Barry’s muddled Media Watch a waste of time

On Media Watch on Monday, Paul Barry tried to examine the ethical issues for journalism — and I suppose, the limits of free speech — raised by the controversy over a column by Mike Carlton in The Sydney Morning Herald and the cartoon by Glen Le Lievre that accompanied that column.

The cartoon was of a fat big-nosed old Jew, sitting on a couch with a Star of David on the back using a video game box to shoot missiles into Gaza.

The SMH had apologised for the publication of the cartoon and accepted that it traded in anti-Jewish stereotypes at best and was offensive and brought pain to many people. In my view, it did much more. It recycled the sort of cartoon image of Jews that was standard fare in Nazi publications in Germany throughout the Nazi era.

Mike Carlton resigned from the paper after a messy process in which he was first asked to apologise for his abusive responses to readers who had emailed him about his column. Some of these emails were vigorous, to say the least. No doubt some were abusive. Carlton apparently was prepared to issue such apologies but then a more senior executive at Fairfax decided Carlton also had to be suspended. At that point, he resigned.

It was all this that Barry set out to examine. That’s a role Media Watch should play, examine the ethical issues involved when editors decide what is acceptable for publication and broadcast and what is not. Editors make those decisions every day. On what basis these decisions are made is well worth examining.

The trouble is that Barry’s examination was extremely muddled. At the end, it was impossible to say just what he was arguing except that he liked Carlton, that the SMH over-reacted in dealing with his abuse of readers, that perhaps some powerful people were involved in the way he was dealt with, and using quotes from Carlton himself, that maybe Fairfax had caved in because of a campaign against him by News Corp.

For what it’s worth, I think Carlton should have been allowed to apologise to those he abused and then gone on writing his Saturday column. Instead, we have this ludicrous situation where it is being widely suggested he was somehow nobbled for the column, that this was yet another successful strike by powerful groups to silence the critics of Israel and its actions in Gaza. I believe that whether he meant to or not, Barry played into this notion of powerful forces able to silence journalists.

They silence cartoonists too, the argument goes, and this is really where it became impossible to understand what Barry was arguing. He said a few perfunctory things about how the cartoon may have been offensive but then he quickly went on to contrast the strong reaction to the Jewish cartoon to what he called the much milder reaction to a cartoon by Bill Leak in which he portrayed a Hamas fighter telling a child “There now, you go out and play and win the PR war for daddy’’. Barry suggested the cartoons were equally challenging or offensive but one had caused a huge fuss that resulted in an abject apology by the SMH and the other the mildest of possible responses and a robust defence of Leak and his cartoon by the editor of The Australian.

How pathetic then was the SMH, Barry implied. How powerful was a certain group in the community and a certain media organisation that a cartoon considered offensive to Jews gets so widely lambasted while an equally offensive carton by Leak about Palestinians is largely ignored and gets the support of his editor.

To reinforce all this Barry recalled the cartoon by Michael Leunig that The Age had refused to publish. He quoted Leunig at some length about how he has been abused and vilified by people who dislike his views on Israel and the Palestinians and how it was a pity that the SMH apologised for the fat Jew cartoon because such an apology makes it harder for cartoonists to tell the truths that some people do not want to hear.

Barry did not show the cartoon that The Age refused to publish, which I imagine made it hard for people to know what he was on about.

Well I was the editor of The Age at the time and I refused to publish the cartoon. I refused because the cartoon clearly suggested that the Israelis were dealing with the Palestinians the way the Nazis had dealt with the Jews. The Jenin refugee camp was the equivalent of Auschwitz.

Barry said nothing about this. One of his researchers had called me to ask why I refused to publish the cartoon. I told her I refused to publish it because suggesting Israelis (Jews) were the modern-day Nazis was not just factually unjustifiable, to put it mildly, but a form of vilification that no editor should accept.

Clearly what I had to say was of no interest to Barry. Instead, he canvassed a few cartoonists who confirmed that they found it most difficult to draw anything about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Barry inferred this was because of the response they got to cartoons on this subject from …. well who knows?

So what about the Leak cartoon? Well Barry himself said that had the fat Jew been taken out of the cartoon in the SMH and replaced by say Netanyahu (and I’d say an Israeli soldier) the cartoon would have been edgy but OK to publish. It was the fat Jew that made it unacceptable, the fat big-nosed Jew gleefully firing rockets that made it clearly anti-Semitic.

In that case, why is Leak’s cartoon ethically equivalent to one the published in the SMH? It is clearly a Hamas fighter in the cartoon and not any sort of representative image of Palestinians. He is not suggesting that long -suffering Palestinians are sending their children off to be human shields or to die for the cause. He is saying that this is a strategy employed by Hamas. Is that not at least arguable?

It is important to examine all these issues, issues I believe a program like Media Watch ought to tackle. Unfortunately, Barry’s attempt to tackle these issues was muddled and in my view, in the end a waste of time.

Michael Gawenda is a former editor-in-chief of The Age.