Almost a rite of passage: Foreign influence and the Australian media

Australia's coverage of Gaza has felt managed for some time now: carefully worded, subtly constrained and oddly consistent across outlets that don't usually agree on much. The feeling has been easy to dismiss. Editorial caution is required, people said. The conflict is complex. The subject is sensitive. These explanations have the advantage of being partially true, which makes them useful cover for what is actually going on. What is actually going on is a documented influence operation that has been running, with considerable success, since 1983.

A champion of press freedom

The National Press Club of Australia describes itself as "impassioned personal champions of media freedom" committed to the Club's "integral role in defending those freedoms." Its weekly addresses, broadcast nationally on the ABC at 12:30pm, have hosted prime ministers, foreign heads of state, and some of the most consequential voices in public life. It is, in its own words, Australia's premier "forum for political and policy debates”.

On 8 September 2025, the Club's chief executive confirmed in writing that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former New York Times Middle East bureau chief Chris Hedges would address the Club on 20 October. Tickets were listed on the website at $95. The topic was the betrayal of Palestinian journalists by Western media.

Three weeks before the event, the confirmation was withdrawn. The chief executive wrote that he was doing so "in the interest of balancing out our program." When the cancellation drew public backlash, the Club claimed the appearance had only ever been "tentatively agreed to." Screenshots of the website listing, taken before the page was quietly removed, disproved that claim immediately.

In the weeks that followed, the Club hosted Israel's recently installed ambassador, a retired lieutenant colonel with fourteen years in the Israeli military, as a featured speaker. Hedges delivered his banned address at the NSW Teachers Federation instead.

This is not a story about one cancelled speech. It is a story about how cancelling it was the path of least resistance.

Four decades of cultivation

For more than four decades, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies has run an annual "Journalists' Mission to Israel" for senior Australian media figures. The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) has run parallel programs for politicians and future leaders under its Rambam Fellowship — marketed as an immersive education program. Archival research by Michael West Media found the journalist program dates to 1983 — significantly earlier than the JBD's own website claim of "about 25 years."

Crikey's investigation, updated in late 2024, identified approximately 130 senior journalists and politicians who have attended Israel lobby-sponsored tours. Michael West Media's analysis found that only 13 journalists and politicians had taken Palestinian-side tours — a ratio of roughly ten to one. Palestinian advocacy tours are also, notably, at least partly self-funded by participants.

The participants in the Israeli programs are not fringe figures. A single 2015 tour included Sky News' Sharri Markson, the future editor of the Daily Telegraph Ben English, the future editor of the Sydney Morning Herald Bevan Shields, and the AFR's Aaron Patrick. Former prime ministers Abbott, Turnbull, Gillard and Rudd are all Rambam alumni. Current NSW Premier Chris Minns attended as a ministerial adviser.

AIJAC's own executive director, Colin Rubenstein, described the program's purpose plainly, as reported by Michael West Media: "We don't expect every one to come back card-carrying Zionists, but we do expect them to be more knowledgeable and more empathetic." AIJAC has not publicly contradicted or walked back that statement.

"More empathetic." In an industry built on scepticism, that is a significant ask and, the evidence suggests, a largely successful one. Former Sydney Morning Herald deputy editor John Lyons, himself a tour participant who later wrote critically about the program, documented what a senior AIJAC official told him: attending had become "almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of any major Australian news outlet."

Disclosure of these trips varies from outlet to outlet. Crikey found no consistency across mastheads on whether journalists disclose a funded Israel trip before reporting on the region. Some had continued publishing content about the conflict after recent tours without any disclosure at all.

This is not, on its face, illegal. It is the kind of undisclosed access arrangement that Australian journalism codes of ethics were designed to flag. Applied to any other foreign government's media outreach program, it would be registered under Australia's Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme. AIJAC and the Zionist Federation of Australia are both exempt from that scheme, on the basis of their not-for-profit status, despite sponsoring overseas travel for politicians, cultivating media relationships, and lobbying public institutions on foreign policy matters.

A 2021 case study cited in multiple subsequent analyses described AIJAC as one of Australia's "best-funded foreign influence operations" — a characterisation AIJAC has not publicly disputed. In 2014, former Foreign Minister Bob Carr stated publicly, in ABC interviews following the publication of his memoir Diary of a Foreign Minister, that the lobby's influence on the Gillard government had been "inappropriately and bullyingly exercised in the government." While AIJAC disputed the characterisation, the record of what occurred at the UN vote on Palestinian observer status is not in dispute.

Influence operations of this kind are invisible when they succeed. The Lattouf case is visible because it failed.

Punishing resistance

In December 2023, Antoinette Lattouf, a Lebanese-Australian journalist filling in as a presenter on ABC Radio Sydney, shared a Human Rights Watch report on social media. The report documented Israel's alleged use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. The ABC itself had already covered the same report.

What followed was documented in Federal Court proceedings. A WhatsApp group called "Lawyers for Israel," with 156 members, ran a coordinated email campaign targeting ABC managing director David Anderson and then-chair Ita Buttrose, demanding Lattouf's removal and threatening legal action. The group's coordinator stressed the importance of complaints coming from lawyers specifically, so the ABC would "feel there is an actual legal threat."

Anderson began trawling Lattouf's social media the night of her first day on air. Buttrose, according to emails tendered in court, asked whether Lattouf could "come down with flu or COVID." She added, "We owe her nothing."

Lattouf was dismissed three days later.

On 25 June 2025, Federal Court Justice Darryl Rangiah ruled that the ABC had acted unlawfully, terminating Lattouf because of "the political opinion she held opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza," in direct contravention of the Fair Work Act. Rangiah found the decision had been made, at least in part, "to appease pro-Israel lobbyists" conducting "an orchestrated campaign." The ABC had also breached its own enterprise agreement by denying Lattouf any opportunity to respond before dismissal.

Justice Rangiah's finding is on the public record, as is the ABC's denial.

The cost in this case was paid by one journalist. The broader cost - stories not pursued, editorial instincts learned and then unlearned, questions that stopped being asked - is harder to quantify and easier to ignore. That is, of course, the point.

No phone call needed

The Press Club denied any external pressure and it might be telling the truth. That’s the more concerning possibility: that no phone calls, threats or explicit instructions were needed. That the institution had simply, over years of accumulated relationships and cultivated instincts, learned which invitations created problems and which ones didn't. That is how long-run influence operates. Not through ongoing pressure but through the slow replacement of independent judgement with comfortable habit.

This dynamic isn't corruption. It's architecture.

The stakes of that architecture extend well beyond one cancelled speech, one conflict, or one lobby group's influence on editorial culture. A democracy whose media has been systematically shaped on one foreign policy question loses something more than accuracy on that question. It loses the capacity for the clear-eyed scrutiny that sovereign decision-making requires across all the questions that follow.

Those questions aren’t abstract. They include which surveillance technology Australia procures, from which companies, with what access to Australian data — and on what basis those procurement decisions are made when the media environment has been shaped to make scrutiny feel impolite. They also include which foreign military operations Australia supports, and whether our institutions retain the independence to ask hard questions when the answers are inconvenient.

A managed media environment isn’t merely a journalism problem. It’s a sovereignty problem. When the architecture of influence is left unexamined, exempt from the foreign interference laws we apply elsewhere, undisclosed by the outlets that benefit from it, and enforced by coordinated legal pressure on journalists who step out of line, the result is a country making consequential decisions with incomplete information.

Australia applies its foreign interference framework with rigour when the influence originates in Beijing: expelling diplomats, legislating transparency schemes and scrutinising think tanks when the funding trail leads east. The same tools applied consistently, regardless of which government funds the influence or in which direction it runs, would require our institutions to examine relationships they have so far shown little appetite to scrutinise.

That asymmetry isn't an oversight. It's a preference. And a country that applies its foreign interference laws selectively is not protecting its sovereignty.

A democracy that can't see clearly can't govern itself clearly.