FRESH AIR

UPDATES

ABC’s McNeill vowed to be an advocacy journo, and she delivered

Sep 26, 2016 | Ahron Shapiro

A year and a half ago, after ABC announced Sophie McNeill as its new Middle East Correspondent, AIJAC questioned how the ABC could give the sensitive post to a journalist who had openly taken sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After all, McNeill had once written a story for the website Electronic Intifada – a website that openly calls for Israel’s destruction.

Unlike her ABC colleague Fran Kelly, who said that once she began working as a journalist with the National Broadcaster, she ceased being an activist, McNeill has never recanted her pledge to use journalism to serve one particular narrative. As I pointed out in 2015, when you craft your reporting to further a political agenda, that makes you, by definition, an advocacy journalist.

In 2011, in an interview with ANU’s Victoria Mason ahead of a lecture she gave at the university entitled “Reporting from Conflict Zones”, McNeill offered two examples of how she prefers to frame stories from the point of view of the people who are “really suffering in a situation”. Tellingly, both examples she gave were of Palestinians – and one specifically referred to Gaza children with cancer.

If you just try and frame stories from the point of view of the people who are really suffering in a situation, be it in Lebanon, if you re hanging out in a Palestinian refugee camp, [or] in Gaza you re hanging out, you know, at the children’s cancer ward. One of the saddest things I’ve seen in my whole life is spending some time filming in a children’s cancer ward in Gaza. I just think if you just – if you look at a situation and you just – yeah, I guess just try and spend time with the people who are – who really don t have any power and it is hard, you know, for them to have a voice. Then that’s, yeah, that’s the kind of journalism I want to do.

Five years later, McNeill has now fulfilled her ambition to do a feature story about children in Gaza suffering from cancer, in a 10-minute story for Lateline that aired on September 21.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with reporting about the challenges facing young cancer patients in Gaza and their families. How it is reported, however, does matter. And here – in a predictable fashion that has become McNeill’s professional calling card on the Israeli-Palestinian issue – she has improperly used the ABC as a vehicle to promote the Palestinian narrative:

1) Portray Palestinians as the victims. This is done by using as much anecdotal, personal stories and heartstring-tugging footage as possible.
2) Portray Israel as the victimiser ideally through utterances of the Palestinians with the grievances you’re looking for. Israeli representatives get their token right to reply with an impersonal single statement slipped in at the end of the story.
3) (In the case of Gaza) Downplay or ignore the responsibility of Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and especially Gaza’s Hamas government to serve the medical needs of these Palestinians. They aren’t given reply at the end of the story because they don’t stand accused by the story narrative. Israel does.

For the purposes of clarity, a deconstruction of McNeill’s Lateline piece appears in a separate blog to be published shortly.

Unlike the deconstruction, this blog does not stand as a critique of McNeill per se but rather of those people at the ABC responsible for hiring her as the National Broadcaster’s sole Jerusalem-based Middle East Correspondent, and overseeing her work there.

The ABC dispatched her to Jerusalem despite the fact that, before she took the post, they knew her track record on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, were made aware that she had written a piece for the Electronic Intifada, had appeared as a guest speaker at a pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Palestinian advocacy function and that, in 2011, she had talked about her desire to perform as an advocate and not an impartial journalist.

McNeill’s decision to file virtually the exact story that she proposed in 2011 as an example of the sort of journalism she “want(s) to do” to promote her advocacy agenda, and her ABC editors’ decision to let her, stands as an indictment of the ABC’s ability to do its job in an impartial way as required by law. Among other things, it should properly be put to ABC’s new Director Michelle Guthrie during Senate Estimates as part of routine parliamentary scrutiny of how the ABC performs its taxpayer-funded role.

Gutherie was not in charge when the decision was made to give McNeill the Middle East Bureau job, but as the head of the ABC, she should have to answer for McNeill’s brazen attempt here to get ABC to support her apparent desire to run the ABC’s taxpayer-funded Middle East Bureau as an advocacy journalist and not an impartial one.

Given the ABC’s statutory obligations to be impartial, she shouldn’t be allowed to run her own agenda, and the ABC must be scrutinised for its decision to let her.

Ahron Shapiro

Tags:

RELATED ARTICLES


Shaking,Hands,Israel,And,Morocco

Morocco and Israel: A disaster underscores how the Abraham Accords have changed the region

Sep 19, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR
Iran Protests (52383779726)

After over 7 months of silence, Government rejects nearly all Senate recommendations on Iran

Sep 14, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR
1J8A7424edit

NSW Parliament pays tribute to AIJAC’s Jeremy Jones, OBM

Sep 14, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR
IAEA head Rafael Grossi (Image: Dean Calma/Flickr)

Sept. 2023 IAEA report: Iran lies and edges even closer to nuclear weapons

Sep 12, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR
A room in Herod the Great's palace near Jericho (image: Flickr/Ian Scott)

Is UNESCO Going to Erase Jewish History From Another Israeli City?

Sep 11, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR, In the media
PNG Prime Minister James Marape opens the PNG Embassy in Jerusalem with Israeli PM Netanyahu (GPO/Screenshot)

Israel and PNG: A relationship built upon faith

Sep 8, 2023 | Featured, Fresh AIR
A scene from the unusually intense and extended battle that took place in Jenin on June 19, which left eight Israelis injured and seven Palestinians dead, six of them gunmen (Photo: Ayman Nobani/dpa/Alamy Live News)

Growing security challenges in the northern West Bank

Jun 27, 2023 | Update
Khamenei called for Iran to create 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power capacity - which would require at least 19 more plants the size of Iran's only current nuclear power plant, the Russian-built Bushehr plant (Image: Wikimedia Commons).

Iran’s ambiguous pronouncements on a possible new nuclear deal

Jun 16, 2023 | Update
Image: Shutterstock, Stuart Miles

A “Less for Less” Nuclear Deal with Iran?

Jun 9, 2023 | Update
Recent weeks have seen the rei-gnition of intense discussions regarding US efforts to negotiate a Saudi-Israel normalisation deal (Image: Shutterstock, lunopark)

Saudi-Israel deal progress?/ Israel and Erdogan’s Turkey

Jun 5, 2023 | Update
Palestinian demonstrators demand the resignation of PA President Mahmoud Abbas - the PA is increasingly viewed by many Palestinians as no longer representing their interests (Photo: Shutterstock, Anas-Mohammed)

Palestinian Authority in Crisis

May 25, 2023 | Update
Screenshot from a tiktok video showing Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets being launched at Israel from amidst civilians in a heavily populated area of Gaza

“Shield and Arrow”: Yet another Gaza conflict

May 12, 2023 | Update

SIGN UP FOR AIJAC EMAILS

RECENT POSTS

Israeli tanks in the Sinai Desert, 1973 (Image: Public domain)

From 1973 to Israel’s next war

Image001

The Last Word: Jeremy Jones – In Memoriam

Clinton appreciated Netanyahu’s political skills, but the two were divided over some key policy issues, leading to a tense relationship (Image: Shutterstock)

Essay: Bibi’s seven presidents

Destined to be an iconic landmark: The new National Library of Israel (Image: Herzog & De Meuron/ National Library of Israel/ Twitter)

Biblio File: Unique monument for the “People of the Book”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (Image: Shutterstock)

Deconstruction Zone: US outreach vs. Iranian aggression

Israeli tanks in the Sinai Desert, 1973 (Image: Public domain)

From 1973 to Israel’s next war

Image001

The Last Word: Jeremy Jones – In Memoriam

Clinton appreciated Netanyahu’s political skills, but the two were divided over some key policy issues, leading to a tense relationship (Image: Shutterstock)

Essay: Bibi’s seven presidents

Destined to be an iconic landmark: The new National Library of Israel (Image: Herzog & De Meuron/ National Library of Israel/ Twitter)

Biblio File: Unique monument for the “People of the Book”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (Image: Shutterstock)

Deconstruction Zone: US outreach vs. Iranian aggression

SORT BY TOPICS