Don’t say the P word

Nobody ever worked out exactly what crime Antoinette Lattouf had committed; but they didn’t miss in ensuring she was punished for it.

Watching the seemingly endless parade of ABC apparatchiks through the witness box of the Federal Court, one was struck by two things: the stark whiteness of the power structure of the national broadcaster; and the intensity of everyone’s denial that they were in any way personally responsible for the decisions that were made.

From Ita down, nobody at any point wanted to take Lattouf off the air. Nobody was entirely sure what she’d done wrong, but everyone was relying heavily on someone else’s assessment. Those who did bother looking at anything weren’t sure what they’d seen, or against what standards of behaviour it should be assessed.

In the end, if the ABC’s case is to be accepted, Lattouf was sacked because keeping her on air risked the organisation’s reputation for (and statutory commitment to) “impartiality”, although nothing she’d done on air  – or anywhere else while she was employed – had crossed that line.

Ita cleared things up – Lattouf, she believed, is an “activist”. Not, she hastened to add, that the side Lattouf had chosen mattered. That didn’t matter to anyone at the ABC, no.

Ita and friends would have us believe that Lattouf was too controversial to be on ABC Radio – that is, should never have been allowed on ABC Radio in the first place – because she had adopted a stance as an activist on the Israel/Gaza conflict following October 7. However, and this is the critical point, not because her activism was pro-Palestinian or opposed to Israel.

Trying to untangle the convoluted explanations proffered by the various ABC managers of the corporation’s editorial and social media policies is literally impossible, for the simple reason that they none of it made any sense.

However, the point they really wanted to make was that it wasn’t what Lattouf posted about Israel/Gaza that mattered, but the fact that she had posted on it at all. After all, they ultimately claim that her point of no return was posting a link to a Human Rights Watch report that the ABC itself had posted the same day. That, some witnesses confirmed, proved that she wasn’t impartial.

Okay. So the ABC was being scrupulously agnostic, and never turned its mind to the question of  why it is that having a view on Gaza or Palestinians is seen as controversial by definition.

That’s in the context of why it was considering Lattouf’s position at all: the coordinated email campaign that was clogging Ita’s very irritated inbox, and causing managing director David Anderson to take it upon his late night self to google Lattouf and peruse her socials.

Anderson concluded that said socials were filled with “antisemitic hate”, aligning with what the emails were claiming in unison. Ita was cranky. 

My sense is that everyone’s denials of bias – that they were consciously doing the bidding of the pro-Israel lobbyists who had coordinated the email doxxing campaign against Lattouf – were sincere. I think they really thought they were being neutral and fair.

This is what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky were referring to with their theory of “manufactured consent”. It’s the unconscious absorption of mass media organisations into the institutions of the status quo, where they function effectively as system-supportive propaganda outlets. What they do, functionally, is reinforce the dominant narrative, by their editorial choices, who they platform, what opinions they allow.

There was a complete and honest absence of recognition in the witness box of the internalised racism that infects the ABC and enables it to deplatform a Lebanese woman on the wrong side of the debate when she had done literally nothing wrong. Equally absent was any recognition or understanding that they were all measuring “activism” and “lack of impartiality” against a purported standard of “normality” which is anything but.

Uncritical support for Israel and its actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon is a stance people are entitled to take, but it is not neutral or normal. Anderson’s unjustified insistence that Lattouf had done something antisemitic reflected his simple unconscious absorption of a dominant cultural trope constantly being reinforced by the institutions of political and media power – that criticism of Israel is necessarily antisemitism.

When history looks back, that last notion will sound as weird as it is. For now, however, we are in the eye of a hysterical storm, being propelled along by all the institutions of state, and we must just wait it out.