Jonathan Holmes

speaker

79 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Jonathan Holmes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

7am · Do Jillian Segal's claims of ABC-fuelled antisemitism stack up? · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

At least that's the way I understood it.

And we thought this was extraordinarily dangerous, that this person who is, after all, the immediate past president,

of the Executive Committee of Australian Jewry, which is the leading representative body of Australian Jews, or certainly claims to be, and has been attacking the ABC's perceived bias for decades, for decades, that she should set herself up as a sort of impartial arbiter of what is or isn't fair reporting.

So Gillian Siegel, in her evidence to the Royal Commission, came up with a new proposal, which apparently is included in an action plan additional to her original plan that she submitted to the government in January, but which none of us have seen.

But from her evidence, it's clear that she is now saying, oh, no, no, it's not me that's going to do the monitoring of a public broadcast.

It's what I suggest is a standing committee of independent people who would become the arbiters of whether the overall coverage of Middle East conflicts

is fair and impartial and accurate, and I guess would advise the ABC and SBS on how to avoid this problem of increasing the antagonism to Australian Jews because of bad news about Israel.

Now, that's almost worse than we had feared.

I mean, who is going to be this independent, constitute this independent committee?

By definition, if it's going to change the overall coverage of the Middle East conflicts,

it would have to consist of people who have a more favorable view of Israel and its actions than the current ombudsman at the ABC and SBS or indeed the official regulator ACMA has because those bodies have not accepted almost any of the constant complaints about bias that they've been receiving over decades.

And no organization that I can think of

devolves all its complaints handling to some completely outside body, as Gillian Siegel seems to be recommending, it would be an absolute abandonment of its independence.

Now, I mean, where does that leave the ADC's reputation for impartiality?

Above all, the ABC's job is to report the facts as accurately as it can and to reflect the diverse views right across the community of what's going on.

So what Siegel is recommending, I mean, among other things, and this is, to be honest, for any professional journalist, a kind of bizarre suggestion, that if the ABC reporters understood this problem of conflation better, they would be trying to help to solve it by, for example, reporting more positive stories about Israel as well as the negative ones.

And she gives the example of all these wonderful startups that are happening in the Israeli economy.

And why don't we talk about that instead of all banging on about Gaza all the time?

If we're reporting on, I don't know, the ICE activities in the United States and the killing of innocent civilians in Minnesota, do we feel the necessity to balance that with a story about a Hollywood blockbuster or the success of AI or something?

I mean, it's just a bizarre notion.

Showing 21–40 of 79 · page 2 of 4