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Submission FPM-ABC written by Stefano Perfili, with Free Palestine Melbourne, in response to the UN Special Rapporteur OPT’s call for input on the role of media in the context of Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people, especially after 7 October 2023.

Introduction

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a state institution established under the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983, funded by Commonwealth appropriation and chaired by Commonwealth appointment. Its slogans — “It’s your ABC” — invoke a collective sense of pride and ownership. Australia is a state party to the Genocide Convention and formally recognised Palestine in September 2025.

This submission documents conduct, across two years of genocide, that places the ABC consistently in breach of Article 19 ICCPR, based on 4 patterns of conduct that General Comment 34 (hereinafter: GC34) identifies as constituting violations: public output systematically biased toward Israeli framing, as measured by three independent studies (para. 13); the silencing of journalists who tried to warn the broadcaster, as confirmed by its own commissioned racism review (para. 14); the unlawful dismissal of journalist Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch report (para. 16); and the institutional weaponisation of “impartiality” running through every failure (para. 23).

If these violations are layered together, a more serious pattern of conduct emerges: the ABC has pursued a policy of editorial bias toward Israel, one that has primed the Australian public to support the Australian government in its own actions towards Israel and the genocide of Palestinians. This has been accompanied by an active and draconian campaign of internal and then public silencing to deter internal and public dissent as to the editorial line, in order to sustain this coverage over 2+ years. In a domestic media environment saturated with right wing media, the ABC has always held a centre and even progressive space in the Australian media landscape. This institutionalised policy has made the ABC an important tool for reinforcing Australian complicity with Israel, in ways such as those illustrated in the Special Rapporteur’s report, Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime (hereinafter: A Collective Crime).

Of particular note, Lattouf v ABC was the first case in Australia in which the pro-Israel lobby’s internal machinations were dragged into open court, with its powerful influence verified by a judge — and (to our knowledge) the first in the world in which that influence drove a public broadcaster to unlawful conduct. Instead of accepting a modest settlement offer, the ABC chose to spend millions of taxpayer dollars defending its own surrender to the lobby.

Three studies measuring bias: betraying our “right to receive media output” (para. 13)

ABC’s editorial policies commit it to be “guided by these hallmarks of impartiality: a balance that follows the weight of evidence; fair treatment; open-mindedness; and opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed.” However, its practices manifestly fall short of these policies in its reporting on Palestine.

In December 2023, South Africa had filed proceedings against Israel for genocide. Instead of allowing this matter to be reported factually as a question of genocide being addressed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the ABC responded by restricting publication of the word: in January 2024, ABC global affairs editor John Lyons reportedly “told staff there had been a recent directive that the word genocide could not be used to describe the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, even when quoting someone, without it being ‘upwardly referred’ to a manager”.

Three independent studies have measured a pattern of bias:

1. Dr Susan Carland’s February 2024 Monash University study of six Australian outlets’ Instagram coverage found the ABC used active voice for attacks on Israel and passive voice for attacks on Gaza — framing that “slips past the audience unnoticed” yet reshapes perception.
2. A Pearls & Irritations analysis of ABC Radio National Breakfast (December 2024) coded more than 450 interviews across 14 months. There were 92 Israeli guests to 40 Palestinian, with 22 unverified Israeli claims left unchallenged, and every single guest reference to “genocide” was interrupted or caveated by the host; a May 2025 follow-up found the pattern intensified under a different host — 33 Israeli to 12 Palestinian across 93 interviews — signalling the disparity lies at the institutional, not individual, level.
3. A joint Deepcut/Newscord study (June 2025) examined 81 article clusters across four outlets from October 2023 to May 2025: the ABC used humanising language for Israelis 1.58 times more often than for Palestinians, and allocated 22.1% of average article space to the official Israeli perspective against 12% for the Palestinian; the disparity was worse than CNN and the BBC.

Mssing Context, an Australian fact-checking project, has documented specific ABC breaches in real time:

1. On 24 July 2025, at the height of starvation in Gaza, the ABC published an Instagram explainer omitting Israel’s policy of forced starvation as the cause, while uncritically repeating Israeli claims denying starvation.
2. On 25 October 2025, the ABC erased the history of Israel’s mass forced displacement of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank in its explainer on the Israeli settler movement in the territory.
3. On 22 January 2026, the ABC headlined the Israeli killing of three Palestinian journalists as “Children and journalists killed by Israel in separate incidents in Gaza, Palestinian medics say”.
4. On 1 February 2026, the ABC sanitised Israel’s violations of the October ceasefire as a continuing ceasefire.
5. On 31 March 2026, the ABC reported Israel’s discriminatory death penalty law — applicable only to Palestinians, tried in segregated military courts — without using the word “apartheid” or citing authoritative bodies using the term.

A state institution that humanises Israelis 1.58 times more often than Palestinians, interrupts references to genocide while platforming unverified Israeli claims unchallenged, and whose own staff describe the same bias the independent studies measured, is not merely making an editorial misjudgement; it is failing the public’s right to know.

Silencing the staff who would warn the public about genocide: the failure to “encourage an independent and diverse media” (para. 14 — with paras. 13, 16, 23)

The ABC’s coverage of Gaza obscured the genocide; the staff who tried to warn the broadcaster about that coverage were silenced.

In November 2023, approximately 200 ABC staff detailed their concerns in an internal document, later obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) by Al Jazeera. They warned that the ABC had “adopted [Israeli state narrative] as our own” — without attribution, a breach of journalism ethics — while systematically excluding Palestinian perspectives. The document recorded a style-guide instruction not to use the word “Palestine”; Palestinian interviewees being pressed to denounce Hamas as a precondition of platform access, with no corresponding condition placed on Israeli guests; and correspondents being stationed in Israel but not Gaza.

In the same month, more than 270 journalists — including the ABC’s MEAA (Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance) House Committee — signed an open letter with eight demands for coverage reform. The ABC’s News Director warned staff in writing that signing “may bring into question your ability to cover the story impartially”.

Free Palestine Melbourne’s analysis of the historical signatory data identifies the ABC as the single largest employer represented, with 26 staff confirmed. Within a day of its launch, a new checkbox was added to the form: “Due to management intimidation I won’t sign the letter, but agree with it […]”. The chilling impact on ABC staff specifically was evident in two ABC journalists eventually removing their signatures — with no journalist from any other outlet doing so. The visible chilling effect was specific to the public broadcaster — and overt enough for the form to be modified to record it.

In May 2023, the ABC commissioned an external review of its handling of racism by Indigenous lawyer Terri Janke, prompted by the resignation of First Nations broadcaster Stan Grant as Q+A host due to sustained racial abuse — an “institutional failure” in his words. While the review was being conducted, the ABC unlawfully dismissed Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf (December 2023), and lost Lebanese-Australian federal politics reporter Nour Haydar (January 2024). When delivered in October 2024, the Janke review reported that “all participants who were First Nations and [culturally and linguistically diverse]… reported their impartiality and objectivity being called into question” (p.69), and recorded testimony that “they want diverse faces but they don’t want what comes with it — as soon as the topic becomes too political, we suddenly can’t be trusted to report objectively” (p.70). The journalists Janke identified as racially distrusted on political topics were the journalists most likely to challenge the editorial line on Gaza.

In May 2025 — within seven months of the Janke review’s release — the ABC pulled down an interview with Nasser Mashni, President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), within two hours of upload. The ABC’s own Media Watch episode reported that the broadcaster had “received no complaints about the interview itself but more than a hundred about the decision to remove it”. The editorial line pre-empted public complaints instead of responding to them.

The reasons cited by ABC’s written defence of the removal to Media Watch do not hold up to scrutiny:

1. It stated that the interview “has a factual inaccuracy”, but never specified what that was. It added that the inaccuracy “was not material to the live interview and therefore did not require a correction. However, we would not knowingly repost inaccurate content.” But many corrections by the ABC Ombudsman (as cited further below) demonstrate that content can be modified to remove inaccuracies or add an editor’s note, without requiring immediate wholesale deletion.
2. It stated that the “live-to-air interview [was] part of broader coverage and was not intended to be published as a stand-alone clip”. Yet ABC published several stand-alone clips from the same news cycle, including a similar sanctions call by a politician and the Prime Minister’s statement. The only voice from that cycle absent from ABC’s online archive is Mashni’s.
3. It stated that the ABC “doesn’t make editorial decisions because of external pressure”. Three weeks later, the Federal Court found the ABC had unlawfully dismissed Lattouf under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby.

Lattouf and the $2.6M+ capture of “independence and editorial freedom” (para. 16)

Janke found that the ABC structurally distrusted and repressed the voices of Arab and Muslim staff members (and other people of colour). The consistent repression of voices critical of Zionist policy attests to an internal practice of the structural racism evidenced in Janke’s findings. This is most clearly demonstrated in the Federal Court’s findings of unlawful dismissal, where Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was explicitly removed for sharing evidence of Israel’s genocidal conduct. These repressive internal practices have continued in spite of clear knowledge of Israel’s crimes.

On 20 December 2023, the ABC terminated Lattouf’s employment within hours of receiving coordinated complaints. Her offence: sharing a Human Rights Watch report documenting Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war on her personal Instagram story — a story the ABC itself covered that same day.

After refusing Lattouf’s mid-2024 $85,000 settlement offer, Australia’s public broadcaster spent “more than $2½ million” in taxpayer funds defending this unlawful termination. The Front itemised approximately $556,000 (Fair Work Commission), $1.85 million (Federal Court), and $220,000 (penalties and damages): a total of $2.626 million in public money spent defending the ABC’s surrender to the Israel lobby, over a journalist sharing evidence of Israel’s war crimes.

In Lattouf v ABC, Justice Rangiah found the ABC had unlawfully terminated Lattouf, three days into a five-day casual radio contract, for her political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The court identified an “orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists” coordinated through a 156-member WhatsApp group, Lawyers for Israel. In messages reported by Media Watch (ABC’s own media scrutiny program), Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s Deputy President confirmed when asked that the reason Lattouf would be removed was her position on Israel.

The ABC’s then-Chief Content Officer made the termination decision after the then-Managing Director communicated his view that Lattouf held antisemitic opinions. The then-Chair had written internally suggesting Lattouf could be sidelined under cover of illness, complaining that “We should be in damage control not managed exits”.

The penalty judgement held that the ABC had “let down the Australian public badly when it abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee Ms Lattouf to appease a lobby group”, and “[failed] to comply with its statutory obligation to ensure its own independence and integrity”. Justice Rangiah further found a factor in the dismissal was a desire “to ‘beat the story’ that The Australian intended to publish” — about the very same “complaints regarding Ms Lattouf’s social media posts and her ongoing employment with the ABC.”

The judgement predicted in September 2025 that “Pressures of the kind faced by the ABC in this case will undoubtedly arise again.” They already were: between May 2025 and January 2026, a single columnist in The Australian named at least 5 ABC journalists across 5 separate pieces attacking ABC’s coverage (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5), and a templated lobby campaign circulated in January 2026 against 2 ABC journalists who had withdrawn from the Adelaide Festival in solidarity with a Palestinian-Australian writer dropped due to government and lobby pressure (herself the target of a sustained media campaign). The ABC did not publicly defend any of these journalists against these pressure campaigns.

A Crikey investigation documented over 130 Australian media and political figures accepting funded trips to Israel. While the ABC told Crikey that it “does not give approval to ABC employees to accept offers of travel of this kind”, it did not respond to questions about its then-political editor’s 2010 trip to Israel. Four days after Media Watch reported on the Lawyers for Israel messages, the then-Managing Director told RN Breakfast that he “categorically” rejected criticism the ABC was vulnerable to pro-Israel lobby pressure; eighteen months later, the Federal Court found that the lobby had influenced them to break the law.

Even after the court’s finding, the ABC doubled down on its position, demonstrating the extent of its “punitive” policy. Two months after the liability judgement, the ABC extended supervision of staff speech to WhatsApp and private messaging; the MEAA called the new rules “punitive”. After the MEAA sued in June 2025 over the rolling fixed-term contract structure that had made Lattouf vulnerable, the ABC attempted to embed probation clauses inside those same contracts five months later. While staff voted “No”, the effort by ABC management was a further signal to staff that, despite losing in court, nothing had changed with management: the environment at the ABC was still designed for staff to fall into line and reduce staff dissent on the editorial line on Gaza — as confirmed by the ABC MEAA House Committee, which linked management’s conduct directly to its “failed defence of its illegal termination of an employee due to her political opinions”.

The ABC’s response to losing in court was to make staff dissent on Gaza more costly; the chilling effect was the policy. Eighteen months into a documented genocide, Australia’s public broadcaster was tightening the conditions under which its journalists could speak about it.

“Impartiality” as a weapon for “muzzling… human rights” (para. 23)

What A Collective Crime documents at the inter-state level — “narrative manipulations and reproduction of Israeli fabrications”, “a simplistic rhetoric of ‘balance’ reinforc[ing] diplomatic protection” — operates inside the public broadcaster as the daily editorial frame.

For each of the abovementioned failures, the ABC invoked “impartiality” to discipline Lattouf, the petition signatories, the staff who wrote the FOI document, and the journalists the Janke report describes. GC34 para. 23 is explicit: the Article 19(3) grounds on which expression may legitimately be restricted “may never be invoked as a justification for the muzzling of any advocacy of… human rights”.

Lattouf was fired for sharing a Human Rights Watch report — the textbook example of what para.23 of GC34 is referring to. The ABC News Director’s written warning that signing a human-rights petition “may bring into question your ability to cover the story impartially” was the same mechanism, applied before the dismissal. The Janke report found it systemic: “[editorial policies] are something People of Colour are more often reminded of, than White staff — feels like [editorial policies] are weaponised against People of Colour” (p.70). The post-judgement speech-policy tightening — extending surveillance to WhatsApp and private messaging — extended the muzzle to the channels of private staff communication. Janke identified the journalists most likely to challenge state-aligned framing. The “impartiality” mechanism reaches them first.

The “impartiality” mechanism, applied this way, is intended to provide plausible deniability by silencing journalists most likely to recognise a genocide and report on it. It implies that the impartial position is Zionist and aligned with Australia’s geopolitical actions, while those recognising Israel’s war crimes are dismissed as unreliable, too extreme or political — a racist trope embedded in the Australian government’s Zionist policy.

Self-clearance: denying the breaches themselves

Against this evidentiary record — three independent studies measuring systematic bias toward Israeli framing, two hundred staff documenting the pattern internally, the Federal Court’s finding of unlawful dismissal and lobby capture, and ongoing fact-checker monitoring of continued breaches in real time — the ABC has failed to compensate or account for its systematic failures.

Janke’s recommendations were accepted only “in principle”. Recommendation 4 called for a centralised, independent team to support staff facing coordinated external attacks. The ABC instead made a “singularly vague and lame” one-line commitment to “improve… systems and processes” and folded staff-support roles into human resources — the opposite of independence.

The ABC Board funds and appoints the ABC Ombudsman, who applies a Code of Practice developed by the Board and the ABC’s Editorial Policies — both requiring “impartiality”. Even where the Ombudsman finds a breach, it cannot require any change to ABC content.

Ombudsman v Gaza

Israel–Palestine coverage has been the largest single source of complaints to the ABC Ombudsman since its establishment in 2022. Every breach finding on Gaza coverage since October 2023 was in favour of pro-Israel complainants, none in favour of pro-Palestine complainants. The first, in November 2023, was against the Hip Hop Show on the broadcaster’s youth radio station, after a First Nations musician guest presenter said: “the genocide, the oppression and the continued hate towards Palestine people on their indigenous lands is wild.” The audio was removed, production staff disciplined, and her remaining guest-host appearances cancelled. At the time it was broadcast, Israel had killed 14,854+ Palestinians in Gaza.

The Ombudsman intervened repeatedly to qualify the word “genocide” in coverage. In June 2024, an editor’s note was added to a News Breakfast segment in which a member of the Australian Parliament described Israeli conduct as genocide; the note said the term was “contested” and the ICJ case “still before the court.” The same correction was applied the following month on Radio National Breakfast. By then, the ICJ had issued three provisional-measures orders for Israel to prevent genocide, with 36,731+ killed in Gaza.

In January 2025, the Ombudsman found a breach in the use of the term “political prisoners” in radio coverage about Palestinians released under the so-called ceasefire, and directed the removal of the word “political”. 6 months prior, the ICJ had found Israel’s policies and practices “amount to apartheid”; the Special Rapporteur’s March 2026 Torture and Genocide report would later describe “Palestinian detainees labelled ‘terrorists’” by Israeli state policy in “a regime of systemic and widespread humiliation, coercion, and terror.” The “accuracy” framing of this correction is a sleight of hand: “political prisoners” is only inaccurate if the verdicts of Israel’s military court system — one with a 99.74% conviction rate — are taken as the factual baseline; yet an Inter-Parliamentary Union assessment of Marwan Barghouti’s trial found it “impossible to conclude” it was fair. In a torturous apartheid regime that effectively criminalises Palestinian existence, every Palestinian prisoner is a political prisoner. The Ombudsman’s intervention constitutes neither “impartiality” nor “accuracy” — it is the editorial adoption of Israel’s framing as fact.

Ombudsman v “impartiality”

Where complaints challenge the editorial framing itself, no breach finding follows, regardless of volume. 987 complaints raised 1,974 issues about a single Q+A episode on 13 November 2023 — the highest single-broadcast volume in the Ombudsman’s published record — almost all alleging the program lacked impartiality in ways that disadvantaged Palestinian and UN voices. The Ombudsman found no breach, stating that the ABC’s editorial standards “do not require that every perspective receives equal time, nor that every facet of every argument is presented within a single discussion or program.”

The broadcaster’s hostile interview of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges was also cleared. Hedges was in Australia in October 2025 to deliver a lecture on The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists (his National Press Club talk on the topic was cancelled days earlier). By that time, it had become “the deadliest period on record for journalists” since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data in 1992, with 255+ killed (68,216+ Gazans overall). On Late Night Live (20 October 2025), a senior journalist railroaded Hedges into a meta-debate about his credibility, repeatedly misquoting his statements and not acknowledging when corrected. Notably, the host was defending the very framing practices the November 2023 staff document had identified as bias. After 234 formal and 625 templated complaints, the Ombudsman accepted an on-air apology as resolving the matter: “I lost my cool once or twice which I deeply regret.” An interview about the assassination of Palestinian journalists in Gaza became a character assassination of their advocate. Same sleight of hand: the editorial choice that obscured Israel’s crimes was protected as routine and impartial.

The Ombudsman can also decline to review a complaint at all, leaving no record or published finding. On 9 March 2026, the inaugural episode of ABC’s National Forum aired, framed as a forum on Jewish Australian experience after the December 2025 Bondi mass shooting and set in the post-October 7 context. The panel ranged from staunchly Zionist to moderately Zionist; no Jewish non-Zionist or anti-Zionist voice, no Muslim voice, no Palestinian voice, no audience questions (unlike Q+A, the show it replaced). When the host raised the UN Commission of Inquiry’s genocide finding, he immediately added, “I’m not asking any of you to offer judgement on that” — editorially distancing the program from an established UN determination. The Jewish Council of Australia described the result as “an echo chamber”. After one complaint was escalated, the Ombudsman declined to review it, defending the program by listing other ABC programs that had platformed anti-Zionist Jewish voices elsewhere in its catalogue.

Excluding anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish Australians from this flagship program presents Jewish views as a Zionist monolith. This conflates Judaism with Zionism — the same conflation Australia formally adopted in December 2025 through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism — allowing criticism of Israel to be treated as antisemitism, which can then be weaponised against Palestine solidarity. The same “impartiality” mechanism that polices the word “genocide” in Gaza coverage also operates as a cover for Zionist partiality: it conditions the inclusion of Jewish voices on alignment with Israel, and legitimises Australian state inaction as compliance with editorial standards. The public has a right to receive a wide range of perspectives. Having different views represented elsewhere in ABC’s catalogue does not justify an exclusion this consequential from a National Forum this central.

The mechanism’s structure and purpose

When the Ombudsman declined to investigate the National Forum complaint, the complainant who escalated — Jewish anti-Zionist James Crafti — expressed his sentiments to Free Palestine Melbourne directly: “Not sure it is worth continuing to hit my head against a brick wall at this point.” That self-censorship and exhaustion is a product of the mechanism’s design.

A formal accountability body that clears the editorial line on Israel–Palestine over 2+ years of documented genocide does two things at once: (a) it absorbs the public pressure that would otherwise reach editorial decision-makers; and (b) it teaches the public — by repetition — that evidence-grounded complaint is structurally futile.

The first failure protects the editorial line from correction, thereby protecting the state’s alignment with Israel. The second failure produces the chilling effect, shaping the boundaries of what is then internalised by the public as acceptable opinion.

Article I of the Genocide Convention obligates Contracting Parties to prevent genocide; that prevention duty depends in part on public news sources being responsive to public dissent. When the broadcaster’s primary formal accountability layer absorbs the public’s signal, it demoralises its source, and suppresses dissent.

As evidenced above, the main public broadcaster responsible for disseminating information to the Australian public is committed to a policy of editorial standards that normalises and distracts from the state’s alignment with Israel’s genocide. This complicity is made out in how the practices contravene core human rights obligations (such as those identified by GC34); some of those practices have been found unlawful domestically. This pattern of conduct, under the guise of “impartiality”, demonstrates the extent of its policy in which editorial standards are invoked to actively aid, give cover for, and legitimise Australia’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.Conclusion