Comments from Arnold Roth 21 October 2004

This is Arnold's comment on the Richard Carleton program which charateristically only showed one side of the conflict. Arnold makes the point that there are deeper problems with the Carleton program than the misrepresentation of the facts:

We live in media-rich times. Richard Carleton has managed to remain on Australian television screens for decades by delivering a product that entertains. It's neither cynical nor unrealistic to say that he's not expected to deliver truth and accuracy. Populistic TV shows like his are made up of sound-bites. The audience keeps coming back because that's what they want. Anything heavier would be dreary and challenging. The hand-held remote ensures they're seeing what they want to see at any given moment.

Of course it hurts the feelings of many people (including me) when he exhibits a boorish superficiality on most things Israeli, as he has been doing for years. But most of your neighbours think he's harmless. For them, the Middle East conflict is far enough way and complex enough so that they don't want to be confused by facts. Like most audiences, they want to see the bad (read: stronger) guys taken down a notch. They don't relate to people who yell at each other, and will always prefer to identify with voices that sound moderate and calm. All journalists know this well. Few Israelis do - why that is requires a longer note than this one.

There are two points that the 'Sixty Minutes' transcript prompted me to share.

One - I was angered by an imbecilic line of questions that Carleton directed at Shimon Peres three years ago for Australian TV, a few days after my daughter Malki was murdered by a Palestinian Arab terror attack in August 2001. I emailed the producers, and Carleton wrote back to me. He said: "...On reflection, I would have made my thoughts clearer had I expressed myself slightly differently..." This leads me to think he's not oblivious to the limitations of his understanding of the issues, and that he is not unreasonable. Unfortunately, none of this 'reflection' reached your screens. So perhaps the right kind of pressure by Australian consumers of the 'Sixty Minutes' product is to ask the manufacturers and distributors of that product to demand a recall or correction - as the makers of toothpaste or motor-oil additives might be obliged to do. That's a prerogative of consumers. It would be a mistake, I think, to pressure Carleton himself. He's delivering a winning product, to judge by the results. From his perspective, it's not about truth but about what the consumers are asking for.

Two - Carleton's casual use of the nazi analogy is not unusual these days. He's probably as uninterested in understanding what Nazism truly is as he is in understanding what's really going on in this war he's covering. (The same is true of a large part of his audience.) Far more offensive to me is his gratuitous throw-away line about treason...

PHYLLIS WISEBERG: Oh, my gosh. I would tell them to be brave and keep up their fight, to tell you the truth. If I were in their place, I would be fighting also.

RICHARD CARLETON: In Israel's current state, such talk edges on traitorous.

Traitorous? Anyone familiar with Israeli society knows it's vibrant, noisy, contentious and almost completely without limits when it comes to the scope of public debate - by comparison with any society anywhere, let alone in relation to the dangerous and dark Middle East neighbourhood we live in. If Phyllis Wiseberg and the people who feel the way she does face obstacles in getting their views aired in Israel, I can't imagine what they are. We have nothing to be ashamed of on this score.

In a subtle - and perhaps unthinking - fashion, Carleton has conveyed to his large Australian audience the image of Israel as a closed society which demands compliance with some centralized group-think. He's not alone in presenting things this way. Many of the reporters and TV 'talking heads' who breeze in and out of Israel in phenomenal numbers tell things this way. Ultimately this does more harm than calling the security barrier a concrete wall (which it is - in the same sense that Australia is a mangrove swamp) or than describing Israeli service personnel as "acting like the Nazis".

If there's one thing that concerned Australians can do to help Israel (other than coming here and riding our buses) it's to help fellow Australians understand the strength of Israel's democratic character. Personally I don't think this is achieved by piling onto Carleton (which I realize is not what name withheld is advocating) but rather by being direct and vocal with the people who own, package and distribute his message. No less than Richard Carleton, you have a democratic right to be heard - even if making use of that right is sometimes not easy.

Arnold Roth
Jerusalem.