COMMENT BY GERARD HENDERSON FOR THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN – SATURDAY
16 AUGUST 2025
Interviewed on ABC Radio Darwin on July 31, the recently appointed ABC managing director and editor-in-chief Hugh Marks received what sounded like a Dorothy Dixer style soft question. Jess Ong put it to her employer: “There is the idea, this commentary, that the ABC is too left-leaning, too woke; how do you respond?”
Marks is an experienced media operative. He did not give his interviewer the answer she appeared to want – namely, to throw the switch to denial and say the taxpayer- funded public broadcaster was fair and balanced and so on.
Instead, Marks declared that he is a pretty “straight-talking, straight to the point, sort of person”. He added, “I think that’s a new approach for the ABC”. And he wondered how long it would take him “to influence the culture of the organisation”. But Marks acknowledged that “we need to talk about the content”.
Without question, Marks has inherited a difficult gig. The ABC is an over-managed bureaucracy which is effectively a staff collective. Marks wants to address the ABC content, which is currently controlled by presenters and producers.
It’s a long time since an ABC managing director, who is also paid to be editor-in-chief, has acted in a way that the editor-in-chief of a commercial media outfit would act. ABC staff believe that it is their right to determine content – not that of management.
The ABC as a staff collective is one matter. But it is also a conservative free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its leading news and current affairs programs or its online news. In the past, ABC management has denied this, but no one has ever named a conservative within the organisation who fits the bill.
This leads to the lack of viewpoint diversity – I believe that the term was first popularised by Uri Berliner who resigned from National Public Radio (NPR) in April 2024 due to what he regarded as its hostility towards Israel when reporting the Israel-Hamas war.
Writing in The Free Press on September 24, 2024, Berliner illustrated his point with respect to United States politics. He wrote: “In [Washington] D.C, where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions, zero Republicans. None.”
Voters in Australia are not required to register as they are in the US. However, if this were the case, I’m sure you would find that the overwhelming majority of ABC journalists in the capital cities support the Greens, or left-wing Labor or the Teals. And it would be close to zero with respect to the Coalition.
The ABC’s defence is to state that there is no relationship between political and social views that journalists have and how they do their job in reporting news, determining interviews, appointing staff and so on. Well they would, wouldn’t they? – to paraphrase what the late Mandy Rice-Davies declared in a somewhat different context.
I was reminded of this when I read an article last Tuesday by John Lyons on the ABC website titled “Western nations’ moves still fall-short of real pressure on Israel, but there are more options”.
Lyons is the ABC’s Americas editor based in Washington DC. Previously he held the position of global affairs editor. Those who have read Lyons’ 2021 book Dateline Jerusalem will know that he is highly critical not only of contemporary Israel but also of the leaders of the Jewish community in Australia.
So it came as no surprise when, in the first four paragraphs of his ABC article, Lyons not only criticised “the Israeli government” but “the main Israeli lobby group in Australia”. You would think that the ABC’s Americas editor would focus more on contemporary US politics and leave Israel to the ABC’s Jerusalem-based journalists.
Ever since Israel went into Gaza in its attempt to defeat the terrorist group Hamas which had launched its barbaric October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the ABC has devoted considerable taxpayer funds to the Israel-Hamas war. However, for the most part, the coverage has been one-sided in its hostility to Israel.
A few recent examples illustrate the point. Neither ABC TV Insiders nor ABC TV Media Watch did an on-air correction after having shown the photo of the Gazan boy Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq and his mother. Neither program stated that the child was suffering from cerebral palsy among other illnesses – not starvation as the photo implied. Also, there was the fact that his mother looked well – as did his older brother in other photos.
To be fair, Insiders did not have much time to research the issue before it went to air on July 27. But it did have time to make a correction the following week. ABC TV’s Media Watch has a staff of around ten for a 15-minute program. It ran the same picture when program research should have pointed to the authenticity of the photo being challenged by the London journalist David Collier. I was aware of this by midday on July 28, Media Watch went to air at 9.15 pm that night, with only a limited qualification before the photo was shown. There was no subsequent on-air correction.
On August 10, Insiders discussed the Israel-Hamas war. One of the panelists was SBS News’ Anna Henderson. She managed to discuss the issue without once mentioning Hamas. There was no challenge from the presenter David Speers.
Last Tuesday, Radio National Breakfast gave soft interviews to a trio of Australian critics of Israel – Chris Sidoti, Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi and Senator Fatima Payman. Liberal Party Senator, Michaelia Cash received an interrogation. So much so that when the Opposition shadow minister said, “we’ve probably both gone and had a cup of coffee this morning…”, Sally Sara responded, “I don’t drink coffee, Senator.” Really.
Meanwhile, the week commenced with 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson interviewing Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and, later, Israel’s ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon. The former received a soft interview, the latter an interrogation with a number of hostile interjections.
Good luck to Marks with his focus on ABC content. But reform to content can only come about if there is viewpoint diversity among ABC journalists.
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Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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