Journalism lost in push for ‘balance’ over truth

A journalist wears a marked vest near military in the West Bank. Picture: iStock

Around the turn of the century when I was a journalist and leader writer at The Age, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a frequent source of tension in the newsroom.

As an out-and-proud Jew and left-leaning Zionist, I had the odd rattling encounter, such as the time an editor implied I might struggle to write a leader on the Middle East “objectively”.

Alas, I find myself looking back on that sort of veiled anti-Semitism with a degree of nostalgia. Back then, “objective” reporting without fear or favour was considered the journalistic ideal, and the sometimes heated newsroom disputes centred on what that might look like in a particular context. That’s all changed.

In June, I was sacked from my weekly Age column for speaking out about activist journalists at the paper who were smothering my efforts to air the commonsense debates around paediatric gender transition and the clash between sex-based rights and rights based on “gender identity”. (The paper has since been pushing back against the censorious within its ranks.)

My experience resembled that of former Guardian columnists, Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman, who likewise found themselves alienated in their long-time intellectual home for questioning the more radical trans activism that seeks to deny the biological reality of sex.

Once a finely tuned BS detector was considered an attribute of good journalism, but now too many in the progressive media see it as a tool of oppression and weapon of “harm”.

A similar philosophy animates the unprecedented open letter, signed by a cohort of journalists at the ABC, Guardian and Nine, calling for a new approach to reporting the Israel-Hamas war. The letter implies that objectivity itself is a con, a means of perpetuating racist and colonialist narratives under the guise of “balance” and “both-sidesism”.

“Adhere to truth over ‘both-sidesism’,” is the letter’s key demand – and actually, I agree with it. I don’t find “balance” or “both-sidesism” particularly useful as a guiding principle of journalism. I much prefer the idea of journalism as a quest for the “truth”, a destination reached by weighing the credibility of sources, the veracity of the evidence and the broader factual context.

Unfortunately, these journalists’ version of the truth can only be arrived at through turning off one’s BS detector and seeing this brutal war as something other than a confrontation between a democratic state, with all its imperfections, and a jihadist terror group dedicated to its destruction.

Julie Szego

The letter is an Orwellian exercise in calling for “truth” while peddling gross distortions thereof. “Both-sidesism,” the letter states, “acts as a constraint on truth by shrouding the enormous scale of the human suffering currently being perpetrated by Israeli forces.” And yet: the enormous scale of the human suffering in Gaza as a consequence of Israel’s military action and blockade is a constant in the news cycle, as it should be.

Indeed, the shocking images of suffering Gazans have drawn thousands to the streets in anti-Israel protests, of which, again perplexingly, the journalists demand “full and fair coverage”.

I agree.

“Full and fair coverage” involves estimating crowd numbers and the backgrounds of attendees, as well as noting the placards – “From the river to the sea” and “Let’s clean the world of rubbish” alongside an image of the Star of David, a symbol of the Jewish people, being cast into the rubbish bin – and interrogating their meanings, and also reporting on the renegade pro-Palestine car and motorbike convoys taking the scenic route through Sydney’s distinctively Jewish suburbs, and the 200-odd mob that descended on Jewish Caulfield in response to a still unproven accusation that “Zionists” had torched a Palestinian-owned business.

The letter calls on reporters to treat unverified information from the democratically elected government of Israel and the terror group Hamas with the same “professional scepticism”. Israel “apparently” deliberately targets journalists, according to the letter; while Hamas, we can only presume by omission, fiercely respects the Fourth Estate.

The letter insists “the current conflict did not start on October 7” – that day of slaughter apparently a mere footnote in history, a history that should immediately be contextualised as the “expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands” in 1948 and so on.

But, curiously, this must never be contextualised as the Palestinians’ decades-long rejection of the Jewish people’s self-determination from before the 1947 United Nations Partition plan or by reference to Hamas’s origins in the Muslim Brotherhood with its anti-Semitic creed likewise pre-dating Israel’s creation.

But the point is: the signatories to this letter, or at least its instigators, well understand that the public can tell the difference between propaganda and the complicated, bloody mess that is the truth. So they seek to rewrite the rules of journalism as a way of bullying the profession into accepting as fact that which is deeply contested.

The rot, unfortunately, runs very deep when the national media section of the journalists’ union (the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance) endorses such a letter as it has done.

Being a true believer, I’m so “proud to be union”; I have been paying union dues even though I am technically unemployed. No more.

In keeping with the current vogue of grand pronouncements, I hereby renounce my membership of the journalists’ union, the MEAA, because whatever it’s about these days, it’s no longer journalism.

Julie Szego is a freelance journalist.