Guardian Australia amends for third time opinion piece by Malcolm Turnbull attacking Sky News Australia

Online website Guardian Australia’s amendments to Malcolm Turnbull’s critical article about Sky News Australia are starting to mount up.

Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Online website Guardian Australia has amended an opinion article co-written by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull for the third time, after complaints about some of its content, which was highly critical of Sky News Australia and of its new 24-hour voice channel.

Since the article headlined “Sky News spreading fear and falsehoods on Indigenous voice is an affront to Australian democracy”, co-written with former ACTU president Sharan Burrow ran online three weeks ago, an additional 180 words of footnotes have been added to explain issues with it.

The authors are co-chairs of Australians for a Murdoch royal commission and in the July 25 article they condemned Sky News Australia’s new channel which dedicates content entirely to the voice.

The pair wrote that it, “risks becoming a factory for misinformation, which will almost certainly be packaged up to feed YouTube’s angertainment algorithm”.

In correspondence on August 9 between Sky News’s head of news Chris Willis and the Guardian’s readers’ editor Elisabeth Ribbans and seen by The Australian, Ms Ribbans defended the article, saying it only anticipated what would be shown on the 24/7 voice channel.

“The article was published at lunchtime on the day the voice debate channel launched,” Ms Ribbans wrote.

“It was clearly distinguished as comment, being published in the opinion section of the website and explicitly marked as such.

“It did not purport to have observed the channel in action; no reference to its output was made.

“It focused substantially on Sky News’s output to date and … where the new channel was referenced it was in the future tense of what the authors “anticipate” would be seen.

“The authors did not hold themselves out as having written after watching the channel; on timescales alone, in terms of writing and editing process, this was unlikely to be opinion based on a review.”

Sky News had repeatedly complained to the website, run by editor Lenore Taylor, and said it “expressly” rejected assertions made by Mr Turnbull and Ms Burrow.

The Guardian’s publication of the Sky News complaint about the portrayal of its voice channel was one of three amendments added; the second was to replace an inaccurate link. The third states: “It was also amended on 8 August 2023 to clarify that the article was published on the day that the voice debate channel launched, and to further clarify that Meta’s rebuttal of the allegation of censorship postdated the claims made on Sky News”.

The Meta issue related to a claim by the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, made on Sky News, that IPA ads on Meta had been removed – censored by – the social media platform.

The Meta rebuttal was that the ads did not carry the required, standard, authorisation message.

The day after the July 25 article was published, Mr Turnbull continued to attack Sky News during an interview with ABC radio national breakfast host Patricia Karvelas who asked him: “have you watched Sky News’ 24-hour voice channel yet”, he replied, “well it hasn’t really started yet, it’s just getting under way”.

When he did the ABC interview the voice channel had been live for almost 24 hours.

The channel has aired numerous events, press conferences and panels on the upcoming voice to parliament referendum and featured campaigners from both sides of the debate.

The Guardian Australia was established in 2013 with the support of Mr Turnbull.