Droppie [farcebk] 🐨♀🌈🐧🦘they met over lunch at a restaurant, & the style of these columns includes wasting ink on the food, which bores me rigid & has no interest at all for me, so i have excised said paras here.
smh.com.au/national/she-paused…
by Matthew Knott:
Antoinette Lattouf makes something clear when we sit down for our interview: the person I met for lunch four years ago no longer exists.In May 2022, Lattouf had just written her first book, an anti-racism handbook drawing on her experiences as a journalist of Middle Eastern heritage and prominent advocate for diversity in the media. So much has happened since. The October 7 attacks in Israel, the war in Gaza, multiple wars in Lebanon, the current war in Iran. And, of course, Lattouf’s sudden sacking from a casual hosting gig at the ABC that saw her take the national broadcaster to court for unfair dismissal – and win. My life has also changed in the interregnum – but not nearly as dramatically: then I was writing about race and diversity; now foreign affairs, including the Middle East.
Lattouf emerged from the court case as a hero to many Australians dismayed by Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza and the media’s reporting of the conflict, but it came at a steep cost. The Lattouf of 2022 radiated energy and optimism; today that lightness, that effervescence, is dimmed. Now 42, she is still outgoing, but more guarded. As we sit down to talk, she presses record on her phone so she has her own copy of our conversation.
“I am a different person,” Lattouf says when I ask what has changed since we last met. “There was a certain innocence I think then and an idealism that I could probably say I mourn a little bit.”
A ceasefire between Israel and militant group Hezbollah has just started when we meet, but Lattouf is not celebrating (“Given how the ceasefire has gone in Gaza, I am not particularly confident that it will be upheld”). Lattouf’s parents moved from Lebanon to Australia as refugees in the 1970s and she and her husband still have many family members there whom she checks on daily. Her husband’s aunt, aged in her 70s, has rejected their advice to leave her Beirut home because she doesn’t want to sleep on the street. “She’s resigned to the fact that she might die, and that’s a conversation we have to have with her all the time,” Lattouf says, choking back tears. “Sorry, it’s heartbreaking.”
Adding to her anxiety is the fact the release of her second book, Women Who Win, is about to thrust her back into the public gaze, in a way she can’t necessarily control. “I’m cognisant of the fact I have probably opened myself up to another wave of tabloid attacks,” she says
Her new book fuses a memoir of her ABC legal battle with pen portraits of pioneering Australian women such as businesswoman Wendy McCarthy and Indigenous anti-coal mine activist Murrawah Johnson. She worked on the book throughout the court case, when she didn’t know if she would emerge triumphant or defeated.
“In the middle of a panic attack at midnight, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d get up, and I would start to read and then reach out to these people,” she says. “They were a source of comfort and inspiration, and the more I researched and learnt, the more I felt I was prepared for whatever may come.”
Lattouf’s dismissal from the ABC came during what she assumed would be an unremarkable five days in 2023 filling in as host of the Sydney Mornings radio show in the lead-up to Christmas. It was two months after Hamas’ brutal October 7 attacks, and Israel was waging a ferocious war in Gaza at a devastating cost to civilian lives. Lattouf, working as a freelancer, had been criticising Israel’s actions on her social media accounts and had just written an article for Crikey questioning a widely shared video that claimed to show pro-Palestinian protesters outside the Opera House chanting “gas the Jews” (police later confirmed forensic analysis had found no evidence the phrase was used, although protesters had chanted “f--k the Jews” and other slogans).
Lattouf didn’t think any of this was especially relevant given her job was to play Michael Bublé songs and discuss Christmas lunch plans with talkback callers. “I was really revelling in the lifestyle type content and showing a lighter side to my personality,” she recalls.
But, as the Federal Court later said, Lattouf was being targeted by a co-ordinated campaign from pro-Israel lobbyists who sent a barrage of emails to then ABC chair Ita Buttrose and then managing director David Anderson in a bid to have her taken off air.
The lobbyist emails caused panic at the very top of the ABC. “Can’t she come down with flu or COVID or a stomach upset?” Buttrose asked in a now infamous email to Anderson sent after Lattouf’s second day on air. “We owe her nothing.” Unbeknown to the legendary former Cleo and Australian Women’s Weekly editor, Lattouf had hours earlier shared a post from Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
While she had been told to be careful about what she posted while at the ABC, Lattouf says she didn’t think she was crossing the line. She checked that the ABC had twice reported on the Human Rights Watch report, and she avoided adding any personal commentary to the post. Noting she had worked for several mainstream media outlets and as a Media Watch researcher, she says: “I knew what I was doing. Everyone makes mistakes on social media, but this wasn’t one.”
Yet the ABC sacked her with two days remaining on her contract. “It’s almost difficult to put in into words how awful it felt to be asked to pack my bags. I knew how significant it was to be asked to leave the public broadcaster.”
The worst moment of the subsequent court case, she says, came when the ABC’s lawyers used an article she had written for the ABC on her experience of post-natal depression to undermine her claim that her sacking had damaged her mental health. In her book she describes being found at court by her legal team violently shaking and crying with rage. “That was the most soul crushing thing I’ve experienced,” she says.
The Federal Court found the ABC had wrongfully dismissed Lattouf because it failed to follow enterprise agreement dismissal processes and had sacked her because of her political opinions. It ordered the public broadcaster to pay her $220,000. Almost a year later, she is not ready to forgive those she believed mistreated her and have not apologised.
I ask what she would say to Buttrose if she saw her now. Twenty long seconds of silence pass as she gathers her thoughts. Then she answers: “I would ask her how she feels as someone who is a patron for [the non-profit organisation] Women in Media that the thing she’s most likely to be remembered for is her abhorrent treatment of another woman in media.” Others may regard Buttrose’s conduct as a jarring coda to a storied career, but for Lattouf it is her defining legacy. (Buttrose has been approached for comment.)
Does Lattouf believe the ABC learnt anything from the saga? “Unfortunately, no,” she replies. “All they’ve done was make their social media policies stricter.” She would “never say never” to working at the ABC again, but not in the current climate, when she believes pro-Israel lobbyists have excessive influence over the organisation.
In his verdict on the case, Justice Darryl Rangiah found that, while Lattouf’s firing was unlawful, her post was “bound to be controversial, when she was an employee of the ABC”, describing it as “ill-advised and inconsiderate of her employer”.
Lattouf says she respectfully disagrees. “I think it’s a strange and sad state of affairs when an employee cannot share a fact that the broadcaster itself has shared twice. I think we start to enter some really dangerous territory when that becomes a problem.”
I ask her what the limits should be for mainstream media journalists when it comes to posting on social media about controversial issues, going to protests and signing petitions. I hold the traditional view that such activity should almost always be avoided as it can call into question the impartiality of our work and undermine our journalism. For example, as an openly gay reporter working in the Canberra press gallery during the same-sex marriage debate, I didn’t go to protests calling for Australians to vote yes in the postal survey.
Lattouf believes that journalists – even at the ABC – should be able to engage in political activity in their own time. “If you want to go to a protest over a coal mine, or over a refugee or over the [Indigenous Voice to Parliament] referendum or whatever, absolutely,” she says. “I don’t think you take away people’s ability to practise their civic rights.”
In her court appearance, Buttrose described Lattouf as “an activist”, a term many journalists would regard as a slur. Lattouf thinks it needn’t be. “I think at its heart a lot of really good, change-making journalism is activism,” she says, referring to investigative reporters who expose wrongdoing and drive policy change.
Noting that prominent ABC journalist Virginia Trioli wrote a piece in 2024 about protesting against violence against women, she asks why she should not be able to publicly oppose children starving in Gaza. “I just think these lines need to be interrogated, who draws them and when they draw them,” she says.
Since her court victory, Lattouf and long-time friend Jeannette Francis (better known as Jan Fran) have launched a podcast, We Used to be Journos, in which they dissect media coverage of issues such as the war in Lebanon. She says the title is tongue in cheek: they are still journalists but focus on commentary rather than straight news reporting. Her advice to media outlets reporting on Israel: “Just cover it like you do every other story. Rely on reputable facts. Treat Israeli sources with the same level of scepticism that you would press releases put out by Putin.”
Israel’s defenders would reject equating the nation to Russia, an authoritarian state that launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Lattouf insists Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are merely “different shades of alleged war criminal” and that neither can be trusted to tell the truth.
When we last met, Lattouf said she felt excited about an increased “appetite for change” in the media to reflect the diversity of modern Australia.
She no longer feels that way, and has stepped back from her role at Media Diversity Australia, the non-profit she founded to help create career paths for non-white journalists.“Diversity alone is window dressing unless you’re allowed to bring diversity of thought, and you’re allowed to actually be who you are,” she says. “When young journalists of colour, particularly young journalists of Middle Eastern backgrounds, come to me, I say to them, ‘I can’t assure you that you will be protected, that you will be able to flourish, that you will be able to record what you see with your eyes.’”
For now, she is pursuing a path outside the mainstream rather than try to improve it from within. “I’m changed for a myriad of reasons, but I’m also proud of myself because my values have never changed, and my beliefs in public interest journalism and human rights have never changed. That Antoinette remains.”
#auspol #fuckzionism #AntoinetteLattouf #abc #racism #discrimination
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