BY JUDE CORBET O'ROURKE

Prominent Australian news outlets have engaged in imbalanced reporting of the Israel-Gaza war, according to an Islamophobia Register Australia report.

The report delivers findings from a study that analysed the Instagram posts of six news outlets — ABC News, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, 9News, News.com.au and The Daily Aus — from October 7 to November 7 last year. It found five of those outlets displayed a lack of balanced reporting. 

Islamophobia Register Australia executive director Sharara Attai said the study was commissioned after the organisation found a 13-fold increase in Islamophobia since the start of the war. 

“We shouldn’t underestimate the role that news media has in influencing public perception of critical events like Israel’s war on Gaza,” Attai said.  

“There is a direct correlation between events that happen overseas and the way that media reports on these events, and incidents that play out in our communities.” 

The study reached three key findings: that Palestinians were humanised significantly less than Israelis, that there was unequal use of adjectives in descriptions, and that there was an imbalance in the use of passive, active and middle voice. 

Active voice describes an action by someone, passive voice shows an action done to someone, and middle voice is a grammatical state between active and passive, which doesn’t identify the actor responsible for an event, according to the study.

The study found that the passive and middle voices were used significantly more when attacks on Gaza were reported, but attacks on Israel were more likely to be reported in active voice. 

An example highlighted is a Daily Telegraph article that reported “bombs falling” on Gaza, which is middle voice and does not ascribe an actor, whereas Hamas was explicitly referred to in the active voice as an aggressor against Israel.

Attai said the voice used in reporting is crucial because it tells us who the media have held responsible for a given event.

“Because grammatical choices are more subtle … that kind of framing slips past the audience unnoticed, but it lingers long in the audience’s mind after they’ve closed Instagram,” she said.

Organiser and activist at Free Palestine Melbourne Michael Shaik said he has observed similar trends in reports on the war.

“You always hear adjectives like the ‘murderous’ or ‘brutal’ October attack, but when Israel bombs a refugee camp or invades a hospital or runs over people in bulldozers you never have the same adjectives used,” Shaik said.

“And that kind of framing is throughout the whole of the media, from the ABC to Fox News … SBS and everywhere in between.”

This was also observed in the Islamophobia Review Australia report, which found that highly emotive language was used “when it came to attacks against Israel, while downplaying the intensity of the language or removing it altogether when describing attacks on Palestine” in three of the six major news outlets.

The report named The Australian, Daily Telegraph and News.com.au, all owned by News Corp, as the worst offenders, with the public broadcaster ABC News and 9News also demonstrating “an imbalance against Palestinians in their reporting”. The only outlet that remained impartial was The Daily Aus. 

During the war, Instagram has remained a vital platform for Palestinian journalists inside of Gaza, and for grassroots coordination and mobilisation. 

Shaik said in spite of foreign journalists being blocked from Gaza, “citizen journalists … are doing their best to bring to light the atrocities that are happening”, with TikTok and Instagram cited as two key platforms for information dissemination.

“I’ve never seen such a grassroots mobilisation across the country [Australia],” Shaik said.

“Obviously the violence is 100 times worse than anything I’ve seen before in Palestine, but there also has to be a reason why all of a sudden people are mobilising.”

He said this mobilisation was likely due to content sharing on social media platforms, allowing people to witness the horror and violence taking place in Gaza.

Attai also acknowledged the importance of Instagram in information accessibility, due to “the lack of access of journalists to Gaza”.

Attai and Shaik see a path forward for the media in its reporting of the war.

Attai said that the media should stick to facts, reporting the facts on both sides equally and impartially, and abstain from using the passive, active and middle voice in a selective manner. 

In an environment of media bias, Attai said a potential solution for readers is to be critical in their analysis of mainstream media. 

“It’s important to consult a variety of sources,” she said.

“Pay attention to the editorial decisions … pay attention to the way the stories are framed.”

Shaik questioned the role of traditional journalistic principles in the current war.

“I don’t know what objectivity is in a time of genocide,” he said.

He said that many prominent mastheads, such as The Australian and Daily Telegraph, are pro-Israel in their reporting.

“You need to editorialise and give context … you need the whole picture,” Shaik said. 

“The whole idea that this [war] started on October 7 and that Israel is retaliating: that’s not objective.”

Shaik said that adding historical context and truth to reporting is an important solution to the current reporting imbalance.

He said the media shouldn’t bend to lobbying pressures, especially that of pro-Israel lobby groups, referring to an ABC Media Watch segment on Monday, March 18.

Media Watch reported that pro-Israel lobby groups played a significant role the sacking of ABC journalist Antoinette Lattouf in December last year, after she shared a post from Human Rights Watch, stating that Israel was using starvation as a tool of war. 

Attai said that the media “bears a huge responsibility in social cohesion through the way it reports on certain issues".

"The media is a huge contributor to the way that people’s perceptions of reality are shaped,” she said.

“These are all editorial decisions … and so careful consideration needs to be given to all of these elements.

“We have seen in the current context dehumanisation of Palestinians by the media. We’ve seen sensationalist reporting, we’ve seen a range of issues, and the media needs to be very careful in how they report on an issue, and needs to be held to account.”