“I have found that the ABC contravened s 772(1) of the FWA by terminating Ms Lattouf’s employment for reasons including that she held political opinions opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza,” Justice Rangiah ruled. He also found that the ABC had failed to follow the proper procedures in its termination of Lattouf, including providing details of what misconduct she was accused of and giving her a chance to defend herself.
The win has been loudly celebrated by fellow disillusioned journalists and media personalities like myself — it’s vindicating that the ABC was forced to accept that Lattouf’s only crime was daring to acknowledge the genocide at all. But it’s interesting that resharing a Human Rights Watch post with no conjecture counts as an opinion, especially when considered in tandem with ABC managing director Hugh Marks’ statement after the verdict.
“Due to confusion expressed about the Personal Use of Social Media Guidelines, which was canvassed during the case, these have been reviewed and will be replaced with new Public Comment Guidelines,” he said, noting that details on what these changes are will be revealed in coming weeks.
“I wish to stress the particular and fundamental obligations the ABC and its employees have to be independent and impartial in our work to ensure we continue to earn the trust of all Australians. Those obligations don’t change as a result of this decision.”
While I’m not an expert on the law and its application on what counts as an opinion, what I can speak to is what it’s like wrestling with diversity politics. I know that to occupy the token ethnic position is often to become a paradox: your presence is required to make sure the newsroom is diverse and inclusive because you have a unique perspective, but if you let that perspective inform your reporting, you risk damaging your perceived objectivity and impartiality. You exist to make the space look diverse, a cosmetic accessory. You are not there to actually challenge the status quo because if you do, you’re an advocate and we all know advocates can’t be journalists.
This is not specific to Australia. We saw these patterns emerge during the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, as Canadian-Egyptian journalist Pacinthe Mattar recounted in a searing op-ed in which the Black editor she interviewed was not named out of concern it would affect her credibility.
“One of the core elements of journalism is for reporters to maintain a distance from those they cover, which is meant to provide a sense of objectivity. For many white journalists, that distance is built in to their very life experiences. But, for many other journalists, there is no distance between what happened to George Floyd and what could have happened to them. Distance is a luxury,” Mattar wrote.
“There is the lack of trust toward the Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people whose stories we are supposed to cover as a reflection of the world we live in. Then there is the mistrust of the Black, Indigenous, and other racialized journalists who try to report on those stories. Our professionalism is questioned when we report on the communities we’re from, and the spectre of advocacy follows us in a way that it does not follow many of our white colleagues.”
Mattar goes on to detail the unspoken higher burden of proof stories about racism face. There is an expectation that you cannot simply believe a non-white witness, that you must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the racist incident happened, even though records of racist incidents are rarely kept and most people don’t report them. It soon becomes clear that making an allegation of racism is more scandalous than actually being racist.
We’ve seen this in how the Australian media continues to reproduce IDF statements uncritically and without scrutiny despite Israel being accused of war crimes, while Palestinian journalists must reach impossible burdens of proof for publications to acknowledge their reports of the atrocities happening in Gaza, even when video evidence and witness testimonies are on their side. They are never seen as objective, impartial or capable of journalistic integrity because by reporting on events happening to their own people, they are accused of advocacy. I believe that being from the community you are reporting on does not mean you can’t meet basic journalistic principles. But it’s time we ask: why do we insist on objectivity in the first place? Why must we remain neutral to racism, white supremacy or genocide?
Walkley-award winning journalist and Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman Dr Amy McQuire argues in her book Black Witness that objectivity and impartiality are concepts weaponised by white media to undermine the testimonies of Aboriginal witnesses. She argues that objectivity is a colonial tool that is only afforded to the white gaze. It is white people alone that believe they are capable of being objective, of having a neutral perspective — which is pretty convenient, given they also control the dominant narrative. It’s her stance that Indigenous journalism should have a distinct agenda of improving the lives of mob, otherwise what’s the point?
“I cringed at some of what I have written,” McQuire wrote of the articles she published when she was a young journalist.
“I didn’t always foreground the testimony of the Black Witness. At times, I spoke in the language that I thought was ‘good journalism’ because it followed the parameters set by western journalism. I have never been objective or unbiased, because I learnt very early on that our role in black media must be advocacy in favour of blackfellas, but, in the methods I employed, I ended up falling into the same traps I intended to avoid.”
When I interviewed Amy McQuire about Black Witness, she told me it’s paramount that we refuse to be neutral in the face of racism and other attacks on our humanity – that we never get to the point where we can see these events and remain unmoved.
“We’re not supposed to feel that it’s not normal. And sometimes you just have to feel that horror,” she said.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been named the deadliest conflict for journalists in the 21st century. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted 185 media workers killed as of July 2025. The International Federation of Journalists reports 20 journalists have been killed in Palestine just this year.
Egyptian writer Abdelrahman Elgendy argued in a piece written for Truthout.org that it is impossible to disentangle Arab journalists from the struggles of their people — but this doesn’t mean their work isn’t credible.
“When our narratives are intertwined with our repression, storytelling within our communities naturally takes on an activist role. Yet, we are only ever viewed in the West as subjects of others’ reporting, not reliable storytellers of our own struggles,” he wrote in 2023.
“This friction raises important questions: Are we, Arabs, unfit to narrate our own lived experiences? If the violence enacted against us is not a shortcoming of the global system, but one of the main goals it serves, are we inherently unqualified to practice journalism? Can our stories, paradoxically, only be told by the same groups whose worldview established the conditions of our oppression in the first place?”
This is especially resonant when you consider media workers like Bisan Owda — a journalist, activist and Emmy-winning filmmaker whose pursuit of documenting and truth-telling was a direct result of surviving genocide, and who faces constant attacks on her credibility for the simple fact that she is Palestinian and reporting on her own experiences. We are supposed to believe information from a Palestinian journalist is weakened by subjectivity rather than strengthened by it.
In the western world, news publications across the globe have banned Arab and Muslim journalists from reporting on the genocide in Gaza. In Australia, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age banned journalists who signed a letter calling for Israel’s comments to be held to the same journalistic standards as other sources from reporting on Gaza at all.
While I resent the idea that anyone critical of Israel lacks impartiality, it’s here I must insist that neutrality in journalism does not exist anyway — there is bias in every story we choose to report on and in every story we don’t. How else could we determine newsworthiness, or what headline to go with, or which story is picked up and which story is dropped? We choose which stories we care about and which stories we think the public should care about because we make active decisions on what is worth our time.
Antoinette Lattouf’s mammoth win against the ABC is a victory for Arab and Muslim journalists who have been silenced by their institutions when it comes to expressing political opinions. It’s a win for those of us who feel like we can’t speak out against genocide or be critical of Israel lest we become unemployable.
However, it’s my opinion that the natural evolution to this conversation shouldn’t be a more equitable or fair use of terms like “objectivity” and “impartiality” but a rejection of them.
Journalism has never been objective and, as McQuire argues, we should use it as a truth-telling tool that empowers people with knowledge, context, and facts. It should overlap with advocacy, otherwise what is its value? Why do we report on events if not to inform and shape the world around us? Why do we report on a genocide if not to hold those committing it to account?
I don’t think I will ever be objective when it comes to racism, and I don’t care to. I write about it because I experience it, because I understand it, and because I want it to stop — and I see that as a strength, not a liability.
