I can’t remember who said it, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Someone was once being invited by a journalist to buy into a controversial issue. “Surely you must have a view!” demanded the journalist.
“Of course I have a view,” came the reply. “What I don’t have is a comment.”
I thought of that exchange again this morning as I considered the judgment in the Antoinette Lattouf case, a case comprehensively lost by the ABC after it was found to have terminated Lattouf from her on-air role at least partly because of her political opinions.
At the centre of the case was a social media post from Lattouf described by the judge as “ill-advised and inconsiderate”. It shared the findings of a Human Rights Watch report about the use of starvation as a “weapon of war” by Israel in Gaza.
Sometimes silence is golden, particularly when trying to maintain the impartiality of the ABC on controversial issues. And there is no doubt that, in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli attack on Gaza, social media posts on the topic by ABC presenters are bound to be controversial. My advice, when I was the editorial director of the ABC, was generally that journalists and presenters should let their on-air work speak for them as far as possible.
And so it’s understandable that Lattouf’s social media activity caused controversy and consternation. It is possible for people of good faith and common sense to differ in their views on whether Lattouf’s posts undermined the ABC’s impartiality. I happen to think they didn’t, and I also happen to think employing her in the first place was not a mistake.
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But ultimately, none of that matters. The simple facts are that her on-air performance for the few days she presented the ABC Sydney morning program was impeccable, and none of her social media posts were ever found to have breached ABC policy.
What did take place, however, was a campaign of complaints from the moment she began in the role, accusing her of being biased against Israel. That campaign was described by the judge in the case as “an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists to have Ms Lattouf taken off air”.
The key issue was how the ABC behaved in the face of that campaign.
The ABC’s first editorial standard is about maintaining the broadcaster’s independence and integrity above all else. That means ensuring that editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by any outside interests, including political, sectional or commercial ones.
In my years as the editorial director of the ABC, I saw many attempts to pressure or influence the ABC into making decisions. Often, they were decisions about what content the ABC ran, but sometimes they were about who the ABC employed, or who they should stop employing. I should hasten to add that there are many people who would argue that I was part of management decisions that buckled under that pressure. I hope that’s not the case, but that’s for others to judge.
One thing I did try to do though, without exception, is to urge that decisions should be made calmly, carefully, and after following due process. That usually meant allowing the established complaints handling processes to deal with any allegations of bias, and ensuring that any staff accused of wrongdoing were given ample opportunity to respond, defend themselves and, more often than not, be provided with opportunities to learn and improve rather than being shown the door. Based on today’s judgment, that didn’t happen in the Lattouf case.
In his findings, Justice Darryl Rangiah said that the campaign of complaints against Lattouf “caused great consternation” among senior management at the ABC, and once she made her social media post about Gaza there was “a state of panic”.
The decision to remove her from air was made quickly, despite no breaches of ABC policy being clearly identified, and Lattouf was given no opportunity to defend herself. One of the reasons for the decision being made so quickly was pressure from both the then managing director, David Anderson, and the then chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose, who wrote in an email about Lattouf that “we owe her nothing”.
Put simply, the process failed all those involved. It failed the presenter herself, and it failed the test of law. Today’s judgment makes that painfully clear.
People often laugh at the ABC’s sometimes cumbersome and slow-moving processes when dealing with complaints. And they are often right – they can always be improved and streamlined. But when the ABC, as so often is the case, becomes a pawn in the culture wars and is subjected to intense political or sectional pressure, those calm and considered processes are often all that stand between the ABC and perceptions of caving in to that pressure.
Often, the biggest pressure I perceived inside the ABC was the pressure to make problems go away as soon as possible. At the highest levels of an organisation, the demand for a quick solution can be loud and insistent, all the more so as those calling for a quick fix don’t have to administer it themselves.
In those situations, being able to point clearly to a policy that has been found to be breached after a process that is consistent and fair to everyone is the only thing preventing the perception of an organisation in retreat from its values and its people.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, and so most of the key players involved in this sorry affair have now left the ABC. What lessons remain for the ABC itself, and for those who believe in brave and principled public broadcasting?
Only to redouble the efforts in defence of independence, integrity and calmness under pressure. The world these days is filled with those who seek to control, bully and pressure public interest journalism in all its forms. The role of senior managers is to stoutly resist that pressure, and protect journalists from it as much as possible. A quick fix is rarely a good fix, and never the right fix.
• Alan Sunderland is a former editorial director of the ABC
