مقالة الجمعة: كيف أن ولاء إعلام موردوخ لإسرائيل يولد النفاق والهجمات و”الصحافة الفاشلة”.

When it comes to covering the Middle East, News Corporation has two guiding principles. The first is that it supports Israel, which means it opposes any nation, organisation or individual that doesn’t. This support is decades old and it’s unwavering, even in the face of global condemnation of Israel for the atrocities committed in Gaza.

News’ loyalty doesn’t just determine news content in the foreign pages of its newspapers. It also shapes the way it covers local events, down to who gets targeted for criticism.

Young Jewish lawyer Sarah Schwartz has campaigned against Israel’s human rights abuses. For this, she has been subjected to sustained criticism that has demonstrated the other principle guiding News’ coverage. You could call this the “we’re‑always‑right‑no‑matter‑what” approach, which allows News to sustain its editorial assaults even in the face of inconvenient inconsistencies.

On the one hand, News has attacked Schwartz for being supposedly antisemitic. On the other, it has criticised her for calling out the antisemitism she’s been subjected to by her Zionist opponents. But when you’re always right no matter what, this is not an inconsistency at all.

Her story demonstrates how News goes about contriving controversy to discredit both individuals and what they’re saying, with little regard for the effect it has on the person being targeted. We interviewed her about her experience of News’ coverage last August.

Like so many other liberal Jews, Schwartz was appalled by Israel’s conduct in Gaza. She joined with several others to form an organisation called the Jewish Council of Australia, a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers. They represent people who believe Israel’s response was not only disproportionate, but counterproductive to regional security and peace.

This posed something of a threat to News, which for several decades has championed Israel and the Zionist cause. The notion of a Jew speaking out against Israel and in defence of Gaza challenged the News line that Israel can do no wrong and that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.

Initially, News outlets wrote a few disparaging pieces, dismissing the council as unrepresentative and irrelevant, even though its membership was steadily growing and its board comprised many high‑profile and influential people. But then Schwartz did something that gave News an opportunity to sharpen its attack.

‘Painted as a Judenrat’

In January 2025, she was invited to speak at the “pre-event” for an academic antiracism conference. “The Greatest Race Debate” was held at a university, but billed as a comedy event. Essentially, it used the format of a debate to call out the absurdity of what constitutes race conversations in this country; everyone was to give their best “worst” takes on race debates in Australia.

So, Schwartz entered into the spirit of things by creating a cartoon image of a caped superhero whose chest carries the letters “DJ”. She titled the slide “Dutton’s Jew”, to depict the then opposition leader’s stereotyping of Jews as anti‑immigrant and hateful of Muslims, using them as “a human shield”. She said: “For Dutton and his ilk, Jews are just the perfect avatars to use to peddle racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Admittedly, the term “Dutton’s Jew” was open to misinterpretation and what unfolded could have been predicted. But at that stage, Schwartz wasn’t as media savvy as she’s since become.

The Australian and Murdoch’s Brisbane daily, The Courier Mail, pounced on the story, although they did take the time to add an important clarification, requested by Schwartz. She wanted to make it clear she wasn’t saying Jews were anti‑immigration and hateful of Muslims; this was about Dutton’s conception of Jews. In other words, it was political commentary.

Unfortunately, some of the subsequent stories left out that important distinction. They referenced the “Dutton’s Jew” cartoon as if to make the point that Schwartz was controversial, maybe even antisemitic.

Both papers stayed on the story, with follow‑ups about federal ministers criticising the Queensland University of Technology for hosting the event, and vice chancellor Margaret Sheil rushing to apologise for any “hurt and offence” the conference caused.

They also covered Sheil’s decision to commission former Federal Court judge John Middleton to determine whether the Jewish community had been vilified. A few months later, Middleton found that nothing Schwartz said was racist.

He concluded, “Ms Schwartz’s slide was photographed and delivered to The Australian and The Courier Mail devoid of context” and “Ms Schwartz’s depiction of ‘Dutton’s Jew’ was not critical of Jewish people themselves, but of the way in which political figures may typecast Jewish identity to serve particular narratives”.

But Middleton’s report came too late to stop the abuse Schwartz was copping from online activists such as pro‑Israel advocate Zara Cooper, who according to Schwartz posted “over 600 times” on Instagram about Schwartz and the Jewish Council of Australia. One image was of a rat, another was of Schwartz’s face superimposed over a train. Was the latter suggesting she would be deported to a concentration camp for siding with Palestinians?

Schwartz told us she was “painted as a Judenrat, as someone who is collaborating with Nazis because Nazis and Palestinians had become conflated in some Zionists’ minds”. She says her opponents became “utterly fixated” by the idea of her being harmed by Palestinians, the very people she was defending. It became so extreme that Schwartz went to the police.

This is when things got a little crazy, because, as Schwartz says, up until then the paper’s “whole narrative had been that Jewish people have been the victim of antisemitism”. But when Schwartz, as a Jewish person, complained about being the victim of antisemitism, The Australian switched. Its line suddenly became, she says: “That’s outrageous that she’s going to the police, she’s trying to suppress her enemies.”

When the police proposed an intervention order against Cooper to stop the online abuse, Schwartz says the newspaper suggested she was a hypocrite because she was “a lawyer who cares about free speech”.

When the matter first went to court, Schwartz insisted the paper correct its claim that she, rather than the police, had initiated the intervention order. She says the paper bullied her by republishing the “incredibly distressing” memes that surfaced online.

“I think those images are antisemitic; whatever you want to say, they are certainly racialised, they are attacking me because I’m Jewish and because I hold a particular political view. The Australian is then republishing those images in articles that are smearing me.”

Schwartz says the pressure made it “untenable for the intervention order to proceed” so she asked the police to withdraw it. She says, “It’s like the bullies won.”

For her part, Zara Cooper told The Australian, “I have never met Sarah Schwartz. I have never spoken with her, threatened her, posted private information about her or encouraged others to do so.”

‘A malicious pile-on’

Schwartz says a particularly hurtful aspect of the paper’s coverage was an opinion piece by Indigenous scholar Professor Marcia Langton, who wrote that Schwartz “deeply offended Jewish Australians and other Australians, including me”.

Referring to the “Dutton’s Jew” cartoon, Langton said,

There was nothing satirical about this message. It was objectively anti-Semitic in its depiction of her nemesis, the ‘bad Jew’, who [Schwartz] imagines has lost all agency and is an unwitting puppet of various warmongering masters.

Langton concluded, “As a Jewish friend said to me about this, the ‘good Jew/bad Jew’ narrative is the ‘absolute epitome of anti‑Semitic conspiracy theory’.” Schwartz’s requests for corrections to Langton’s column prior to publication were ignored by the paper, she told us.

Following publication, her lawyer argued the piece took the cartoon out of context and portrayed Schwartz as an antisemite who had publicly represented all Jews as “bloodthirsty monsters”. The lawyer asserted the opinion piece “contributed to a malicious pile‑on, attacking Ms Schwartz and attempting to inflict maximum personal and reputational harm on her, based on an entirely false premise that does not withstand the slightest scrutiny.”

The Australian denied the allegations and warned it would invest heavily in defending what it said was clearly an opinion piece on a matter of public interest.

A ‘serious threat to News’ narrative’

Schwartz has had time to ponder why she became a News target: “I think I represent a really serious threat to News’ narrative that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.” She told us, “News wants to use Jews to bolster their right‑wing claims, but I and the Jewish Council of Australia represent a real threat to that.”

She accuses the Murdoch press of “working hand in hand with Zionist lobby groups with the intention to silence me or shame me or stop my advocacy”.

Creating a negative image of a person under attack is a fundamental component of a Murdoch campaign. Schwartz says the papers “cultivated this image of me as controversial, obscene, dangerous, frivolous or attention seeking”. This “false narrative” was based on “concocted events”, but its effect was powerful: “Now when they refer to me they can refer to me as just a controversial individual,” says Schwartz.

When an article appeared with a headline describing her as a “Radical fringe Jewish voice”, she knew “they were complete in their objectification of me”.

This sort of treatment is damaging because it reaches so many different audiences. “Maybe I can explain individual incidents to people in my life who still read The Australian, but I’ll never be able to get over this confected persona they’ve created for me,” she told us. “I think that’s the most hurtful thing.”

Even within her own community, the coverage is caustic. “There is just a whole segment of the Jewish community who now look at me as someone who is antisemitic and who is offensive and who is radical, and that affects me going about my day‑to-day life, going to synagogue, going to Jewish communal events.”

While on one level this coverage is just about one person in a far corner of the world, far removed from the atrocities of the Middle East, it is also indicative of News’ broader coverage of the conflict and of its framing of both Jewish and Muslim people.

News is unquestioningly loyal to Israel and Zionism, and deeply sceptical of, if not aggressive towards, Israel’s enemies, both perceived and real. And that means News is especially hostile towards Muslims and the Islamic faith.

Something nasty and scary and manipulative

In a recent interview for The Atlantic, Rupert’s youngest son, James, described the way tabloid culture “is contrarian for the sake of it” and “delights in poking people in the eye”. He said, “At its worst, it metastasizes into something nasty and scary and manipulative.”

By that definition, Fox News should be classified as tabloid, but so too The Times and The Australian, even though the latter still retains its broadsheet format. Along with many News mastheads, they’ve been poking at Muslims and Islam for decades. They’ve aggravated fear and done little to encourage understanding or tolerance. And, like a cancer, that kind of coverage has spread and metastasised in grotesque forms.

No longer is there a need for the proprietor to hammer out his fury in the middle of the night in the New York Post newsroom, as Murdoch had in 1977, when a group of radical Hanafi Islamists seized control of three buildings in Washington DC and held 149 people hostage.

By now, everyone knows where he, and consequently his publications, stand. Islam is posed as an ever-present threat to Western society and Judeo-Christian values. Muslims are too often characterised as hateful and untrustworthy. The Palestinian side of the current conflict does not warrant equal treatment because News stands with and for the other side.

Therefore, it almost didn’t matter how Israel responded to Hamas’ atrocities of October 7 2023. It was always going to be considered proportionate, regardless of how many thousands of innocent Palestinians were killed.

On the first anniversary of the war, many media outlets paused to reflect, most with at least some balance. There was recognition that both sides had suffered trauma and loss, which in some cases prompted analysis about the blurred boundaries between defence and retribution.

The Weekend Australian, however, had no interest in balance. Despite devoting 13 broadsheet pages to the topic, it could not find room to even note that 100,000 Palestinians had been injured and that two million had become refugees.

The Weekend Australian instead blamed the Australian government for abandoning Israel, while focusing on Israeli suffering and instances of antisemitism within Australia. The paper described the conflict as “Israel’s war in defence of world order”.

As Paul Barry, the then presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch, noted, “42,000 dead Palestinians rarely get a mention” and there was “not one picture or human story of a Palestinian child, woman or family”. Barry concluded, “To call the coverage one-eyed is the understatement of the year. It is quite frankly astonishing and a journalistic disgrace.”

It was happening in every corner of the News empire. In February 2025, Trump had a thought bubble. Along with annexing Greenland, turning Canada into the 51st state, retaking the Panama Canal and giving Putin Ukraine, he had an idea that the United States could “take over” and “own” Gaza.

After the Palestinian people were resettled somewhere else, the US could turn Gaza into a new Middle East Riviera, where there would be “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing”. As you’d hope, reputable media outlets pulled apart the plan, and within minutes revealed its thoughtless cruelty. World leaders said it was inconceivable. Arab leaders said it was a violation of international law.

But the idea found supporters on Fox News. Ainsley Earhardt, the co-host of Fox & Friends, asked her audience, “If you have the opportunity for economic development, and supplied unlimited number of jobs and housing, and a good, fresh, ‘beautiful piece of land’ like he calls it, why wouldn’t you consider it?” She seemed genuine, like she actually believed it, when she asked, “Why wouldn’t they say thanks for doing this?”

But perhaps the most egregious example was provided by Sharri Markson, a host on Murdoch’s Sky News Australia. In 2025, Markson scored a 16-minute interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but then wasted it by asking not a single probing question.

Instead, she provided a platform for Netanyahu to further his personal attack on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who had just announced Australia would recognise the state of Palestine.

She declared, as fact, that the Albanese government was “aiding and abetting” a “propaganda campaign” against Israel. Many of her questions were mini editorials, like this one: “Is it true you still plan to take over Gaza and eliminate the terrorists if they do agree to a deal?” She nodded in agreement throughout the interview. “Absolutely, absolutely,” she added enthusiastically as he explained Israel’s good conduct. The result was that she let a man charged with war crimes off the hook.

The interview was widely condemned. Veteran television interviewer Ray Martin told Media Watch it was a “sycophantic endorsement” that “failed journalism 101”. In a responding statement, Markson said she “had been inundated with high praise from leading editors and journalists, describing the interview as outstanding, first class and agenda setting”.

‘Determined avoidance’ of other perspectives

The company’s editorial line was on display in its coverage of the Bondi Beach massacre in December 2025, when two terrorists killed 15 people, and injured a further 40 who were celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

News Corp mastheads rightly deplored the appalling violence and questioned whether the Australian government had heeded warnings about such an attack. The papers rightly commemorated and mourned the loss of innocent life, and investigated and exposed the ugly ideologies and personal pathologies behind the killings.

But inevitably – and sadly for the health of public discourse – the coverage displayed a determined avoidance to present any perspectives other than its own on the rise of antisemitism in Australia.

This is an edited extract of Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch’s Media Wields Power and Punishment by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson (Hardie Grant) .

Matthew Ricketson worked on staff at News Corp Australia publications, The Australian between 1986 and 1989, and The Sunday Herald in 1989.

Andrew worked as a journalist at The Australian newspaper between 1999 and 2004.