The ABC's Media Watch show's montage of damaging headlines reflecting the damaging outcome of Antoinette Lattouf's Federal Court case. Photo: ABC Media Watch
"Last year, the BBC won a Bafta for its Glastonbury coverage," the BBC's own culture and media editor Katie Razzall noted this week.
The 2024 coverage was also streamed and hosted here on TVNZ+.
"This year, it's being attacked for it or, to be more precise, for one hour of it - two at the most, if you count Kneecap's set, which followed Bob Vylan's. It felt to me that the BBC had spent so much energy on how it would deal with Kneecap at Glastonbury, that it had missed Bob Vylan's potential to cause it problems."
What's a broadcaster to do, when it's committed to live coverage of a major cultural event like Glastonbury and some star performers are determined to send a message about a controversial issue?
Kneecap had criticised Israel's Gaza campaign explicitly on stage in the past. Band members faced charges recently for allegedly displaying a flag supporting Hezbollah and allegedly urging concertgoers to kill Members of Parliament.
Police dropped those charges in the end, but the BBC decided not stream Kneecap's Glastonbury set live last weekend.
"Good luck to the BBC, editing all those out," Kneecap's singer told the crowd, acknowledging the Palestinian flags waving, as they performed.
It also didn't post the group's performance on its on-demand service iPlayer for people to watch later, prompting criticism it effectively censored the group in response to pressure.
Irish rap band Kneecap perform at the West Holts stage on the fourth day of the Glastonbury festival at Worthy Farm in the village of Pilton in Somerset, south-west England, on June 28, 2025. Photo: AFP/OLI SCARFF
However the punk/rap pair Bob Vylan were live on the BBC, when they chanted "Death to the IDF" and "Free Palestine" during their set, against a backdrop of slogans on a screen, including one that accused the BBC of downplaying the war as merely "a conflict".
Pascal Robinson-Foster of the duo also spoke of working for a "f****** Zionist" during their show.
"The anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves," the BBC said. "The BBC respects freedom of expression, but stands firmly against incitement to violence."
The UK Prime Minister also said he was "appalled".
"I called the director-general to ask for an explanation - and what immediate steps the BBC leadership intended to take," Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told Parliament.
When she claimed the Glastonbury broadcast had "an enormous impact" in the UK, critics countered that Britons would have seen far more upsetting scenes from Gaza and Israel frequently on the news.
Damning judgement
The BBC isn't the only public broadcaster that's suffered a backlash over its response to claims of fostering anti-semitism this week.
Last week in Australia, a Federal Court ruled presenter Antoinette Lattouf was unlawfully sacked, when the ABC took her off the air in late 2023.
"The public broadcaster had capitulated to a pro-Israel lobbying campaign and unlawfully jettisoned an on-air presenter who had done nothing wrong," ABC Media Watch host Linton Besser told viewers on Monday.
That tortured tale began two years ago, when the ABC hired Lattouf for just five days to fill a gap as a radio host before Christmas, despite a string of social media comments she'd previously made that were highly critical of Israel's military campaign in Gaza.
The online post most discussed in the court case was a Human Rights Watch message she shared in which the group claimed Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. The ABC itself had reported that claim as news at the time.
As soon as Lattouf's short stint began in late 2023, the ABC received complaints that she was not fit for on-air duties, because of anti-semitic views.
After Lattouf was taken off air without warning, she challenged it in court. After a case the ABC spent more than a million dollars defending, Lattouf was awarded $70,000 last week for distress caused.
What did the ABC do wrong?
Photo: Instagram / Antoinette Lattouf
The Federal Court judgement says senior managers of the ABC panicked over the complaints about her.
Lattouf's boss at the ABC - Chris Oliver-Taylor - told the court he thought Lattouf had been explicitly told to not post anything concerning the war in Gaza, but the judge reckoned he knew she had merely been given advice not to do so.
"Mr Oliver Taylor sought to mitigate the anticipated deluge of complaints and criticism of the ABC," the judge said in his ruling. "The decision was made to appease the pro-Israel lobbyists, who would inevitably escalate their complaints about the ABC employing a presenter they perceived to have anti-Semitic and anti-Israel opinions."
The judge also described the evidence of other senior ABC managers as "implausible" and "troubling".
ABC chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson were both adjudged to have ramped up pressure on Chris Oliver-Taylor by forwarding to him the complaints from lobbyists, amplifying the view that Lattouf was a potential risk to the organisation.
The Federal Court did not find the ABC had been motivated by racism, but that the ABC wrongly terminated Lattouf's employment on the basis of holding a political opinion.
This week, new ABC managing director Hugh Marks pledged to be a better buffer between ABC journalists and their critics.
"Our obligation is to ensure we're not overly affected by external forces and that's... pretty much a big part of my role," he told ABC News.
"This is an extraordinary win for Lattouf and an extraordinary setback for the ABC, because the court also found that the ABC made this decision under extreme pressure," Dr Denis Muller said on his podcast Truth Lies and Media.
What pressure was applied to the ABC?
Denis Muller Photo: supplied
Muller cut his teeth on newspapers in Auckland, before becoming an editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and running investigative journalism at Melbourne's main daily, The Age.
He's now a fellow at The University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism. He watched the ruling as it was delivered in court
"It was an a very intense email campaign from the pro-Israel lobby," Muller told Mediawatch. "They threatened legal action against the ABC, if [Lattouf] wasn't removed.
"There were leaks to The Australian newspaper that intensified the pressure. On the day that Latif was sacked, The Australian had had a story saying so, before she got home from the ABC."
"In recent years, the ABC has developed a habit of just caving in to pressure... from external criticism of their journalists.".
He cited the case of TV presenter Stan Grant, an indigenous Australian, who quit the ABC recently, after being targeted with criticism and threats for an opinion expressed as a guest in a current affairs show about the coronation of King Charles III and the impact of the monarchy on Australia.
"He wasn't there as a reporter, he'd been invited as a commentator. He was simply doing what the ABC had asked him to do.
"That brought down the wrath of News Corporation through The Australian newspaper, and the wrath of monarchists and of conservatives generally on the ABC. The ABC walked away from him and, in the end, he just walked away from them.
"For the better part of a decade, the public broadcaster has been repeatedly buffeted off course by members of its board going weak-kneed before the gripes of the persistent and the powerful, even when those complaints have very little, if any merit," ABC Media Watch host Linton Besser said last Monday.
"Surely that must end now."
"The ABC top levels include managers who have to make decisions in fast-moving news environments, despite not having come up through newsrooms," said media analyst Tim Burrowes, who co-hosts the ABC show MediaLand. "Oliver-Taylor was a content and production guy who'd come back to the ABC from Netflix.
"Burrowes makes a really strong point there, because there are people in senior editorial roles at the ABC who have never done much - if any - serious news reporting, much less editing," Dr Muller told Mediawatch. "On top of that, the ABC's got a bureaucratic culture - and decision-making and accountability get diffused.
"You didn't become a newspaper editor in my time, unless you had a proven ability... to withstand external pressure. It's part of their duty to create a safe place, within which their staff can do good journalism, without looking over their shoulder every five minutes to see if some vested interest is going to come after them."
Public broadcaster, private opinions?
The ABC said policies on private use of social media by staff would be reviewed.
"Their present guidelines... are contradictory, imprecise, and open to arbitrary interpretation and enforcement. They define a breach as occurring, when a journalist's private social media content could reasonably be considered to breach the ABC's guidelines.
"We need to have something more precise than that.
"What evidence is needed to support some reasonable belief that a political reporter [is] expressing a 'strong personal opinion on a contentious issue' on their own private media? What's strong, what's contentious by whose criteria?
"It also talks about 'perceptions of impartiality'. Well, whose perceptions? Those of a lobby group? [These guidelines] don't have any firm red lines."
What red lines would allow a media organisation to restrict a journalist's private activities to protect its own interests and reputation?
"One is that a journalist who's covering a story should not be using his or her social media to comment on that story. Second, when they do comment, they should refrain from using hate speech, incitement, crude speech or personal attacks - because that does tend to bring, not just the journalist, but the the people they work for into disrepute."
Journalists can't know what issues they may be covering in the very near future. They may have made comments about individuals they end up reporting on.
"Once you've been assigned to the story, that should be the cutoff point," Muller told Mediawatch. "If they're reporting politics all the time, there's room for people to make reasonable, professional decisions about this and be trusted to make them.
"If you try to impose vague, imprecise rules around these things, you don't solve the problem."
