Antoinette Lattouf debacle reveals all that’s wrong with the ABC

You’d have to toss a coin to decide which has been the most crass and revelatory episode of the week: Bianca Censori at the Grammys or this shabby affair in Federal Court.

Antoinette Lattouf outside the Federal Court this week, and Kanye West and wife Bianca Censori at the Grammy Awards.

You would have to toss a coin to decide which has been the most crass and revelatory episode of the week. Was it Bianca Censori’s desperate attention-seeking at the Grammys when she dropped her fur coat to reveal more than anyone other than husband Kanye West wanted to see, or was it the Antoinette Lattouf unfair dismissal case against the ABC in the Federal Court?

The Lattouf affair has stripped bare the faults of the ABC’s editorial management and its enslavement to the insidious diversity, equity and inclusion movement.

A competing swirl of virtue-seeking rules and politically correct guidelines have conspired to produce a taxpayer-funded saga where everyone loses, especially taxpayers and ABC audiences.

It turns out that Lattouf, who styles herself as a non-white journalist campaigning for media diversity, was contracted by the ABC in large part because of how she helped to fill diversity targets. And it also transpires that Lattouf believes she was unfairly dismissed partly because of her Lebanese background.

Along the way we have been treated to ABC managing director David Anderson insisting that Australia is a racist country, while former chair Ita Buttrose was urging a fake illness to make Lattouf go away.

If the ABC were listed on the stock exchange rather than the inventory of government grantees, its shares would be plummeting. And if anybody was really in charge, a major shake-up would be under way, starting with editorial management and those implementing the “Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Plan”.

So let us backtrack and explain how this imbroglio has unfolded. Incredibly, it all hinges on a rather unremarkable five-day, fill-in stint for ABC radio in Sydney.

The ABC needed a morning host for the week before Christmas in 2023, and even though Ultimo would have been full of reporters and producers eager to give it a go, they decided to give the prized gig to Lattouf, who had taken similar casual opportunities over the preceding 18 months. Lattouf was a broadcast journalist, most notably with Channel 10, who had switched to freelance work in 2022.

She also styled herself as a media diversity campaigner, co-founding Media Diversity Australia in 2017. At the time Lattouf told The Australian: “It’s not just about getting more brown faces on television. It’s also about wider cultural perspectives among writers, producers, researchers – anyone who creates the content Australia sees and hears.”

Presenter and journalist Antoinette Lattouf pictured leaves the Federal Court in Sydney.

In 2022, Lattouf published a book, How to Lose Friends and Influence White People, which was billed as exploring “how to make a difference when championing change and racial equality”. Quite the activist.

In 2019, she appeared a few times on Sky News as an occasional panellist on a show I hosted. I had no idea of Lattouf’s ethnic or religious background, or that she identified with as belonging to a minority or non-white group, and nor was I interested.

All I knew was that she articulated political views that were generally green-left and divergent from mine in an engaging fashion – that was the diversity I wanted. On air we once discussed an ABC internal diversity survey which I argued was an outrageous intrusion. Lattouf disagreed, saying, “the ABC is continually criticised for not representing the Australian population, and rightly so”.

So you can see why the ABC soon started using her as a casual host – she would blend seamlessly into their culture. But as the court case has revealed, there was also blatant box-ticking at play.

“As part of our diversity policy, a number of future ABC presenters were identified,” said ABC radio Sydney manager Steve Ahern in an email revealed to the court. “Antoinette was one of them.” And Ahern elaborated, “Her background is Lebanese-Christian, she grew up in Western Sydney, the child of immigrants … she’d been selected in part having regard to the ABC’s diversity policy.”

There you go. The broadcasting behemoth and the media diversity activist were lucky to find each other, a media marriage made in heaven.

So how did it all go wrong? And who is at fault?

Well, apart from ticking diversity boxes, Lattouf also would have been chosen because her political views aligned with the ABC’s green-left monoculture. It seems no conservatives or centrists are ever considered for these positions.

Yet it was her frankness in remaining true to those values in her social media profile that embarrassed the ABC and saw her abruptly removed. The case has provided an extraordinary insight into the national broadcaster’s misplaced priorities, sensitivity to criticism, bureaucratic processes and lily-livered leadership.

The timing was critical – this was only six weeks after the October 7 atrocities, and Lattouf’s extreme views were publicly evident on social media. On October 16 (two days before her ABC stint began), Lattouf posted a video on Instagram that accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, apartheid and illegal occupation.

Many people in this debate have insinuated an ugly false equivalence between the actions of Hamas and Israel, but there was no insinuation from Lattouf, she was as wild, unsubtle and erroneous as you could get, directly equating Hamas and the Israeli government. “Both are extremists,” she said.

Yet with that freshly on the public record, the ABC thought it would be a good idea for her to host morning radio two days later as a rational, reasonable and objective host in Australia’s largest city?! This was madness.

But it was not Lattouf’s fault. All she did was make herself available.

The Federal Court will rule on the legal technicalities, but my assessment from the standpoint of taxpayers and ABC audiences is that the ABC made a deeply unwise decision to hand over a public broadcasting microphone to a polemicist with extreme views on a current controversial war. When they belatedly realised their mistake, they treated her unfairly – in effect, Lattouf was made to pay for the ABC’s error in hiring her.

Even though Lattouf was not discussing the Middle East on air (what a way to run a public broadcaster, avoid the most crucial global issue to dodge controversy), the ABC received many complaints from Jewish listeners and “pro-­Israel activists” familiar with her views. After the first day ABC radio content director Elizabeth Green told Lattouf about the complaints and recommended she keep a low profile on social media, but Lattouf did not want to go silent and claims she struck an agreement to post only “factual information from reputable sources”.

On her third day, the Wednesday, Lattouf shared a social media post by Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. This was pivotal because it appears to have been the trigger, or at least the excuse, to take Lattouf off air for her remaining two days.

Lattouf, of course, claims the tweet was factual information from a reputable source, and thereby allowable under her agreement. I would argue that Human Rights Watch is not a reputable source and that the information it shared was not factual.

But here again, the ABC was hoist on its own petard. Because ABC news coverage has given HRW a platform and reported the very same claims circulated by Lattouf.

You can see why Lattouf believed she was treated unfairly. Her extreme views and public posturing had not changed since the ABC appointed her but, in response to many complaints, the ABC was waking up. Managing director Anderson searched Lattouf’s social media accounts and told the court this week he realised ABC radio had made a mistake employing her. At the time, many emails of complaint were going directly to the chair.

“Has Antoinette been replaced?” Ita Buttrose emailed Anderson. “I’m over getting emails about her.” The managing director responded that Lattouf would finish up her five-day contract on the Friday.

“I have a whole clutch more complaints,” replied Buttrose.

“Why can’t she come down with flu or Covid or a stomach upset? We owe her nothing. We’re copping criticism because she wasn’t honest when she was appointed.”

The fake disappearance was novel. But from Buttrose to Anderson and further down the chain, it was made clear to Sydney radio that they wanted Lattouf off air.

The social media post about starvation as a weapon of war on the Wednesday provided a pretext. And the manager who enacted the sacking, chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor, probably “missed a step”, according to Anderson, because Lattouf was not given a chance to defend herself before being shown the door.

Where the court proceedings became even messier is the debate about whether Lattouf’s social media post constituted grounds for dismissal. The court has heard about controversial and highly political posts from senior ABC presenters such as Paul Barry, Laura Tingle, John Lyons and Patricia Karvelas that appear to have breached guidelines but have not resulted in dismissal.

In was in this context, defending a Tingle post, that Anderson argued that calling Australia a racist country was a factual statement. Barry, on the other hand, has accused Israel of “killing journalists” and Lyons’ extensive commentary on the Middle East is consistently antagonistic towards Israel and apologetic towards Hamas.

It seems Lattouf was sacrificed to assuage the critics because, as a casual, she was expendable, while others get to flout the ABC guidelines with impunity. The trouble is the national broadcaster underestimated Lattouf – she was up for the fight.

Clearly, they never should have hired her. But having made that mistake, with three days down and two to go, they should have let her finish the week and let the problem subside. They would have been under no obligation to employ her again.

Instead, Lattouf was treated appallingly. She even claims her skin colour was a factor in that treatment. The ABC has had its ugly diversity and inclusion linen aired publicly, while revealing a lack of judgment in editorial decisions.

The episode proves what some of us have pointed out for many years: the broadcaster tries to promote a superficial diversity based on race, gender and sexual preference – all the things that should not matter – while stubbornly avoiding the intellectual or ideological diversity that should be central to its mission.

The ABC tolerates political tendentiousness, but only if it favours the green-left. Lattouf was an attractive appointment to meet ABC political and diversity goals, but Sydney radio management either did not do due diligence on her extreme views or, more likely, her views did not seem particularly extreme to ABC staff.

The national broadcaster also failed to comprehend the risk of employing a self-styled advocate for media diversity when they needed objectivity. In the end, the ABC has exposed its shabbiness for all to see, and made Lattouf a martyr to her cause.