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Failing Gaza: Journalist enlists the political, professional and personal to demand media reform

Presenting Australia’s oldest public journalism oration, journalist Nour Haydar delivers a searing critique of media coverage of Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and on newsroom cultures that marginalise journalists with lived experience of the region. Coco Veldkamp reports.

Failing Gaza: Journalist enlists the political, professional and personal to demand media reform

"Too often conversations about objectivity ignore the whole process of news gathering, and news writing involves subjective choices and values judgements ... I believe in following the weight of evidence and I believe objectivity is important - but so too is acknowledging its limitations": Nour Haydar delivering the University of Melbourne's AN Smith journalism lecture, which dates back to 1936. Image: Coco Veldkamp

Words and pictures by Coco Veldkamp
 

Failures by media organisations in their coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and “the horrors being inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza” have fuelled the crisis of trust in traditional media, with “long term consequences that cannot be overstated”, former ABC political reporter Nour Haydar has warned.

Haydar, who quit the ABC in January citing concerns about its coverage of the conflict and treatment of culturally diverse staff, called out media organisations for often dehumanising, apathetic and timid coverage of the conflict when she delivered the prestigious AN Smith journalism lecture at the University of Melbourne.

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The number of Palestinians killed in the conflict has surpassed 43,000, according to figures from Palestinian authorities, she said, “and could be as high as 180,000 according to some public health experts”. A potential toll of up to 186,000 was included in a recent study published by The Lancet including estimates of indirect deaths over time due to disease and untreated health issues.

Now a senior producer with Guardian Australia, Haydar also highlighted the deaths of 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers. “How is it that journalists will rightly express outrage about the arbitrary detention of western journalists in China, Iran and Russia and yet there has been no uproar about the killing of our colleagues in Gaza? Or about Israel’s ban on foreign reporters that has prevented international media organisations from telling stories from the inside?”

The daughter of Lebanese migrants, Haydar drew on tragic family history and media treatment of it across two “profound and personal moments in my life” to argue for reforms to journalistic practice.

In 2006, her family’s village in southern Lebanon was under attack by Israeli forces, and her grandmother was killed by an Israeli drone strike as she fled in a convoy under white flags. “According to my uncle’s statement, she lost her arm, her leg, and died in 10 minutes”. When Australian media reported the story, they covered the family’s grief, but not the political and historical context, she said. “This frustrating lack of analysis persists to the present.”

In 2015, her father murdered her mother, Salwa Haydar. Several years later, Haydar participated in a program by the Our Watch Institute to develop best-practice principles for covering domestic violence. Similar principles should be applied to state-inflicted violence, Haydar argued.

“By consistently naming the perpetrator, giving voice to those with lived experience, resisting victim-blaming and dehumanising tropes and ensuring accurate context is included, we can bolder the credibility of our work,” Haydar said.

“Doing this would not get in the way of traditional journalistic principles of truth, fairness, and accuracy, but rather, it would enhance them and remedy some of the inherent imbalance between occupier and occupied, just as it does between abuser and abused.”

Haydar called for newsrooms to value the insights and lived experiences of journalists from diverse backgrounds, particularly those with personal connections to regions affected by conflict, as essential to providing accurate and empathetic coverage. This would not undermine journalistic integrity, but enrich it, she argued.

“Too often conversations about objectivity ignore the whole process of news gathering, and news writing involves subjective choices and values judgements. From what stories we run and what resources we invest in them, to the lead sentence, to the headline, to the choice of words and turn of phrase, to who gets quoted and in what order,” Haydar said.

“I believe in following the weight of evidence and I believe objectivity is important – but so too is acknowledging its limitations.”

The title of Haydar’s oration asked “who gets to shape the news?” While applauding efforts in recent years to bring more diversity to newsrooms, she highlighted the distance still to go.

“If your news diet is only made up of Australian news, you are only receiving a sliver of the picture,” she said, “one that is filtered, written, curated and conditioned, in many instances by people who have never been to the Middle East, who have a limited or little understanding of its cultures and religions, and whose knowledge base on Israel and Palestine is largely derived from other western news sources”.

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The lecture ended with a standing ovation from the sold-out event.

Moderating questions from the audience, Professor Andrew Dodd, director of the university’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, said that critics of Israel often make their arguments with “lots of qualifications”, in particular “to say what happened on October 7th was wrong”. Noting Haydar had not included any reference to the 2023 Hamas attacks which killed about 1200 people and took more than 250 hostage, “that must have been a conscious decision … Can you talk us through your thinking about that?”

“I think we have over the last 13 months had to bear witness to some incredible atrocities,” Haydar responded. “The question itself is an insulting one. It is one that assumes that as Arabs we do not recognise that all humanity is equal.

“I wanted to make a point tonight that for 13 months we have seen unbelievable amounts of violence and tonight was about my reflection on Palestine, it was about my grandmother, it was about my experiences in newsrooms – which are valid and don’t need to come with qualifications.”

If you’d like to hear Nour Haydar’s AN Smith lecture on media coverage of Palestine, you can tune into Radio National’s Big Ideas on Thursday 5 December or, after the broadcast, on this link.

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