Aunty: Blind spots, errors or worse?

By turning tragedy into farce, the ABC's credibility is at stake.

Originally published by the AJN October 2025.

If I hadn’t loved the ABC for so long, I wouldn’t feel so betrayed.

There must have been thousands of kids just like me. Kids who sat in the back seats of cars on Parramatta Road breathing in second-hand Margaret Throsby and Richard Glover. Kids who listened to those voices become as familiar as family itself.

Despite a brief hiatus during my teens, come bushfire season the compass needle pointed squarely back at Aunty.

ABC News 24 is the longest-serving link in my browser’s bookmarks bar. When Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens release an episode of “The Minefield”, Siri knows to suggest it as I connect my headphones.

No matter the government and no matter the weather, the ABC is there.

But nobody is perfect.

The framing of Israel’s attack last month on Hamas’s billionaire leadership sheltering in Qatar – as aggressive and self-serving as it might have been – by Laura Tingle as “an attack on peace negotiations themselves” was troubling. While Gulf states have imposed on-and-off-again sanctions on Qatar for funding regional terrorism, understanding that there are many deplorable actors in the region has been squeezed out of the ABC’s increasingly misleading coverage.

Without Qatar, Hamas would have had to surrender, ending the war and freeing the hostages earlier. Without Qatar, the war couldn’t have been funded in the first place. Qatar enables Hamas’s leadership to gamble with Palestinian lives, manufacturing an Israeli hostage life to Gazan life exchange rate that one might expect from greater Israel extremists like Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The framing of Qatar as a regional peace-broker is bizarre.

Empirically incorrect oversights also gather steam. In August, The ABC’s Maddy Morwood and Lewis Wiseman reported that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in any other war”. This misquotes their source, which claims that the Gaza War has killed more journalists than the US Civil War (8), WWI (2), WWII (67), Korea (17), Vietnam (71), the Yugoslav wars (39) and Afghanistan (81) “combined” (285).

The source’s numbers estimate Gazan journalists killed at 147–232. While common sense alone might challenge the swallowing of those claims, universal access to calculators should have prevented them. One doesn’t have to rely on false information to paint a picture of the horrors taking place in the Levant.

The piece also cites the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Of the 185 deceased journalists documented by CPJ between October 2023 and August 30, 2025, 31 are listed as “murdered” as opposed to having been “killed on dangerous assignment”. This includes “journalists” fighting for Hamas on and since October 7.

By turning tragedy into farce, the ABC’s credibility is at stake.

Brandon Schechter (Columbia, NYU, Brown, UC Berkeley) accounts for the deaths of 225 Red Army journalists alone in WWII. Over 1400 Jewish journalists were murdered in the Holocaust – none of whom were within a hair’s breadth of a weapon, as remains recorded by Yad Vashem.

Horrified by Netanyahu’s decimation of Gaza, I had considered the ABC’s mounting errors part of the fog of war.

After the Charlie Kirk assassination, Sarah Ferguson’s 7:30 Report hosted American Hasan Piker, a man who encouraged the assassination of Senator Rick Scott and regularly advocates for sectarian violence from Pakistan to Yemen.

Does the ABC know that Piker famously insisted that “it doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7”, voiced his preference for rich women to be date rape victims, defended the killing of babies on October 7 as “there are babies in the settlements too”, and yelled “remember 9/11” and “shut up, go back to Auschwitz” on live-stream to hundreds of thousands of followers?

To millions more, Piker has repeatedly announced his support for Hezbollah, celebrated the Houthis and compared them to Anne Frank, and has glorified Hamas, making fun of Israeli hostages being asked to kiss their captors.

The ABC can’t always get it right. But the decision to host Piker was a step too far.

The next time I stand in my grandmother’s driveway on a 37 degree day, the smell of smoke in the air and the horizon blackening, the ABC will blare from my pocket as it always has. Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski will continue to walk the dog with me or chatter away while I’m weeding. The ABC is a church far broader than its shortcomings.

But having slept on it, I remain disturbed by something that feels increasingly less like oversight.

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Published first by AJN 16/10/25. Link to come.