Big Small Talk
Why Does Australian Media Still Have The Same Problems? With Antoinette Lattouf
03 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A listener production. Women who have an opinion, women who are difficult, women who are challenging the status quo are often attacked and maligned and ridiculed and defamed in the media.
Hi, I'm Sarah, and this is Small Talk. It's not quite a news headline, but it is what the girls are talking about.
Chapter 2: What challenges do women face in the media today?
And I am so thrilled to be here today with Antoinette Latouf. Welcome. Thank you for coming on. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today. You are the co-founder of Et Media. You have the podcast We Used To Be Journos. You are the co-founder of Media Diversity Australia, the author of now two books, and the most recent one being Women Who Win, which really just came out.
When did this come out? Four or five weeks ago? Yeah.
It's very new.
And congrats on the writing festival being the most sold in Sydney.
Yes. And Melbourne?
And Melbourne. Congratulations. It's been a wild month. That's a huge month. I know we briefly met once before. I think my mum made us all take a selfie together outside of that.
That's right.
Outside of the, what was it, the opera house? We were in front of the opera house.
Yes.
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Chapter 3: What does 'Women Who Win' explore about female empowerment?
I think... Pretty much everyone who listened to this podcast would already, like we followed on the podcast. I mean, we know what happened, but for anyone listening that doesn't, do you have a, can you kind of summarize?
A very summary, elevate a pitch of my trauma. It's so funny that you can never assume that people know, even though most people do. I did have a look at, I mean, most people read reviews about their books, but I went on to Goodreads and the very first review of my book by a member of the public was like, oh,
I had never heard of this author or what she went through, but I really enjoyed learning about it and I really enjoyed the stories of all the other women and I really liked the book cover. So my very first reviewer had no idea. It is funny.
Chapter 4: How did Antoinette Lattouf's court case impact her career?
I think when you work in media and you're a journalist, you're like, everyone knows this, but there probably would be people.
There are people. Yes. So very, very brief is that... I was presenting for ABC Radio, local radio, in the lead up to Christmas. I was on a short-term contract. I am a journalist and an author. I am Lebanese-Australian and I have worked across many outlets in many different areas of journalism.
And at that point in my career, I was freelance, happily so, doing a bunch of different things at a bunch of different outlets. It wasn't uncommon for me to fill in as a I had shared a Human Rights Watch post on the third day while I was on air or after I was on air. I did nothing relating to geopolitics or whatever on the podcast because it was the lead up to Christmas.
It was very conversational, music, summer tips, talkback, all of those things. But I was targeted by the pro-Israel lobbyists because I am critical of Israel's conduct and because I was critical of the fact that Israel's using starvation as a weapon of war. So merely by sharing that Human Rights Watch post,
In my Instagram stories, a post that the ABC had already reported on twice, a finding the ABC had already reported on twice, I was called into my manager's office, dismissed on the spot, told to get my bags and leave. And by the time I'd gotten home, there was already a defamatory, horrible hit piece about me in The Australian.
And it later surfaced a couple of weeks later, there were a couple of WhatsApp groups, Lawyers for Israel and other creatives and academics, Jewish creatives and academics who were targeting me, targeting the board and then celebrating my sacking. And
And then I had to fight it for almost two years in the federal court to prove that the ABC targeted me for my political opinion, not that I did anything wrong because I had alleged that I didn't listen to my manager and that I breached editorial policy and I breached social media policy. I had done no such thing. I had done nothing wrong, literally nothing wrong.
So rarely is there a very clean victim. Like usually in court cases, they're like, yeah, but you kind of did this and you kind of did that. And, you know, no, like I literally did nothing. I literally did nothing wrong, but I still had to fight tooth and nail for my career, my reputation, my mental health, my safety. Anyway, I won. It said employment law precedent because...
testing political opinion under the whatever. I'm not going to get into it. It's boring legalese, but it's at legal precedent in Australia because that section of the law had never been tested. And the ABC spent $2.6 million fighting me and they had denied it right to the very end that they had done anything wrong. And I won.
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Chapter 5: How does Antoinette Lattouf define a 'win' for women in society?
I want to talk about when you first became a journalist. What was the media landscape like at the time when you first started this job?
It was incredibly white, incredibly middle class, incredibly city centric. But I really wanted to be part of storytelling and be part of such a powerful... lever or part of our democracy because I know it plays a really crucial role. Now that I look back, my first job was at SBS and it was where all good little ethnics go and start.
But I look around, if I think back to all of my colleagues and the news directors and the presenters and the managers and stuff, and they were all, it's the multicultural broadcaster, but they were all white, which is sort of emblematic of how non-inclusive our industry is and what that trickle down effect is. for a society and a democracy that is so culturally and linguistically diverse.
But it also gives you a taste of how and why certain issues about minoritised and marginalised communities are treated or ignored because you have a particular lens and a particular worldview that dominates newsrooms around the country.
Was wanting to change that part of what made you want to become a journalist as well?
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the so-called war on terror era I grew up in Western Sydney. There was the Cronulla riots when I was, I think, still at school or university. I have distinct memories of September 11 and the coverage and the narrative after that, the gaslighting and excuses to...
go into Iraq and kill hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people for so-called weapons of mass destruction. We just did a whole deep dive on the Iraq war. It is insane.
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Chapter 6: How does the media treat women who challenge the status quo?
And also how the media manufactures consent for outward racism or, in this case, genocide. And there was just so many things that were dangerous and unfair, whether it was the shock jocks or whether it was Murdoch press. And perhaps... naively, I thought that I could contribute to it and change it. If I joined, my voice would be part of a shift in 10 years into working in the media.
I was like, hey, things haven't changed. And so I started a not-for-profit, Media Diversity Australia, thinking, well, okay, we need other things to help structural change come about.
Chapter 7: What historical context does Antoinette provide about women's struggles?
And so we did things like academic research with university partners. We did internships and scholarships and for mid-range journalists of colour to go into management roles. I did that for seven years while still working as a journalist. And then I left that in 2022. The not-for-profit is still going. And then after October 2023...
And the way that story has been covered and the way journalists who are either Arab or Muslim or even journalists who call out the industry to be fairer and more ethical about the way we report on the unfolding genocide in Gaza, the way we've been treated and the way Arabs continue to be dehumanised and disregarded has made me think, well, I'm an idiot.
All those years I thought that we were making progress. Here we are back again to the early 2000s level of racism and division.
I think that's part of why I was really wanting to talk to you today because I think being sort of new to journalism in a way, part of me was like racking my brains about is this what it was like 20 years ago or have I just become more media literate and I notice this more now?
Yeah.
Well, it was really bad back then, but it's, I fear, worse now. I think it's worse now because we think we had gotten past things. We thought we were better. We thought we had learnt lessons. Whether the lessons are about the impact of ignoring blatant breaches of international law and human rights atrocities, what that does to safety and security.
You can't bomb your way into safety and security because there's a lot of evidence that shows that the treatment of Iraqis and the desecration of the Iraqi state led to the birth of ISIS and al-Qaeda and extremist organisations. And also when you demonise and dehumanise huge sections of the Australian community, that's not good for Australia's democracy.
When you impinge on civil liberties like the freedom to protest or the freedom to say certain words, that doesn't make anybody safer. From a media perspective, I don't think we've gotten better, sadly. It's just, and perhaps that's why I fought so hard in the courts because I wanted it to be public knowledge about the institutional failures in this moment in time. I wanted it to be aired.
I wanted everybody to know just how easily the ABC capitulated to the pro-Israel lobby. And also if you're looking at coverage and going, this is incongruent with what I know to be happening. I don't know if you know, Sarah, but in the last 24 hours, Penny Wong sanctioned a bunch of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and also organisations for their violence against Palestinians.
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