieving quite a lot of influence among ministers, politicians, journalists and other opinion leaders in the community.

We’re looking now at what the future holds. I’m 89 and Susie, my wife, is not in good health. So we’re looking at new governance arrangements, a public company with outside directors so that we can continue Pearls and Irritations well into the future.

This is one of your themes and motivations with Pearls and Irritations as a public policy journal, isn’t it? That our mainstream media perhaps don’t do the job they might do in covering significant issues of public policy?

JM: That’s our hope and intention, but I’m afraid some of them are just incorrigible. They in fact act as stenographers to powerful interests.

It’s quite a shame what mainstream media is serving up today, propaganda for the United States, so focused on America.Occasionally we get nonsense about the British royal family or some irrelevant feature like that.

But we’re very badly served. Our media shows very little interest in our own region. It is ignorant and prejudiced against China. It is not concerned about our relations with Indonesia, with the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam.

It’s all focused on the United States.We’re seeing it on an enormous scale now with the US elections. Even the ABC has a Planet America programme.

It’s so much focused on America as if we’re an island parked off New York. We are being Americanised in so many areas and particularly in our media.

ML: What has led to this state of affairs in the way that mainstream media treats major public policy issues these days? It hasn’t always been like that or has it?

JM: We’ve been a country that’s been frightened of our region, the countries where we have to make our future. And we’ve turned first to the United Kingdom as a protector. That ended in tears in Singapore.

And now we turn to the United States to look after us in this dangerous world, rather than making our own way as an independent country in our own region. That fear of our region, racism, white Australia, yellow peril all feature in Australia and in our media.

But when we had good, strong leaders, for example, Malcolm Fraser on refugees, he gave leadership and our role in the region.

Gough Whitlam did it also. If we have strong leadership, we can break from our focus on the United States at the expense of our own region. In the end, we’ve got to decide that as we live in this region, we’ve got to prosper in this region.

Security in our region, not from our region. We can do it, but I’m afraid that we’ve been retreating from Asia dreadfully over the last two or three decades. I thought when we had a Labor government, things would be different, but they’re not.

We are still frightened of our own region and embracing at every opportunity, the United States.

ML: Another theme of the many years of publishing Pearls and Irritations is that you are concerned to rebuild some degree of public confidence and trust that has been lost in the political system and that you seek to provide a platform for good policy discussion with the emphasis being on public policy. How has the public policy process been undermined or become so narrow minded if that’s one way of describing it?

JM: Contracting out work to private contractors, the big four accounting firms, getting advice, and not trusting the public service has meant that the quality of our public service has declined considerably. That has to be rebuilt so we get better policy development.

Ministers have been responsible, particularly Scott Morrison, for downgrading the public service and believing somehow or other that better advice can be obtained in the private sector.

Another factor has been the enormous growth in the power of lobbyists for corporate Australia and for foreign companies as well. Ministers have become beholden to pressure from powerful lobby groups.

One particular example, with which I’m quite familiar is in the health field. We are never likely to have real improvements in Medicare, for example, unless the government is prepared to take on the power of lobbyists — the providers, the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies in Australia.

But it’s not just in health where lobbyists are causing so much damage. The power of lobbyists has discredited the role of governments that are seduced by powerful interests rather than serving the community.

The media have just entrenched this problem. Governments are criticised at every opportunity. Australia can be served by the media taking a more positive view about the importance of good policy development and not getting sidetracked all the time about some trivial personal political issue.

The media publish the handouts of the lobbyists, whether it’s the health industry or whether it’s in the fossil fuel industries. These are the main factors that have contributed to the lack of confidence and the lack of trust in good government in Australia.

ML: A particular editorial focus that’s evident in Pearls and Irritations is promoting, I think in your words, a peaceful dialogue and engagement with China. Why is this required and why do you put it forward as a particularly important part of what you see as the mission of your Pearls and Irritations public policy journal?

JM; China, is our largest market and will continue to be so. There is a very jaundiced view, particularly from the United States, which we then copy, that China is a great threat. It’s not a threat to Australia and it’s not a threat to the United States homeland.

But it is to a degree a threat, a competitive threat to the United States in economy and trade. America didn’t worry about China when it was poor, but now that it’s strong militarily, economically and in technology, America is very concerned and feels that its future, its own leadership, its hegemony in the world is being contested.

Unfortunately, Australia has allowed itself to be drawn into the American contest with China.  It’s one provocation after another. If it’s not within China itself, it’s on Taiwan, human rights in Hong Kong. Every opportunity is found by the United States to provoke China, if possible, and lead it into war.

I think, frankly, China will be more careful than that.

China’s problem is that it’s successful. And that’s what America cannot accept. By comparison, China does not make the military threat to other countries that the United States presents.

America is the most violent, aggressive country in the world. The greatest threat to peace in the world is the United States and we’re seeing that particularly now expressed in Israel and in Gaza.

But there’s a history. America’s almost always at war and has been since its independence in 1776. By contrast, China doesn’t have that sort of record and history. It is certainly concerned about security on its borders, and it has borders with 14 countries.

But it doesn’t project its power like the US. It doesn’t bomb other countries like the United States. It doesn’t have military bases surrounding the United States.

The United States has about 800 bases around the world. It’s not surprising that China feels threatened by what the United States is doing. And until the United States comes to a sensible, realistic view about China and deals with it politically, I think they’re going to make continual problems for us.

We have this dichotomy that China is our major trading partner but it’s seen by many as a strategic threat. I think that is a mistake.

ML: But what about your views about the public policy process underlying Australia’s policy in reaching the positions that we’re taking vis-a-vis China?

JM: There are several reasons for it, but I think the major one is that Australian governments, the previous government and now this one, takes the advice of intelligence agencies rather than the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Our intelligence agencies are part of Five Eyes. Of the international intelligence which comes to Australian agencies, 90 percent comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we’ve had the colonisation of our intelligence agencies and they’re the ones that the Australian government listens to.

Very senior people in those agencies have direct access to the Prime Minister. He listens to them rather than to Penny Wong or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. On most public issues involving China, the Department of Foreign Affairs has become a wallflower.

It’s a great tragedy because so much of our future in the region depends on good diplomacy with China, with the ASEAN, with the countries of our region.

Those intelligence agencies in Australia, together with American funded, military funded organisations such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have the ear of governments. They’ve also got the ear of the media.

Stories are leaked to the media all the time from those agencies in order to heighten our fear of the region. The Americanisation of Australia is widespread. But our intelligence agencies have been Americanised as well, and they’re leading us down a very dangerous path.

ML: I’m speaking with our guest today on Reno Northern Beaches Community Voices and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast with the publisher of Pearls and Irritations Public Policy Journal, John Menadue, distinguished Australian public servant and businessman.

John, again, it’s one thing to talk about that, but governments, when they change, and we’ve had a change of government recently, very often, as I’m sure you know from personal experience, have the opportunity and do indeed change their advisors and adopt different policies, and one might have expected this to happen.

Why didn’t we see a change of the guard like we saw a change of government?

JM: I think this government is timid on almost everything. It was timid from day one on administrative arrangements, departmental arrangements, heads of departments.

For example, there was no change made to dismantle the Department of Home Affairs with Michael Pezzullo. That should have happened on day one, but it didn’t happen.

Concerns we’ve had in migration, the role of foreign affairs and intelligence with all those intelligence agencies gathered together in one department has been very bad for Australia.

Very few changes were made in the leadership of our intelligence agencies, the Office of National Assessments, in ASIO. The same advice has been continued. In almost every area you can look at, the government has been timid, unprepared to take on vested interests, lobbyists, and change departments to make them more attuned to what the government wants to do.

But the government doesn’t want to upset anyone. And as a result, we’re having a continuation of badly informed ministers and departments that have really not been effectively changed to meet the requirements and needs of, what I thought was a reforming government.

ML: In that context, AUKUS and the nuclear submarine deal might be perhaps a case in point of the broader issues and points you’re making. How would you characterise the nature of the public policy process and decision behind AUKUS? How were the decisions made and in what manner?

JM: By political appointees and confidants of Morrison. There’s been no public discussion. There’s been no public statement by Morrison or by Albanese about AUKUS — its history, why we’re doing it.

It’s been left to briefings of journalists and others. I think it’s disgraceful what’s happened in that area. It’s time the Australian government spelled out to us what it all means, but it’s not going to do it. Because I believe the case is so threadbare that it’s not game to put it to the public test.

And so we’re continuing in this ludicrous arrangement, this fiscal calamity, which Morrison inflicted on the Albanese government which it hasn’t been game to contest.

My own view is that frankly, AUKUS will never happen. It is so absurd — the delay, the cost, the failure of submarine construction or the delays in the United States, the problems of the submarine construction and maintenance in the United Kingdom.

For all those sorts of reasons, I don’t think it’ll really happen. Unfortunately, we’re going to waste a lot of money and a lot of time. I don’t think the Department of Defence could run any major project, certainly not a project like this.

Defence has been unsuccessful in the frigate and numerous other programmes. Our Department of Defence really is not up to the job and that among other reasons gives me reason to believe, and hope frankly, that AUKUS will collapse under its own stupidity.

But what I think is of more concern is the real estate, which we are freely leasing to the Americans. We had it first with the Marines in Darwin. We have it also coming now with US B-52 aircraft based out of Tindal in the Northern Territory and the submarine base in Perth, Western Australia.

These bases are being made available to the United States with very little control by Australia. The government carries on with nonsense about how our sovereignty will be protected.

In fact, it won’t be protected. If there’s any difficulties, for example, over a war with China over Taiwan, and the Americans are involved, there is no way Americans will consult with us about whether they can use nuclear armed vessels out of Tindal, for example.

The Americans will insist that Pine Gap continues to operate. So we are locked in through ceding so much of our real estate and the sovereignty that goes with it.

Penny Wong has been asked about American aircraft out of Tindal, carrying nuclear weapons and she says to us, sorry but the Americans won’t confirm or deny what they do.

Good heavens, this is our territory. This is our sovereignty. And we won’t even ask the Americans operating out of Tindal, whether they’re carrying nuclear weapons.

Back in the days of Malcolm Fraser, he made a statement to the Parliament insisting that no vessels or aircraft carrying nuclear weapons or ships carrying nuclear weapons could access Australian ports or operate over Australia without the permission of the Australian government.

And now Penny Wong says, we won’t ask. You can do what you like. We know the US won’t confirm or deny.

When it came to the Solomon Islands, a treaty that the Solomons negotiated with China on strategic and defence matters, Penny Wong was very upset about this secret agreement. There should be transparency, she warned.

But that’s small fry, compared with the fact that the Australian government will allow United States aircraft to operate out of Tindal without the Australian government knowing whether they are carrying nuclear weapons. I think that’s outrageous.

ML: Notwithstanding many of the very technical and economic and other discussions around the nuclear submarine’s acquisition, it does seem that politically, at least, and not least from the media presentation of our policy position that we’re very clearly signing up with our US allies against contingency attacks on Taiwan that we would be committed to take a part in and we’re also moving very closely, to well the phrase is interoperability, with the US forces and equipment but also personnel too.

You mentioned earlier, intelligence personnel and I believe there’s a lot of US personnel in the Department of Defence too?

JM: That’s right. It’s just another example of Americanisation which is reflected in our intelligence agencies, Department of Defence, interchangeability of our military forces, the fusion of our military or particularly our Navy with the United States. It’s all becoming one fused enterprise with the United States.

And in any difficulties, we would not be able, as far as I can see, to disengage from what the United States is doing. And we would be particularly vulnerable because of the AUKUS submarines. That’s if they ever come to anything. Because the AUKUS submarines, we are told, would operate off the Chinese coast to attack Chinese submarines or somehow provide intelligence for the Americans and for us.

These submarines will not be nuclear armed, which means that in the event of a conflict, we would have no bargaining or no counter to China. We’d be the weak link in the alliance with the United States.

China will not be prepared to strike the mainland United States for fear of massive retaliation. We are the weak link with Pine Gap and other real estate that I mentioned. We would be making ourselves much more vulnerable by this association with the United States.

Those AUKUS submarines will provide no deterrence for us, but make us more vulnerable if a conflict arises in which we are effectively part of the US military operation.

ML: How would you characterise the mainstream media’s presentation and treatment of these issues?

JM: The mainstream media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda. And that American propaganda is pushed out through the legacy media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the news agencies, Fox News which in turn are influenced by the military/ business complex which Eisenhower warned us about years ago.

The power of those groups with the CIA and the influence that they have, means that they overwhelm our media. That’s reflected particularly in The Australian and News Corporation publications.

I don’t know how some of those journalists can hold their heads. They’ve been on the drip feed of America for so long. They cannot see a world that is not dominated and led by the United States.

I’m hoping that over time, Pearls and Irritations and other independent media will grow and provide a more balanced view about Australia’s role in our region and in our own development.

We need to keep good relations with the United States. They’re an important player, but I think that we are unnecessarily risking our future by throwing our lot almost entirely in with the United States.

Minister for Defence, Richard Marles is leading the Americanisation of our military. I think Penny Wong is to some extent trying to pull him back. But unfortunately so much of the leadership of Australia in defence, in the media, is part and parcel of the mistaken United States view of the world.

ML: What sort of voices are we not hearing in the media or in Australia on this question?

JM: It’s not going to change, Michael. I can’t see it changing with Lachlan Murdoch in charge. I think it’s getting worse, if possible, within News Corporation. It’s a very, very difficult and desperate situation where we’re being served so poorly.

ML: Is there a strong independent media and potential for voices through independent media in Australia?

JM: No, we haven’t got one. The best hope at the side, of course, is the ABC and SBS public broadcasters, but they’ve been seduced as well by all things American.

We’ve seen that particularly in recent months over the conflict in Gaza. The ABC and SBS heavily favour Israel. It is shameful.

They’re still the best hope of the side, but they need more money. They’re getting a little bit more from the government, but I think they are sadly lacking in leadership and proper understanding of what the role of a public broadcaster should be.

I don’t think there’s a quick answer to any of this. And I hope that we can extricate ourselves without too much damage in the future. Our media has a great responsibility and must be held responsible for the damage that it is causing in Australia.

ML: Well, look, thank you very much, John Menadue, for joining us on Radio Northern Beaches and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast. John Menadue, publisher, founder, editor-in-chief of, for the last 13 years, the public policy journal Pearls and Irritations. We’ve been discussing the role of the mainstream media, independent media, in the public policy processes too in Australia, and particularly in the context of international relations and in this case our relationships with the US and China.

Thank you so much John for taking the time and for sharing your thoughts with us here today. Thanks for joining us John.

JM: Thank you. Let’s hope for better days.

John Menadue, founder and publisher of  Pearls and Irritations public policy journal has had a senior professional career in the media, public service and airlines. In 1985, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for public service. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Adelaide in recognition of his significant and lifelong contribution to Australian society. This transcript of the Pearls and Irritations podcast on 10 August 2024 is republished with permission. 

Media publisher NZME has come under fire for admitting it used artificial intelligence to create editorials that ran in the Weekend Herald and other publications, with a media commentator saying it “can only damage trust”.

RNZ’s Mediawatch revealed late yesterday that NZME had used AI to write an editorial about “Who the All Blacks should pick to play at centre” that ran first in the Weekend Herald on July 20 and another piece about MMA professional Israel Adesanya.

A statement from NZME editor-in-chief Murray Kirkness said AI was used in a way that fell short of its standards and “more journalistic rigour would have been beneficial”.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MIDDAY REPORT: NZME admits AI editorial lacked journalistic rigour
• Herald deploys AI for editorial, admits lack of rigour — Mediawatch

NZME’s standards don’t mandate disclosure but do say stories should be attributed to “the author and/or the creator/provider of the material” in accordance with the company’s Code of Ethics.

A co-author of the annual AUT Trust in News report, Dr Greg Treadwell, told Midday Report it was a poor experiment in AI use.

“I think New Zealanders have to be realistic about the fact AI is going to work its way into the production of news, but I think the Herald has kind of admitted this was a pretty poor experiment in it for a number of reasons, I think.”

Treadwell said the role of the editorial in any major news publication was to be an opinion leader.

‘Not world-shattering’
“I don’t know how many of your readers have actually gone back to have a look at the editorial that the Herald published, but it was sort of a generalist round-up of the arguments for and against Reiko Ioane at centre in the All Blacks back line — not a world-shattering issue, but a really good example of how AI doesn’t really, can’t really do what an editorial should do, which is to take a position on something.

“If you ask it to take a position, it will, and if you ask it to take another position, it will take that position.

“What is lacking here, even if you ask [AI] to take positions, is the original argument we would look to our senior journalists to put into the public domain for us about important issues.”

Public trust in the media was falling and media companies needed to reassure the public it could be trusted, he said.

“When the public hears that AI is being used in places — and perhaps most importantly here is that it wasn’t acknowledged that was being used to create this editorial — then that can only damage trust.

“I think there’s a lot of issues here including that AI can be incredibly useful for data analysis and other things in journalism, but we just have to be incredibly transparent about how we’re using it.”

‘Another world first’
Former Herald editor-in-chief and prominent media commentator Tim Murphy joked on social media the editorial may “have achieved another world first for NZ”.

On the upside, this has got to have achieved another world first for NZ https://t.co/e6UvHMRwXg

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) July 31, 2024

The revelation was also panned by some competitor publications, with the National Business Review’s official X account noting that “NBR journalists are intelligent. Not artificial.”

NBR journalists are intelligent. Not artificial.
Just saying.https://t.co/aUJfld3taf

— NBR (@TheNBR) August 1, 2024

RNZ also approached New Zealand Rugby to ask their thoughts on NZME using AI to analyse the All Black team selection.

In a statement, NZR said it recognised the need for media organisations to have well-established editorial policies and standards.

“These ensure high quality sports journalism and play an important role in telling rugby’s stories.

“NZR is satisfied that the New Zealand Herald has made the appropriate steps to amend the story in question.”

“The Herald and other NZME publications use AI to improve our journalism. In some cases, we also create stories entirely using AI tools,” says an explanatory article headlined NZME, NZ Herald and our use of AI.

“We believe that smart use of AI allows us to publish better journalism. We remain committed to our Code of Ethics and to the integrity of our journalism, regardless of whether or not we use AI tools to help with the production or processing of articles.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Reporting Israel’s war on Gaza has become the greatest credibility challenge for journalists and media of our times. The latest assassination of an Al Jazeera photojournalist yesterday while documenting atrocities has prompted a leading analyst to appeal to global journalists to “take a stand” to protect the profession.

The killing of Hamza Dahdoud, the 27-year-old eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, along with freelancer Mustafa Thuraya, has taken the death toll of Palestinian journalists to 109 (according to Al Jazeera sources while global media freedom watchdogs report slightly lower figures).

Emotional responses and a wave of condemnation has thrown the spotlight on the toll faced by reporters and their families.

• READ MORE: War on Gaza: The voices that really matter are the journalists on the ground
• Israeli military accused of targeting journalists and their families in Gaza
• Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide
• This Israel has no future in the Middle East – Marwan Bishara

Wael Dahdouh, 52, lost his wife, daughter, grandson and 15-year-old son on October 25 in an earlier Israeli air raid that hit the house they were sheltering in. After mourning for several hours, Dahdouh senior was back on the job documenting the war.

Just under 20 months ago, Al Jazeera’s best known correspondent, Shireen Abu Akleh, was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper while reporting on the Occupied West Bank on 11 May 2022 in what Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned by saying this “systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous.”

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists protested about the killing of Hamza Dahdoud and Thuraya, saying it “must be independently investigated, and those behind their deaths must be held accountable”.

But few journalists would accept that this is anything other a targeted killing, as most of the deaths of Palestinian journalists in the latest Gaza war have been – a war on Palestinian journalism in an attempt to suppress the truth.

‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’
Certainly, Al Jazeera’s Palestinian-Israeli political affairs analyst and Marwan Bishara, who was born in Nazareth, has no doubts.

Speaking on the 24-hour Qatari world news channel, with at least 22,835 people killed in Gaza – 70 percent of them women and children — he said: “Nowhere is safe in Gaza and no journalists are safe . . . That tells us something.

“Killing the messenger”: Marwan Bishara’s interview with Al Jazeera — more tampering over the message? There is nothing “sensitive” in this clip.

“It is understood they are war journalists. But still the fact that more than 100 journalists were killed within three months is breaking yet another record in terms of killing children, and destruction of hospitals and schools, and the killing of United Nations staff.

“And now with 109 journalists killed this definitely requires a certain stand on the part of our colleagues around the world. Not just in a higher up institution.

“I am talking about journalists around the world – those who came to cover the World Cup in Doha for labour rights, or whatever. Those who are shedding tears in the Ukraine, those who are trying to cover Xinjiang in China [persecution of the Uyghur people], those who are claiming there are genocides happening right, left and centre – from China to Ukraine, to elsewhere.

“The same journalists who see in plain sight what is happening in Gaza should – regardless if we disagree on Israel’s motives, or Israel’s objectives in this war – must agree that the protection of journalists and their families is indispensable for our profession. And for their profession,” Bishara said.

“Journalists, and journalism associations and syndicates around the world – especially in those countries with influence on Israel, as in Europe, or the United States; journalists need to take a stand on what is going on in Gaza.

New investigations on U.S. and UK media bias have exposed chilling double standards by Western media when it comes to reporting on killings of Israelis compared to killings of Palestinians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uQ0I7cT340

— AJ+ (@ajplus) January 10, 2024

‘Cannot go unanswered’
“This cannot continue and go on unanswered. What about them?

“They’re going to be from various media outlets deploying journalists in war-stricken areas. They will have to call for the defence of journalists and their lives and their protection.

“This cannot go on like this unabated in Gaza,” Bishara added, as Israeli defence officials have warned the fighting could go on for another year.

The South African genocide case filed against Israel in the International Court of Justice seeking an interim injunction for a ceasefire and due for a hearing later this week could pose the best chance for an end to the war.

Bishara has partially blamed Western news networks for failing to report the war on Gaza accurately and fairly, a criticism he has made in the past and his articles about Israel are insightful and damning.

His call for a stand by journalists has in fact been echoed in some quarters where “media bias” has been challenged, opening divisions among media groups about fairness and balance that have become the most bitter since the climate change and covid pandemic debates when media “deniers” and “bothsideism” threatened to undermine science.

In November, more than 1500 journalists from scores of US media organisations signed an open letter calling for integrity in Western media’s coverage of “Israeli atrocities against Palestinians”.

Israel has blocked foreign press entry, heavily restricted telecommunications and bombed press offices. Some 50 media headquarters in Gaza have been hit in the past month.

Israeli forces explicitly warned newsrooms they “cannot guarantee” the safety of their employees from airstrikes. Taken with a decades-long pattern of lethally targeting journalists, Israel’s actions show wide scale suppression of speech.

In the United Kingdom, eight BBC journalists wrote an open letter in late November to Al Jazeera accusing the British broadcaster of bias in its coverage of Gaza.

A 2300-word letter claimed that the BBC had a “double standard” and was failing to tell the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately, “investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage”.

What is next? He lost everyone!!! Literally!!! #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1LVh4eruIt

— Palestine News (@palestine) January 7, 2024

In Australia, another open letter by scores of journalists and the national media union MEAA called for “integrity, transparency and rigour” in the coverage of the war and joined the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), RSF and others condemning the Israeli attacks on journalists and journalism.

Leading Australian newspaper editors of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and the Nine network hit back by banning staff who had signed the letter. According to the independent Crikey, a senior Nine staff journalist resigned and readers were angrily cancelling their newspaper subscriptions over the ban.

Crikey later exposed many editors and journalists who had made junket trips to Israel and is currently keeping an inventory of these “influenced” media people — at least 77 have been named so far.

In The Daily Blog, editor Martyn Bradbury has also questioned how many New Zealand journalists have also been influenced by Israeli media massaging. Bradbury wrote:

“If Israel has sunk that much time and resource charming Australian journalists and politicians, the question has to be asked, [has] the pro-Israel lobby sent NZ journalists and politicians on these junkets and if they have, who are they?”

He wrote to the NZ Press Gallery, the “journalist union” and media companies requesting a list of names.

Pacific journalists ought to be also added to the list.

I have just returned from a two-month trip in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Australia. After a steady diet of comprehensive and well backgrounded reporting from global news channels such as TRT World News and Al Jazeera (which contrasted sharply in quality, depth and fairness with stereotypical Western coverage such as from BBC and CNN), I was stunned by the blatant bias of much of the Australian news media, particularly News Corp titles such as The Australian and The Advertiser in Adelaide.

Some examples of the bias and my commentaries can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

A pithy indictment of much of the Western reporting — including in New Zealand — can be read in the Middle East Eye and other publications.

Exposing much of the Israeli propaganda and fabricated claims since October 7 (and even from time of The Nakba in 1948), award-winning columnist Peter Osborne wrote:

“I am haunted by one other consideration. It is not just that Western commentators, columnists and chat show hosts often don’t know what they are talking about. It’s not even that they pretend they do.

“It’s the comfort of their lives. They sit in warm, pleasant studios where they earn six-figure sums for their opinions. They take no risks and convey no truths.”

A polar opposite from the Gaza carnage and the risks that courageous Palestinian journalists face daily to bear witness. They are an inspiration to the rest of us.

Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.

Recently, there was a serious revelation that some wire service reports were edited, without attribution, by an individual employee of our national broadcaster, RNZ.

Now, let’s examine the way I composed the above sentence.

I included the word “serious” to signal to readers that this news is of significant importance. The reason is that I believe there is already extensive frustration at media coverage of news — and therefore anything that erodes trust in our major media should be taken seriously.

• READ MORE: Mediawatch: Further fallout as RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’
• Other RNZ inquiry reports
• Other Palestine reports

Later in the sentence, I used the word “edited”. Initially, I had used the word “altered” but I made a conscious decision to change it to “edited”. I did this because I thought the word “altered” might suggest a higher type of wrongdoing — one that could be linked to fraud and criminality, such as being paid by a foreign agent to alter documents.

There is no evidence that this was the case at RNZ. The word “edited” suggests the use of some sort of journalistic judgment which, in this particular case, regardless of the factuality or falsehood of the edits, were clearly unethical because they were unauthorised and undeclared.

The reference to “an individual employee” was to ensure that other journalists at RNZ, and the organisation as a whole, were not implicated in the revelation. If I had thought RNZ was systematically biased in its reporting, I probably would have just written that RNZ had been found to be altering wire service news.

So my choice of words to form the first sentence of this column was informed by my personal perspectives, as well as the impression I hoped to create in the minds of those reading it.

The subject of this column isn’t about what happened at RNZ. We will be informed of this, in time, when the result of the ongoing inquiry is made public.

Unbiased reporting?
The question I intend to explore here is if there is such a thing as unbiased reporting.

I went back to university later in life to study journalism because it was important to me to understand how the news was produced. My course placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of objectivity and impartiality as ideal standards of news reporting, without much discussion about the limits of achieving such unrealistic standards.

News is produced by reporters and shaped by editors who cannot help but inject their own perspectives and personal experiences into the final product. Even when reporting live from the scene, journalists often have to form a judgment as to what is newsworthy, and so depending on who is reporting the story, the information we receive may alter.

In general, the idea of “unbiased”, “objective” or “neutral” reporting cannot be entirely divorced from the editorial guides journalists use to determine what information to report, and also what they believe is the truth.

Omitting context or the decision to exclude some key words can, in some instances, produce a misleading report.

For instance, my interest in the Palestinian cause has meant that I notice the journalistic language used in reporting on Palestine. I consider that Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) should always be referred to as “occupied Gaza” and “occupied West Bank” because this is their legal status under international law.

But in many articles about Palestine, the word “occupied” is often dropped even though its use matters because it gives relevant context to reporting of political and military events there.

#Mediawatch: Further #fallout as #RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’ #CafePacific #AsiaPacificReport #rnznews #PacificMediaWatch #rnzinquiry #kremlingarbage #RussiaUkraineWar #media #mediacredibility #newsedits @USPWansolwara https://t.co/waIGzEUdwE pic.twitter.com/wfzDEFZjdi

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 18, 2023

Impartial presentation
Some journalistic codes refer to “balanced” and “fair” reporting. The idea here is that, where there is controversy, there should be an impartial presentation of all facts as well as all substantial opinions relating to it.

A fair report, it is said, should avoid giving equal footing to truths and mistruths and should provide factual context to any inaccurate or misleading public statement.

In recent years, The New York Times has used a series of articles known as Explainers to, as they describe it, “demystify thorny topics”.

Stuff’s Explained follows a similar format to help deconstruct topics that are complex and challenging to understand.

The notion of bias in news writing has become the most common criticism of the media.

Ultimately, the solution to increasing trust in journalism lies in transparency and disclosure of the standards, judgments and systems used to produce and edit news. It is therefore right that RNZ has announced an external review of its processes for the editing of online stories.

But there should also be a mind shift in our understanding of the notions of unbiased and objective reporting — namely that these notions have always existed and continue to operate within power dynamics that give privilege to certain perspectives.

The best approach, therefore, is to always allow for an element of doubt — and only believe something to be true just so long as our active efforts to disprove it have been unsuccessful.

Donna Miles-Mojab is an Iranian New Zealander interested in justice and human rights issues. She lives in Christchurch and works as a freelance journalist and a columnist for The Press. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

The RNZ board is meeting tonight to begin setting up an independent review on how pro-Russian sentiment was inserted into a number of its online stories.

An RNZ digital journalist has been placed on leave after it came to light he had changed copy from news agency Reuters on the war in Ukraine to include pro-Russian views.

Since Friday, hundreds of stories published by RNZ have been audited, and 16 Reuters stories and one BBC item had to be corrected, with chief executive Paul Thompson saying more would be checked “with a fine-tooth comb”.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘I think it’s really important that we preserve the editorial independence of an institution like RNZ’ – PM Chris Hipkins
• LISTEN TO RNZ NINE TO NOON: ‘I am gutted. It’s painful,’ says RNZ chief executive
• Prime Minister responds to questions on RNZ investigation into pro-Russian editing
• Other RNZ inquiry reports

The journalist told RNZ’s Checkpoint he had subbed stories that way for a number of years and nobody had queried it. Thompson said those comments appeared to be about the staffer’s overall role as a sub-editor.

Board chairperson Dr Jim Mather said the public’s trust had been eroded by revelations and it was going to take a lot of work to come back from what had happened.

“We see ourselves as guardians of a taonga and that taonga being the 98 years of history that RNZ has in terms of trusted public media and high standards of excellent journalism and so it is fair to say we are extremely disappointed,” he told RNZ’s Checkpoint on Monday.

“We need to demonstrate that we are prepared to review every aspect of what has occurred to actually start the restoration process in terms of confidence in RNZ.”

The board would discuss who will run the investigation and its terms of reference, and would make a decision “very soon”.

Currency is trust
“The role the board is going to take is we are going to appoint the panel of trusted individuals, experienced journalists, those that do have editorial experience to undertake the review. This is going to be done completely separate from the other work being undertaken by management,” he said.

Dr Mather said the currency of the public broadcaster was trust, and the revelations had impacted the organisation’s journalists.

“I know that we pride ourselves as having the highest standards of journalistic quality so I can just say that it’s had a significant impact also on our journalism team.”

Reuters said it had “addressed the issue” with RNZ, noting in a statement that RNZ had initiated an investigation.

“As stated in our terms and conditions, Reuters content cannot be altered without prior written consent,” the spokesperson’s statement said.

“Reuters is fully committed to covering the war in Ukraine impartially and accurately, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”

‘Important that politicians don’t interfere’ – Hipkins
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said while he would never rule out a cross-party parliamentary inquiry, he had not seen anything so far to suggest the need for an wider action.

Hipkins told RNZ’s Morning Report he was not sure a cross-party parliamentary inquiry on issues around editorial decisions would be a good way of protecting the editorial independence of an institution like RNZ.

“Having said that, we always monitor these kinds of things to see how they are being handled, it’s really important that politicians don’t interfere in that,” he said.

“I think if it reached a point where public confidence in the institution was so badly tarnished that some degree of independent review was required, I’d never take that off the table.”

But in the first instance, it was important to allow RNZ’s management and board to deal with it with the processes that they had in place, Hipkins said.

“I haven’t seen anything in the last few days that would suggest that there’s any case for us to trigger something that’s more significant than what’s being done at the moment.”

Hipkins said he had not sought, nor had, any briefings from New Zealand’s security services in relation to the incident because it was a matter of editorial independence and it was important that politicians did not get involved in that.

“RNZ, while it’s a publicly-funded institution, must operate independently of politicians.”

Not an issue for politicians – Willis
National Party deputy leader Nicola Willis agreed that it was not an issue for politicians to be involved in.

She said it was important the investigation was carried out, and the concern was about editorial standards that let the situation go unnoticed for such a long time.

Trust in media was important and people reading mainstream media expected stories to go through a fact-checking process and reflect appropriate editorial independence, she told RNZ’s First Up.

“I think it will be a watch for newsrooms around the country, and I hope that it’s a thorough investigation that comes out with robust recommendations.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

FijiFirst party general secretary Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum claims they are fighting The Fiji Times and Communications Fiji Ltd — not political parties — in the lead up to the 2022 general election.

He said this while taking a swipe at The Times during a news conference this week at the FijiFirst party headquarters in Suva.

Sayed-Khaiyum claimed the two media organisations were “always parroting” the People’s Alliance and the National Federation Party “without checking the facts”.

• READ MORE: Stop attacking the media, says Ali
• AG accuses CFL and Fiji Times of inaccurate reporting
• Other Fiji media freedom reports

“We are not fighting other political parties, we are fighting two mainstream media organisations — Fiji Times and CFL,” he said.

“The Fijian public know that. This is why we have our live Facebook when we have conferences, because we don’t expect these people to do any justification in terms of what we are saying.

“I urge you if you are serious about your profession and the organisation you work for, are independent, not just say ‘independent’.

“The saying goes [that] the proof is in the eating of the pudding.

“We have a seen a continuous propagation by Fiji Times and by CFL, simply parroting whatever the PAP and NFP says without checking the facts; we have a very sad state of affairs today.”

Sayed-Khaiyum cited as an example that when NFP reported the FijiFirst party to the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption about placing a banner on the Civic Car Park, The Fiji Times continued to publish commentary from NFP general secretary Seni Nabou.

“They have absolutely no idea of what due process means, they have absolutely no idea, neither Fiji Times nor does CFL have any idea what an independent process means.

“They throw these words around, bending these words around, yet not understanding what [they] mean.”

Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley responded that The Fiji Times was being attacked — “as usual” — for doing its job.

“We strive for fair and balanced coverage of the news, especially now as political parties go into election mode,” he said.

“Understandably the pressure is on the government to respond to statements by opposition parties. We offer them a platform to clarify issues and to make statements.

We refer all opposition party criticism to the government for comment. The government rarely, if ever, replies.

“We are not here to make the government look good. We offer a platform for every party to voice their opinions. Some choose to use it and some do not.”

Arieta Vakasukawaqa is a Fiji Times reporter. Published with permission.

A founding father and former politician has urged young journalists to write more about Vanuatu’s history.

In a presentation to trainee journalists, Pastor Sethy John Regenvanu called on future writers to write more about people who have contributed to Vanuatu’s history and record their stories.

“I am one of the few leaders who is still around and we are sort of a rare commodity,’’ he said.

• READ MORE: Other Vanuatu journalism training reports

“I’m not going to be speaking to people all the time.

“You may say that you cannot find important books that pertain to us, then you have to ask why.

“I want you people to feel able to come and interview us who have lived in different stages of the country’s evolution and have had the experience of leading this country into independence — and interview us and write books about us.’’

The 78-year-old author elaborated on the writings that are important for people to read. He said they included significant stories that tell people about the happenings of Vanuatu.

His autobiography Laef Blong Mi
He opened his presentation by displaying some of his own published works, which included his autobiography Laef Blong Mi, written in 2004.

Pointing to his autobiography, he said not many writers had written about important people in Vanuatu’s history.

“Not many of us have got a life story — like I have here,’’ he said.

“It means that writers haven’t done important life experience stories which are a very important part of this history. They are the identity of this nation.’’

The retired leader said he believed stories or information were best relayed when written.

“What you hear through word of mouth, or other mediums, faces the potential risk of distortion, exaggeration, third parties — and in due course becomes untrustworthy, unreliable and forgotten,” he said.

Pastor Regenvanu encouraged future journalists to always be truthful reporters and have the credibility to help others.

He said it was important to be “inquisitive” and to “take life seriously” as the media could have both positive and negative impacts.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

October 2021 was a horror month for Facebook as the headlines screamed “Facebook under fire” which started with the social media behemoth suffering an outage for several hours.

Then it had a whistleblower — American data scientist Francis Haugen — who accused the company of:

• prioritising growth over user safety;
• bowing to the will of state censors in some countries;
• allowing hate speech to burgeon in other countries;
• ignoring fake accounts that may influence voters and undermine elections;
• allowing the antivaccine message to proliferate; and
• having algorithms that fuel noxious behaviour online.

Add to that, a major impending problem of capturing a young audience who are flocking elsewhere and turning their backs on the oldest social media platform which was founded in 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

• READ MORE: Facebook profits top $9bn amid whistleblower revelations
• Other Pacific Newsroom reports
• The Pacific Newsroom

Even so, its success as the leading platform is undeniable with it announcing a $9 billion quarterly profit in October with a massive 3 billion users.

It was the access to smartphones when they were offered in the Pacific and technology that drove Facebook’s popularity to largely receptive devotees. The uptake of the social media platform in French Polynesia (72.1 percent penetration by 2020), Fiji (68.2 percent, Guam (87.8 percent), Niue (91.7 percent), Samoa (67.2 percent) and Tonga (62.3 percent) made it a no-brainer for Sue Ahearn, founder of the highly credible The Pacific Newsroom page to use the platform.

Measured success
The success of The Pacific Newsroom page can be measured by the site garnering in excess of 40,500 members most of who can participate actively by contributing to the page.

Ahearn is no stranger to the Asia-Pacific region. An Australian journalist for more than 40 years, 25 at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who originally hails from Martinborough in New Zealand, she was drawn to set up the page primarily because of misinformation that tends to flourish in the Pacific news.

“It came to me about four years ago when the ABC cut back on all of its coverage of the Pacific, and I could see there was a big gap there,” she says.

“The ABC was only providing a small service and there was a lack of interest in most of the Australian media. You could see the technology was changing, how the information was flowing from the region was changing.’’

The apathy for a thirst for Pacific knowledge has had a profound effect on insularity in the media, especially in Australia and New Zealand, although the Public Interest Journalism Fund is attempting to address that in some way in New Zealand.

“I wish I knew, Sean Dorney, Jemima Garrett and all of the Pacific journalists just can’t fathom why is there so little interest in our region among the Australian media,’’ says Ahearn.

“It doesn’t make sense. There tends to be three or four journalists that cover the region and try to convince news outlets to run their stories or send reporters, and that has become very difficult.”

Only Pacific correspondent based in Pacific
Natalie Whiting of the ABC and the recipient of the Dorney-Walkley Foundation grant 2021 is the only journalist from Australasia who is based in the Pacific. She is stationed in the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby.

“In New Zealand, that’s not a problem and New Zealand does good coverage of the Pacific. New Zealand has a much closer relationship with the Pacific,” Ahearn says.

However, Michael Field in Auckland, a page administrator and a veteran of the Pacific who went to journalism school with Ahearn, had qualms about the coverage out of New Zealand.

“The thing that really bugs me is that only Radio New Zealand (RNZ) seems to be doing Pacific news. For example, you’d pick up the (New) Herald and see who’s covering the hurricane out in Fiji only to see it is a re-run of a RNZ story,” says Field.

“It bothers me. The Herald should have had a different angle on the story, RNZ a different angle, The Dominion Post would be different and there would be work for stringers in the Pacific. Now that is not the case because RNZ takes up everybody else’s work and runs it that way,

“I guess that is the reality of it now, but it seems the voice of the Pacific these days is state radio.

“Call me old fashioned, but I’d be too embarrassed to run a story quoting another media organisation, and if you had to do it you’d do it grudgingly. We are starting to fail in the coverage of the region,” he says.

Success stirs amazement
The success and growth of The Pacific Newsroom as an organic, quasi news agency akin to Reuters, Agence France Press (AFP) or Australian Associated Press (AAP) in a tiny way, has caught Ahearn by amazement.

“I am surprised because we have a lot of engagement, some stories get 80,000 or 90,000 engagements so there is a lot of interest in it, and I think it fills a huge niche.

She speaks about the talanoa concept of The Pacific Newsroom.

“It’s like a town square where people can meet, share stories and talk about what is happening. Michael (Field) and I spend an enormous time on this project and we’re basically volunteers, we’re not being paid or making any money from it,” she says.

Nor would she entertain the thought of applying for funding either in New Zealand or Australia, preferring instead to maintain their editorial independence.

“Mike and I have discussed this, and we think one of the main attractions of our site is it is not monetised, that it is a voluntary site, there are no advertisements on it, we try and keep it independent, and we are both at the stage in our lives where we’re not working fulltime in the media,” Ahearn says.

“We’ve got time to spend doing this as a public interest, we really enjoy doing it too, it’s a lot of fun.

Many great stories
“There are so many great stories in the Pacific that need to be amplified to the world.

“Things are happening with technology and it’s giving a much stronger voice to the Pacific whether it’s on climate change or fishing or other important issues and that is why it is going to get stronger and stronger,” Ahearn says.

Among the stories that gained the site momentum was the University of the South Pacific (USP) having its vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia at the centre of controversy during his first term when Fiji government and educational officials tried to oust him from office in the so-called USP saga, eventually unceremoniously deporting him in a move widely condemned around the Pacific.

“The big story which moved us along was the USP saga last year, for quite political reasons which had to do with the players, we were leaked all the reports and people could see if it got a certain amount of information on Pacific Newsroom that things might happen, and it did,” Field says.

“More recently we’ve had the same with the Samoan elections where a number of players wanted to be interviewed directly; the former Prime Minister (Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi) seemed to have some misinformed view that we are more powerful than we are. We cope with that so it is constantly moving thing.”

Another worrying development were the libel laws in Australia where last month the court ruled publishers to be liable for defamatory comments.

“The libel laws, it’s another tension and another thing we’ve got to watch. We watch it like a hawk (as moderators) and that is not to characterise the particular audience we’ve got,” Field says.

‘Shooting your mouth off’
“Shooting your mouth off seems to be regarded in much of the Pacific as a God-given right — ‘why you trying to stop me from saying this’, we just delete people now. We tried saying to people right at the beginning we didn’t need expletives, swear words and all that stuff, and we were going to take them down.

“It is learning experience, moderating a site like Pacific Newsroom can be hard, depressing work and sometimes there’s a lot of people that sort of feel they have to say something even though it is a complete nonsense, and it is hard yakka that sort of stuff,’’ Field says.

On the flip side of it were the tangible rewards that make it all worthwhile.

“I can remember one particular point where we were tracking a superyacht that was tripping around Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga; there were people from quite remote village areas of these countries that would send us pictures saying, ‘here is a picture of the yacht that has just passed my village ‘. Whereas back in the day you tried to get a shortwave radio operator to tell you what happened three weeks after the event.

“The Pacific is now full of people with smartphones and with good connections so we can cover everything in the Pacific,” Field says.

As for the credibility of the site, Field declined an approach from a major mainstream New Zealand media company that sought copyright and permission to use the material that was published.

Then there was the young journalist from another mainstream media company who asked Field for a contact in relation to a Vanuatu story, telling Field that they all shared their contacts in the newsroom. Needless to say, he went away disappointed and empty-handed.

Ancient settler societies
Just how well The Pacific Newsroom is regarded in the Pacific is summed up eloquently by history associate professor Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano of the USP who tells it with a Pacific panache.

“Apart from Australia, New Zealand, Tokelau, Hawai’i, Guam, American Samoa, West Papua, Rapanui, and the French territories (New Caledonia, Uvea and Futuna, Tahiti), the nature of independent and self-governing Pacific societies is that they are ancient settler societies steeped in conservatism,” Tuimaleali’ifano says.

“While their constitutions have absorbed Western influences, imperial laws, Christianity, fundamental freedoms/rights, monetary capitalism, they remain steeped in ancient systems of governance based largely on hereditary hierarchies.

“Two worlds co-exist with the constitutional democratic model heavily influenced by kinship patterns of thought and behaviour. Within kinship hierarchies, there exists diverse governance structures and no two villages share the exact governing structure,” he says.

“Equally important are the constitutions and parliamentary legislation. These law-making institutions together with the judiciary are constantly evolving as they must with changing circumstances and best practices.

“It is within these social dynamics that journalism provides the Fourth or Fifth Estate to maintain an even keel on the Pacific’s growth as a viable region of nation-states.

“The Pacific Newsroom plays a vital role, of mirroring the changing Pasifika people needs and commenting on sensitive matters that many may find unsavoury difficult and overwhelming to articulate within ultra-conservative societies.

‘Without fear or favour’
“Without fear or favour, The Pacific Newsroom and its sister networks provide a critical service for a multi-faceted Pasifika struggling to reconcile and reshape a new consciousness for Pasifika.

“These include the enduring issues of regional identity and solidarity and unity within the context of relentless ideological and geopolitical power plays.”

As associate professor and head of journalism at USP Shailendra Singh in Suva, who continues to strive to keep his students well abreast in journalism under draconian media laws in Fiji, says:

“It is indeed a success story, due to a large following, because of media restrictions in Fiji. Users from Fiji especially feel more comfortable expressing themselves on this page.

“The page is prudently and professionally moderated, so it is respectable. The page uses information from credible news sources. (Independent sources like Bob Howarth on Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste; former Vanuatu Daily Post publisher Dan McGarry; current Pacific Island Times publisher Mar-Vic Cagurangan; and photojournalist Ben Bohane, until he returned to Australia from Vanuatu; as well as David Robie‘s Asia-Pacific Report which is a huge contributor to the page).

“I promote USP journalism students’ work on Pacific Newsroom. It is exemplary of how Facebook can support democracy.”

A vital source of information in the covid era. You get a cross-section of news and views on one platform. It is definitely the most popular virtual “kava bar” in the Pacific.

• Browse The Pacific Newsroom

The Pacific Newsroom – the virtual ‘kava bar’ news success story #ThePacificNewsroom #AsiaPacificReport @shrek45 #mediafreedom #independentmedia @RSF_inter @RSF_AsiaPacific @sueahearn @MichaelFieldNZ @ShailendraBSing @wansolwara @USPWansolwara https://t.co/9m7DJ0DUq6 pic.twitter.com/QIJUlvsbFu

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) November 5, 2021

The caretaker Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, thinks the newspaper you hold in your hands is dedicated to trying to “tear down” the Samoan government but the broader economic progress of Samoa.

So, reader, are you subsidising borderline treachery by having paid for the edition you hold in your hands?

We certainly don’t think so. This newspaper has been part of Samoan public life for longer than the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) and Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi. And for all these 43 years we have lived by a simple rule: telling truths, however uncomfortable, is the best thing for our country.

• READ MORE: Samoa Observer trying to tear down Govt – Tuilaepa
• Samoan elections

Our loyalties belong to our readers, the people of Samoa, and the truth and nothing and no one else. We consider not telling the truth about failures of government or corrupt goings-on to be the height of disloyalty to one’s country.

Tuilaepa’s statement was not entirely surprising to us but further evidence that he evidently lives by the saying that consistency is a preoccupation of small minds.

Many would have noticed that the Prime Minister’s office space at the Human Rights Protection Party Headquarters has as its backdrop several articles from what he this week described (and later retracted as a ) “vile” and “miserable” tabloid.

It is a strange thing indeed for a leader to have clippings from the pages of what he has described as essentially a magazine subversive to national loyalties.

Flattering coverage
There is after all an alternative, government-owned newspaper in this country and one that has not been short at all of flattering coverage of the Prime Minister that could serve as alternative decoration.

But perhaps he’s taken these pages down following the front-page article of this edition of the Weekend Observer.

On Thursday, Tuilaepa asserted that it was very typical of Samoans to try and tear each other down even when they are trying to do good.

“That’s like this paper, the [Samoa] Observer. Everything [they publish] is incorrect, I do not know when they will correct it,” he said.

“Others try to do something good while others try to tear it down […] just like the Samoa Observer newspaper.

“Whatever happens, they never report about anything bad from other political parties, but when it is criticism from something very minimal, oh, the [Samoa] Observer would be so full of a collection of irrelevant reports on it.”

We would beg to differ with the caretaker Prime Minister’s observations. But of course we would; no one would admit to harbouring such a rotten agenda as to seek to sabotage this country.

So we suggest you don’t take our word for it but rather Tuilaepa’s own.

‘Loved’ Samoa Observer
It was earlier this year that the then-Prime Minister said that he “loved” the Samoa Observer.

He was mixing his words with a touch of irony but as the old Russian saying goes: in every joke, there is a trace of a joke. And in this case, he was obviously making a serious point about the deficiencies of this country’s state-owned media empire and its inability to ask questions of him during press conferences.

He reproached the announcers at the state-owned radio station 2AP for deriving all the questions they asked of the Prime Minister from the Samoa Observer.

“Even though I make harsh comments towards them most of the time, I still love the (Samoa) Observer,” he said.

“You guys then go and read their articles and use those articles to formulate the questions you ask me during our weekly programmes.

“That is how you get your questions and that is what makes these interviews interesting, but it’s all because of the issues highlighted in the Observer.”

If Tuilaepa truly desired scrutiny he would have invited us to ask him unscripted questions at press conferences over the last two years for which he was in power. We never requested nor required what the Government Press Secretariat styled as the special “privilege” of being the only media outlet obliged to submit questions in advance to the Prime Minister.

Returning scrutiny
Returning scrutiny to your press conferences, Tuilaepa, is only a phone call away.

But let’s consider the Prime Minister’s broader accusation. Do we set out to undermine the credibility of our government?

No, we just do our job every day.

Politics is about power. Journalism is about asking questions about how that power is exercised to ensure that it is in the interest of the public.

In recent times at the Samoa Observer, this has involved a range of stories.

We of course measured the multi-million dollar airstrip at Ti’avea Airport – sold to the public as an alternative to Faleolo International Airport – and found it three times too small to land a passenger jet. There were plenty of questions there.

In 2019, we asked why the government was continuing to downplay the possibility that Measles had reached Samoa when, as we then revealed, an isolation unit for the disease had already been established at the national hospital.

Protecting the youth
More recently, we asked why the government had ignored the advice of its own advisory committee, issued months before, to move quickly to protect the youth of the nation before the disease ravaged the health of Samoa’s children.

Is it the Prime Minister’s contention that we should not investigate matters such as these and ask questions about them? Especially when, by his own admission, state-media employees are not providing scrutiny or even ideas off their own steam.

To be frank, we don’t much care. Our responsibility is not to please the powerful – far from it. But it is obvious that governance in Samoa would be much the worse without a critical press.

But as to the accusation that we are biased, in fact, whichever way misdeeds draw our attention our reporters will follow.

So it was with our critical editorial and coverage of the Faatuatua ile Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party manifesto. We asked how the party planned on funding a policy platform that would almost double the size of the national budget at a time when the economy was shrinking faster than ever.

What about our March front-page story that three electoral committee members from the party were facing charges relating to election forgery?

(Note the party, which is not happy with our journalism, denied this story but has refused to say what the titles of the people arrested were. Until it does so, we stand by our reporting.)

Taking on all comers
The Samoa Observer takes on all comers and has always done so.

If we sense that the rules are being breached or the people of Samoa are being hard done by we will report on it. If we believe that the ongoing level of poverty in this nation is obscene, as we do, we report on it.

What is the alternative of a country without a newspaper with a critical edge?

We see it regularly in the Prime Minister’s press conferences where a sense of apathy radiates around the room as announcers tee up the Prime Minister with questions that fit his agenda.

Question marks loom particularly large over Samoa’s democracy at the moment. The final institution of government standing between Samoa and dictatorship appears to be the judiciary.

Tuilaepa has done his best to undermine that institution through casting aspersions.

But we can assure you that whatever the caretaker Prime Minister says about us will make us think twice about publishing a story.

This editorial was published by the Samoa Observer on 8 May 2021.

Australia’s journalists’ union – the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – has voted to end its decades long relationship with the Australian Press Council, citing concerns about governance and consistency of rulings at the press regulator.

Formed in 1976 as an alternative to government intervention, the Australian Press Council has been an important arbiter of media standards, adjudicating complaints from the public about material in newspapers, magazines and online news sites at publishers that belong to the Press Council.

MEAA’s predecessor, the Australian Journalists’ Association, played a crucial role in establishing the Press Council after more than 20 years of lobbying for self-regulation. Despite not being a publisher itself, MEAA has contributed more than A$100,000 each year to the organisation within recent years.

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The Press Council also draws on media academics and selected public representatives to run its adjudication processes.

In recent years, MEAA members have become increasingly frustrated by a lack of financial transparency and accountability at the Press Council and the inconsistent manner in which it has adjudicated on complaints, some of which are out of step with community expectations.

In April, delegates to MEAA’s National Media Section committee, made up of rank-and-file union members, voted to formally quit the Press Council.

Under the rules of the APC, four years notice must be given to withdraw, which means MEAA will officially leave the organisation in 2025.

Overwhelming feedback
The decision to withdraw came after MEAA – which represents more than 5000 journalists and other media workers – consulted with its members, who overwhelmingly gave feedback that the union should leave the Press Council.

The federal president of MEAA’s Media section, Marcus Strom, said there was a pervasive dissatisfaction among MEAA members about the role played by the regulator.

He said it had failed to change with the times during more than a decade of media convergence and was not effective in the contemporary industry where there is cross-over between print, digital and broadcast journalism.

Australia’s broadcast media are regulated by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“The Press Council has lost credibility with journalists and even with the publishers who make up its membership. There have been too many cases in recent years where adjudications have been mocked or ignored,” Strom said.

“Currently our members are more concerned about being hauled over the coals on Media Watch [a weekly national television program that regularly exposes misdemeanours and unethical practices by journalists and publishers] than being called before the Press Council. That’s obviously not an acceptable situation.”

MEAA Media federal vice-president Karen Percy said readers who made complaints were also frustrated with the response they received from the Press Council, which eroded trust in journalists and the media.

Credible regulator ‘is critical’
“In order to maintain integrity in journalism in Australia, a credible regulator – where there are real consequences for breaches – is critical,” Percy said.

“Unfortunately, the Press Council is no longer fit-for-purpose for the modern, cross-platform media industry.”

Percy said MEAA’s Journalist Code of Ethics should play a more prominent role in media standards.

First established in 1944, and updated twice since, the Code of Ethics is the most enduring and best-known set of guidelines for journalists.

The public are also able to make complaints about union members who breach the code, with a range of sanctions available including termination of membership of MEAA.

“The industry needs a simpler system of self-regulation that is consistent across all platforms and organisations, upholds the standards of public interest journalism, and serves the needs of members and the public who want ethical practices and accountability,” Percy said.

“The status quo is serving no-one – not the industry, nor the public.”

Senate media inquiry
The decision by MEAA to withdraw from the Press Council coincides with an inquiry into media ownership by the Australian Senate, with the future of media regulation and questions of how to maintain trust in journalism coming under scrutiny by inquiry.

Strom said many journalists regarded the Press Council as toothless and wanted a more robust regulator to ensure standards of good journalism were maintained.

“Arbitrations at the Press Council have been inconsistent, slow and are increasingly out of touch with community expectations.

He said it was time for a broad review of media regulation in Australia. MEAA has publicly stated it would like to see a one-stop-shop regulator to replace the multitude of confusing, inconsistent bodies and processes currently in place.

“We want our notice to leave the Press Council to spark a serious discussion about media regulation,” he said.

As part of its decision to withdraw from the Press Council, MEAA will engage with the Press Council and other industry stakeholders to discuss what shape the regulatory environment should take in future.

As the IFJ’s Australian affiliate, MEAA is the largest and most established union and industry advocate for Australia’s creative professionals.