On Saturday, the Australian published a bizarre and scurrilous feature by former Age editor Michael Gawenda, entitled “How the media went from newsroom watchdogs to activist brands”. It draws on a longer report commissioned by the Centre for Independent Studies, a right-wing think tank given to enthusing about tax cuts for billionaires and campaigns against renewable energy.

Though grandly labelled a “research paper”, the document the feature is based on shows no evidence of research but instead consists mostly of meandering anecdotes in which Gawenda fulminates against anyone who diverges from his own views on Palestine. He attacks John Lyons for documenting the harassment received by journalists critical of Israel. He denounces Josh Bornstein and Louise Adler for disagreeing with Jillian Segal. He says that the Age gives too much space to the Jewish Council of Australia, fuming that “not a single piece by me has been published since October 7 2023”.

Attributing the dire circumstances of the newspaper industry to Boomer shibboleths like social media (rather than, say, the free-market policies advocated by his friends at the CIS), Gawenda contrasts the good old days when “few journalists talked about changing the world” with the bad new days in which some of them attend university.

That draws his attention to me.

“[O]ne of the senior lecturers in journalism and international journalism in the master’s program at Melbourne University is Jeff Sparrow”, he says,

who was the editor of Overland magazine when it published an open letter titled “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” on October 21, 2023, 14 days after the October 7 Hamas attack and before there had been any ground invasion by the Israel Defence Forces. The letter was signed by hundreds of writers and artists.

The letter Gawenda finds so objectionable noted that, already, more than 3500 Palestinians had been killed and over a million displaced. It explained the toll already included “one thousand children, 11 journalists, 28 medical staff and 14 UN staffers”, and warned that those numbers would rise unless the conflict stopped.

That prediction proved, alas, entirely correct.

Today, the war has killed at least 75000 people, though the real number is almost certainly much higher (since so many bodies remain in the rubble). Save the Children says more than 20000 children died. Some 260 journalists were killed in Gaza: the Committee to Protect Journalists says that “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has committed more targeted killings of journalists than any other government’s military since CPJ began documentation in 1992”. The toll among medical staff exceeds 1700, with almost every hospital in Gaza damaged or destroyed; an astonishing 160 UN workers have been killed: according to Secretary-General António Guterres, the highest death toll in the organisation’s history.  

The International Association of Genocide scholars has voted overwhelmingly that Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide. Their assessment coincides with that of almost every major human rights organisation and NGO, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and many, many more.

I confess to considering the judgement of these experts more significant than the angry feels of Michael Gawenda as he yells at passing clouds. I also admit to believing genocide wrong and thus thinking the efforts by Overland and countless activists to prevent it entirely admirable.

But had Gawenda performed actual journalism rather than simply reminiscing about it, he would have discovered the not insignificant fact that I ceased editing Overland back in 2014.

“Days after the October 7 attacks”, he says,

Sparrow organised and published the now infamous letter signed by hundreds of writers that urged the massacre by Hamas of 1200 Israelis to be seen as an act of “resistance”. He was teaching journalism and what constituted good, ethical journalism in the Masters course at Melbourne University.

Um, no. Because I was not the editor in 2023 – and had not been for nine years – I neither organised nor published Overland’s open letter, which had precisely zero relationship with the University of Melbourne. Gawenda’s key anecdote rests on a complete falsehood, one that even a cursory Google search would have debunked.

In his “research paper”, Gawenda congratulates himself repeatedly for his own commitment to journalistic ethics. Well, point one of the MEAA code of conduct reads “do your utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply” —yet neither our media ethicist nor his paymasters at the CIS contacted me before publishing their shoddy mess at the Australian, where, shockingly, it ran next to a montage of images from Bondi massacre.

Even if Gawenda wasn’t factually wrong, the insinuation of a connection between the events at Bondi and the opposition to genocide expressed by media workers (as well as vast numbers of other Australians) constitutes the worst kind of yellow journalism, of which all involved should be deeply ashamed.

“Mainstream journalism is in decline”, Gawenda says. He’s certainly doing his best to prove it.

As the author of a jeremiad about media ethics, Gawenda must, at some stage, have stumbled across point twelve in the MEAA code. It reads: “do your utmost to achieve fair correction of errors”.

I await his retraction and apology.

Image: Operators filming a live broadcast in the Gaza strip (Musa Azlanoun)