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The ABC’s coverage of Israel – in par­tic­u­lar, its highly con­tro­ver­sial Q + A program which focused on the recent Israel-Hamas war – was the subject of a high-level meeting between the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ) and the ABC lead­er­ship at ABC headquar­ters in Sydney on Monday, 21 June 2021.

It was attended by ABC managing director David Anderson and his chief of staff Michael Rippon, and ECAJ president Jillian Segal, co-CEO Peter Wertheim and newly-appointed ECAJ con­sult­ant Vic Alhadeff. ABC chair Ita Buttrose was also scheduled to attend, but had suffered an injury and sent an apology.

The meeting had been sought by the ECAJ in a detailed letter of complaint delivered to the ABC Chairman and Managing Director shortly after the program went to air.

The ECAJ letter com­plained of “a pervasive culture of bias, if not antipathy, towards Israel and the main­stream Aus­trali­an Jewish community, within the unit respons­ible for organ­ising and producing the Q + A program”.

It said that the program had “featured an out­pour­ing of undiluted and uncon­tested false­hoods and vitriol from two pan­el­lists (one of whom seems to have her own page on the Q + A section of the ABC’s website, which describes her as ‘a Muslim of Palestini­an and Egyptian heritage’), with passive support from two other pan­el­lists and only one lone voice, not from the Jewish community, swimming against the tide and trying to put the other side of the argument despite repeated inter­rup­tions. The selection of questions from the audience and of tweets that were screened was similarly skewed.”

Pointing to a pattern of conduct over many years, the ECAJ stated that the Q + A program “was merely the latest unfor­tu­nate example of a long history of exclusion of an authentic Jewish community viewpoint on Q + A and elsewhere by the ABC on matters of vital concern to our community, including gross mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion or exclusion of the main­stream Jewish community’s per­spect­ive on matters related to Israel. We emphasise that the culture of bias and exclusion against our community is not limited to the Q + A program. The ABC’s overall news and current affairs coverage of the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas on this occasion, and in the past, is part of the same pattern.”

The letter added that “the urgency of our request for a meeting is due to the dramatic upsurge in antisemitic incidents which have neg­at­ively impacted on the safety, security and wellbeing of Jewish com­munit­ies around the world, including Australia.”

During the course of a wide-ranging dis­cus­sion, David Anderson readily acknow­ledged that the Q + A program and the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage of the conflict had contained “many errors” for which he apo­lo­gised.  He also acknow­ledged the validity of the ECAJ’s earlier detailed critique of an “Explainer” document that had been published on the ABC website at the start of hos­til­it­ies, before being corrected. That matter is still under invest­ig­a­tion by the ABC com­plaints unit.

“The meeting was held in a very positive spirit and Mr Anderson was keen to explore specific con­struct­ive steps to prevent a recur­rence of the problems we raised and improve the quality of the ABC’s news coverage,” ECAJ President Jillian Segal said after the meeting. “Despite the obvious dif­fi­culties, we have secured a com­mit­ment for follow-up meetings and engage­ment with both key ABC staff and lead­er­ship, and have reason to hope for a pro­duct­ive outcome.”