Moulding the Australian Mind: The Jewish role in the Australian Media Landscape
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Jews control the media — so goes the classic anti-Semitic ‘canard.’ Inquiries into the extent of Jewish influence over the streams of information that make up so much of our daily life are among the most studied aspects of the Jewish Question and it’s not hard to see why. In the age of mass democracy, the media has delivered the rich and the powerful an historically unprecedented mechanism to mould the minds of the general public and direct the political currents of society. Revolutionary and subversive new ideas can be broadcast wide and far, editorial decisions can determine the boundaries of the Overton window, critical perspectives can be silenced, and the thought-makers of the day set the overall tenor of discourse.
Western liberal democracies have always been averse to the bequeathing of this power to the government and the resulting predominance of wealthy private actors, each with their own ideological predispositions, was the necessary price to pay to avoid a state media monopoly. In times past, such arrangements could be begrudgingly accepted within homogenous nations, confident that even across sharp political divides the basic notion of the ethnic preservation of one’s homeland would remain uncontested. However, with the advent of multiculturalism and multiracialism, where competing ethnic groups clash on even the most fundamental principles of society, media outlets can now be fashioned into instruments of covert ethnic warfare.
Much has been written on this topic within the United States and undoubtedly many readers of The Occidental Observer are familiar with the graphs documenting US media ownership colour-coded by ethnicity that regularly circulate on the internet — and make an appearance with famous rappers. The basic line of argument is as follows: Jewish dominance over the American media results in the consolidation of Jewish power and the promotion of anti-White narratives. The ills of the world, as communicated by the Jewish intelligentsia at newspapers and television networks, are racialism, bigotry and exclusion, and the path to a brighter future is paved with diversity, open borders and tolerance. But what of the far reaches of the American empire? How true is the so-called canard in Australia?
In surveying the Australian media landscape, I am guided by two simple queries. Firstly, how much do Jews influence the media within Australia, and secondly, to what degree does this influence have an impact on political discourse. Focusing on ownership, the editorial gatekeepers and the media trailblazers, I seek to gain a balanced understanding of the state of the Australian media in 2024. Each section investigates the various constituent elements of information communication that make up what we broadly define as ‘the media’ — newspapers, television, radio, publishing etc. — and my review covers only those that are owned and operated in Australia, and are geared exclusively towards the Australian audience.
This therefore rules out foreign-based newspapers that have a presence in Australia such as The Guardian Australia and Spectator Australia, or overseas media companies like Netflix, which operates an office in Sydney for running local content. I have excluded media that is deliberately positioned towards a single ethnic group or is otherwise inaccessible by the majority of Australians, for example Jewish paper The Australian Jewish News, or the contingent of Chinese-language newspapers that operate in the country. Finally, I have restricted my analysis to ‘mass media’ — that is, media that is able and intended to reach a wide audience — as well as ruled out media outlets that cannot reasonably be described as political in character. One may well find a knitting magazine that has a Jewish owner, but it would be far-fetched to claim that pages of instructions for woollen socks and baby bonnets will be able to impart any kind of political influence in Australia.
Newspapers
Our survey starts out with the most traditional form of information delivery, the newspaper. As is the case around the world, Australian newspapers are in a period of significant decline. Their physical circulations are minuscule compared to what they once were and online content is increasingly hidden behind paywalls. Nevertheless, the newspaper still remains the prestige institution for the dissemination of news and opinion, and the putting of ink to paper will always have longevity over a television broadcast or a social media post.
The Australian newspaper industry of the 20th century was the domain of a handful of press barons, almost all of Anglo-Saxon extraction. The major names are the Fairfax dynasty, founded by English-born journalist John Fairfax in the mid-19th century, notably owning the oldest extant newspaper in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald; The Syme family in Melbourne who stewarded The Age until a later Fairfax takeover; The Norton family with their nation-wide sensationalist tabloids Truth; and the Packer family, whose newspaper, publishing and television holdings spanned four generations.
Australia’s historically minuscule Jewish population as well as the established nature of local newspapers from a time before the era of mass Jewish migration after the Second World War left little opportunity for strong Jewish ownership within this industry. Australia has no equivalent to the Sulzberger family at the New York Times or the Meyer family at the Washington Post. Historical Jewish ownership of Australian newspapers is limited to the periphery of the industry, owners of singular newspaper operations that never grew into a sprawling media empire. Thedore Fink owned and chaired the Herald and Weekly Times in Melbourne during the early half of the 20thcentury, the dominant newspaper in the city at the time. John Davies, a Jewish convict, founded The Mercury newspaper in the small state of Tasmania which remained in the family for almost 150 years, and Maurice Brodzky founded Table Talk, an infamous muckraking journal popular during the financial crash of the 1890s.
Today most newspapers fall under the ownership of larger media conglomerates, publicly traded companies whose shareholders need not even be Australian. Modern Jewish influence at the major papers comes primarily in the form of prominent editors and contributors, or in the occasional director or board member at a parent company. The list of Jewish journalists and editors that have made their mark over the years is too large to reasonably detail in this essay, only the more prominent individuals are worth mentioning. Michael Gawenda edited The Age from 1997–2004, Cyril Pearl edited a number of Murdoch and Packer papers during the 50s and 60s and George Munster edited the fortnightly journals Nation and Nation Review from 1958-1978.
An exception to the relative dearth of modern Jewish newspaper ownership is found in the case of Australian Community Media, which owns most of the regional newspapers in Australia and the newspaper of the nation’s capital, The Canberra Times. In 2019, ACM was sold off by its prior owners and Alex Waislitz, an investment manager and member of the Pratt Family (Australia’s richest Jewish family) purchased a 50 percent stake.
Television
Television was first launched in Australia in 1956 with a single governmental broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and a commercial broadcaster (TCN-9) founded by press baron Frank Packer. Free-to-Air[1] television is now comprised of the two government-funded and operated broadcasters — the ABC and its multicultural broadcasting twin the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) — alongside the three commercial networks; Channel 9 (current day TCN-9), Channel 7 and Network 10. Prior to the transition to digital television in the late 2000s, these five broadcasters corresponded to the five television channels available to the general public via analog broadcasting, with cable television having a very small market share. Thereafter, each broadcaster began steadily introducing additional digital channels to their schedule, the tally now standing at more than twenty-five separate television channels in Australia.
In theory, control of the ABC is in the hands of the Australian public. The taxpayer funds its operation, and the elected government of the day exercises legislative power via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 and appoints the ABC board, comprising 5-7 directors plus a managing director. The ABC board is responsible for the operation of its television (and radio) assets, and a strong Jewish presence has been evident on the board over the past three decades. At a high-point in 2009, Jews made up three of the board members: Maurice Newman, who served as chairman from 2006-2011 (also former Chairman of the Australian Securities Exchange), and two banking executives, Steven Skala and Cheryl Bart. Other Jews who have occupied the board are left-wing activist James Spigelman, chairman from 2012-2017, and Ramona Koval, a long-time ABC radio presenter. Indeed from the turn of the century until the retirement of Joe Gersh from the board in 2023, there was a continuous presence of at least two Jews on the ABC board at all times.
In practice, the ABC has been afflicted with much of the same ‘march through the institutions’ seen throughout the West. Even a conservative government hostile to the ABC appears impotent to prevent a left-wing bias in the lower management levels, as occurred during the late 1990s when the ABC board was stacked in vain with conservative allies. During the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist journalist Allan Ashbolt began the institutional capture of the ABC at the staff level, promoting ‘free speech’ and democratic reform, and he built a cadre of young dedicated leftists within his department who would come to dominate the direction of radio and television programming over the coming years.
According to McAdam, the source of many of the radical ideas Ashbolt would launder through ABC programs was his connection to the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies, founded in 1963 by Jews Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet,[2] and Jews make up a handful of his prominent protégés. Jewish journalists, producers and content creators who have made their mark at the ABC are again too numerous to list out in full. Daryl Karp was head of ABC Factual Programs from 1993–2005. Satirist John Safran created various programs for the ABC (and SBS) skewering religious and racial ‘extremism’, and Andrew Denton’s production company Zapruder’s Other Films has delivered a steady stream of non-fiction content for the ABC for the last two decades, including launching the television career of political satire group The Chaser. Working Dog Productions, co-founded by Michael Hirsch, has also contributed numerous popular comedy and political satire shows, notably Frontline and the now iconic Australian film The Castle (1997), a comedic exploration of land rights in Australia after the Mabo decision.[3]
Neither Channel 9 nor 7 display any significant degree of Jewish leadership or ownership. As of 2024, both networks are owned by publicly traded companies with controlling shares held by individual gentile shareholders or local investment funds. Channel 9 remained within the Packer family for many years under Frank Packer’s son Kerry and grandson James. James Packer became known for his curious “obsession with the Jewish state” and close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu[4], allegedly attempting to convert to Judaism. Since 2010, ownership of the network has been separated from the Packer family with the majority shareholder now Bruce Gordon, a long-time associate of Kerry Packer and a former Hollywood executive who spent 35 years on the board of Paramount Studios. Channel 7 was historically associated with the Fairfax empire and other than a brief period of joint ownership with Jewish private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, West Australian businessman Kerry Stokes has been the controlling force at the network since the 1990s.
As with newspapers, Jewish influences at these two networks are felt more on the producer level, for example Gerald Stone, founder of the Australian edition of the current affairs program 60 Minutes in 1979. In its day a ratings juggernaut for Channel 9, and the most influential current affairs program on a commercial broadcaster, Stone nurtured a generation of the most popular political reporters in the country. Born to Russian-Jewish parents, Stone migrated to Australia in 1962, covering the Vietnam war at The Daily Mirror before migrating to television, first at the ABC (prominently at the flagship currents affairs program This Day Tonight) and thereafter a news director at Channel 9. Later in life, Stone became network head of current affairs for Channel 7 and served on the board of directors of the SBS from 2000 until 2010 (deputy chairman from 2005), rounding out a career at almost every television station in the country.
Since its founding in the 1960s, ownership of Network 10, the third and final station to be given a broadcasting license — and the most financially unstable — has bounded across different owners. Jewish interests in this ownership mix have predominated since the 1980s. Property developer and founder of the Westfield shopping centre empire Frank Lowy briefly owned the network from 1986-1988 and CannWest, a Canadian media group owned by Israel Asper, held a controlling interest from 1992-2009. Jewish community leader Isi Leibler also owned a significant share of the network during the 1990s and in 2017 Network 10 was sold to the American media conglomerate CBS (now renamed Paramount) which is still run by members of the Redstone family (Jewish).
Multicultural Broadcasting
As readers would no doubt suspect, Jews have been integral to the founding and modern alignment of Australia’s multicultural broadcaster SBS. Launched in 1978 as a supplement to the ABC, the SBS was designed to counter the forces of assimilation and explicitly promote multicultural values. The bread and butter of the SBS was once world news and its foreign language news services, though in recent years it has expanded well beyond these confines into more commercial ventures through a partnership with Canadian media group Vice News.
The origins of the SBS lie in 1975 with the new-left Whitlam government, which set up two ethnic radio stations as part of the newly minted policy of multiculturalism (2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne). Members of the Ethnic Radio Experiment Committee which oversaw the two stations that later became the SBS included Walter Lippmann. The inaugural chair of the SBS was Russian-Jewish migrant Grisha Sklovsky, who guided the early years of multicultural radio and the launch of multicultural television in 1980. A chemist by trade with seemingly no experience in the TV or radio industry, explaining Sklovsky’s prominent position at the SBS requires an understanding of the war the organised Jewish community had waged against public access radio in the mid-1970s.
Alongside ethnic radio, the Whitlam government had also launched two experimental public access stations, 3ZZ and 3CR, the former being hijacked by multiculturalists and turned into ethnic broadcasting[5]. With no Jewish presence, the results of this experiment began to alarm the Jewish community and threatened to jeopardise the multicultural cause. The unmoderated nature of both stations saw a flourishing of far-left and pro-Palestinian rhetoric, and they became mired in ethnic tensions as ethnic communities (in particular Yugoslavs) used the broadcasting facilities for the airing of longstanding political disagreements. A pressure group led by Isi Leibler was successful in shutting down 3ZZ and censuring 3CR.[6] Once moves were made to formalise ethnic radio, it was clear to the Jewish community that a strong Jewish presence was required to prevent such further hijacking of multicultural broadcasting.
After 1996, the SBS found itself in the crossfire of the Coalition government hostile to its multicultural charter. Whilst failing to shut the network down, by the mid-2000s the SBS had become a politically neutered institution. More and more commercial programmes were replacing LOTE content, and the station was widely mocked for its predictable rotation of World News, Soccer, and racy European films. The saviour of the SBS came in 2009 in the form of Jewish investment banker Joseph Skrzynski who undertook sweeping reforms within the institution. Under Skrzynski’s chairmanship, the SBS secured a large increase in federal funding and was revamped into an aggressive vehicle for promoting diversity and multicultural rhetoric via the commission of new current affairs shows and documentaries:
SBS repositioned itself under the Skrzynski board in three key complementary arenas. The board insisted that SBS would not be a “neutral” broadcaster (and increasingly irrelevant and dull as it had been during the Howard years), but rather would be an advocate of a human rights-based exploration of Australian cultural diversity. SBS would become riskier and more investigative, building a body of media productions that tested the limits of where Australians were going in this increasingly multicultural nation.[7]
This ‘riskier’ SBS found expression in local television programs such as Immigration Nation and Go Back to Where You Came From, programs that pushed the button on the refugee and immigration debate. Changes also came to the SBS Radio division, which broadened out from its European base to introduce languages from Africa and the Asian subcontinent, and in 2012 the network launched the National Indigenous Television channel (NITV).
Skrzynski‘s multiculturalist television credentials go as far back as the 1980s during his time as chief executive of the Australian Film Commission, involved in the production of the 1984 SBS documentary series The Migrant Experience. The 6-part series aimed to reposition the centre of the Australian experience from British settlers to the post-war migrants, and presented assimilation as a harsh and undesirable policy. Produced and directed by Jews for the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs[8], the series was intended to be shown in school classrooms and exemplified the early use of the SBS by Jews for spreading the multiculturalist message to wider Australia.
Skrzynski’s tenure at SBS came to end in 2014, but he left the broadcaster a changed organisation, now empowered to further the cause against White Australia. Current Jewish leadership at the SBS includes two Jews on the board of directors — Christine Zeitz as Deputy Chair alongside Jewish community activist Vic Alhadeff as Managing Director — and a number of other Jews dotted throughout lower management levels.
Radio
Like television, radio broadcasting in Australia is split between the government channels of the ABC and SBS, and privately run commercial broadcasters. Commercial radio in Australia is dominated by a handful of publicly traded companies who own most of the ‘hit’ stations across the country. Other than occasional commentary from hosts or the hourly news bulletins, these commercial radio stations are not of an explicitly political nature, the exception being the talkback radio stations. Talkback radio remains arguably the most conservative and right-wing medium in Australia[9] and is regularly the scene of politically incorrect controversies and incidents. Accordingly, one struggles to discern any degree of direct Jewish influence over this medium.
Turning to public radio, Jewish influence at the board level and elsewhere at the ABC and SBS has been covered in the section above. Of further note is ABC radio in Melbourne, perhaps the most Jewish of the regional networks at the level of presenters. For more than two decades, Jon Faine was a staple of Melbourne’s airwaves, hosting the morning program from 1996 to 2019. Fellow tribesman Raf Epstein rounded out the Jewish face of Melbourne’s public radio broadcasting, hosting the drive-home program from 2012-2023 until he took over Faine’s old position on the morning broadcast. Since 2022, ABC radio’s Australia-wide PM news program has been presented by David Lipson.
At the top of the local music industry, Dan Rosen serves as current President of Warner Music Australasia, taking on the role after a decade as CEO of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA).
The Murdoch Empire
Keen observers may have noticed a conspicuous absence in the above analysis of Australian newspapers and television, a certain Murdoch-shaped absence. The empire of Rupert Murdoch covers so large a cross-section of the Australian media that it ultimately deserves its own segment. Looking deep into the past, the origins of the Murdoch press can in fact be attributed to Jewish lawyer and newspaper proprietor Thedore Fink (mentioned previously), who appointed journalist Keith Murdoch as editor of The Herald in 1921 and fostered Murdoch’s rise to a major figure in the Australian media in his own right, long before his world-conquering son took over the family business upon his death in 1952.
Murdoch’s Australian media interests, contained under the News Corporation umbrella, have grown to the point where he owns the tabloid press in almost every major city in the country, totalling upwards of 50 percent of Australia’s entire print market readership. New Corp. also publishes the nationwide paper The Australian, online news sites Daily Mail Australia and News.com.au, the NOVA radio network, cable TV network Foxtel and the television channel Sky News Australia.
Though Murdoch’s biography is hardly a secret, the ideological contours of the man once known as ‘Red Rupert’ during his time at Oxford (due to his fondness for displaying a bust of Lenin in his room) are far less understood by the general public. Many have been misled by attempts to classify Murdoch — an opponent of the British Monarchy whose tabloid papers ran soft-core pornography — as some kind of conservative. Whilst the left-wing radicalism of his youth that once so upset his father has subsided, Murdoch has never lost his sense of anti-elitism and his hostility to the cultural mores of the long since vanquished ‘stuffy narrow-minded men’ who once comprised the British and Australian elite.
Murdoch’s political trajectory from youthful socialist to neo-liberal Reagan-booster is an altogether familiar one. Accordingly, the editorial positioning of Murdoch’s papers (which Murdoch has always taken a hands-on approach in fashioning) has been aligned with the neo-conservatism of Irving Kristol and Co. since the Thatcher/Reagan era. Critics pinpoint the beginning of Murdoch’s intimacy with Jewish power to his entrance into the American media scene in 1973. For a power-hungry businessman looking to make a splash in the USA and disrupt the old establishment, the benefit in aligning with America’s then emergent elite faction is obvious.
In short, whilst Murdoch and his family are not Jewish[10], his media empire has perfectly dovetailed with the organised Jewish community for the past five decades. Murdoch embodies the word philo-Semitism, and for his efforts he has been rewarded with all the symbols of a ‘Righteous Gentile’. His accolades include the ADL’s International Leadership Award (2010), a Simon Wiesenthal Humanitarian Laureate Award (2006), a Museum of Jewish Heritage Award (2012) and an American Jewish Committee National Human Relations Award (2009) given in a ceremony where Norm Podhoretz personally thanked Murdoch for his help in keeping Commentary magazine alive.
In Australia, the Murdoch press that once supported the new-left Whitlam Labor government and its program of social and cultural radicalism has become almost inseparable from the Liberal Party of Australia. His newspapers incorporate weak, multiracial civic-patriotism for Australia with an iron-clad support for Israel as an ethnically Jewish state. Murdoch appointed a number of Jews to prominent positions at his Australian newspapers in his early years, including Solomon Chandler, a Fleet Street veteran whom he hired to launch The Australian. Lithuanian-born Zell Rabin (Rabinavicius), edited Murdoch’s The Daily Mirror in the mid-1960s, the only major Australian newspaper to oppose the Vietnam war.[11]
Within Murdoch’s local television ventures, Foxtel was primarily for American television shows and the latest Hollywood movies still inaccessible on free-to-air television. Sky News, a 24-hour news station, is known for its ‘After Dark’ rotation of right-wing commentators akin to the evening lineup of Fox News in America, including breakout Jewish star Sharri Markson. All Sky News commentators are vocal Zionists who rally against ‘wokeness’ and predictably reject any form of White racialism.
Magazines and Periodicals
The political magazine and periodical industry in Australia is dominated by Schwarz Media, owned by property developer Morry Schwarz. This outfit produces The Monthly, Australia’s leading current affairs magazine[12]; The Saturday Paper, a weekend newspaper focusing on politics and current affairs; Quarterly Essay, a political journal; and Australian Foreign Affairs, Australia’s leading foreign policy journal. Visit any newsagency in Australia and Schwarz’s publications will be your most obvious choice for local political reading. Though ostensibly left-wing products, Schwarz’s Zionist views have long created a cordon-sanitaire around espousing pro-Palestine perspectives within his publications.[13]
On the other end of the political spectrum, usually sitting alongside The Monthly and Quarterly Essay, comes Quadrant magazine, a solidly kosher-conservative outfit that has for its entire existence held the line against racialism and anti-Semitism. Founded and overseen by Czech-Jewish migrant Richard Krygier in 1956, Quadrant was the Australian venture of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Jewish-led anti-communist group later discovered to be funded by the CIA.[14] Jewish editors and major contributors abound in Quadrant’s history, from anti-communist firebrand Frank Knopfelmacher, television journalist Sam Lipski, to the neo-conservative academic Robert Manne, whose editorship from 1990 began to draw the magazine towards a more progressive position, in particular on the Indigenous question, until an internal revolt eventually forced him out in 1997. Critics have decried Quadrant’s supposed recent descent into “right wing extremist material”, but with a new Jewish editor-in-chief appointed earlier this year (Rebecca Weisser), racialism and critical discussions on the Jewish question, let alone any significant criticism of Zionism, remain predictably off-limits.
When it comes to lifestyle and special interest publications that have a degree of political character (such as women’s or scientific magazines), the Packer family’s Australian Consolidated Press was the main player in Australia. Once again Jews have come more into leading positions as editors: Nene King at Woman’s Day and The Australian Women’s Weekly; Bernard Leser, founder of Vogue Australia; and Alan Finkel, co-founder and editor of science publication Cosmos Magazine. As of 2024, this dying market has been under the management of gentile-controlled private equity firms that every year wrap up publication on yet another magazine that was once a staple of Australian light reading. As to pornographic magazines, I have previously written about the Jewish component here.
Publishing
For the sake of brevity, I have limited my analysis of the publishing industry to wholly Australian-owned and controlled publishers who are primarily known for producing non-fiction works — publishers which can thus be seen to have an overtly political intent. Schwarz Media comes to the fore again with their publishing outlet Black Inc. Founded in 2000, Black Inc. is the publisher of choice for left-wing political writers in Australia and its imprints also include the university publisher La Trobe University Press.
Scribe Publications, founded in 1976 by Henry Rosenbloom, holds another large catalogue of local non-fiction works. Melbourne University Publishing, founded in 1922, is Australia’s largest and oldest university press. For the better part of the last two decades, MUP was under the stewardship of Jewish CEO Louise Adler, whose tenure introduced many commercial titles into what was once a primarily academic press. Adler departed from MUP in 2019 after a 16-year stint to become publisher-at-large for Hachette Australia.
Australia’s largest online bookseller Booktopia, which also operates its own publishing arm, was founded and run by Tony Nash (Nachemstein) and Steve Traurig, and in 2015 it acquired the book retailer and publisher Angus & Robertson.
New Media
The term New Media encompasses the new generation of news outlets, websites and political magazines that have no physical presence away from the online world. Such outlets benefit from a lack of overhead tied up in large offices and printing presses and have grown in popularity over the last decade with the decline of traditional newspapers and free-to-air television. Given the novelty of the medium and lack of institutional barriers, Jews have founded many of the prominent Australian ventures, covering everything from feminist blogging to youth-orientated news websites.
The Conversation, an academic current affairs website which has launched editions across the globe, was co-founded by American Jack Rejtman. Mia Freedman, the daughter of anti-apartheid activists, founded the women’s media group Mammamia. Quilette, owned by gentile Australian Clare Lehmann, has positioned itself as a hub for the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, a grouping of disaffected anti-woke Jewish writers and academics. Youth news website The Daily Aus was launched in 2017 by Sam Koslowski and Zara Seidler and the recently launched investigative journalism website Declassified Australia was co-founded by Antony Loewenstein. Finally, ADH TV a video news channel launched in 2021 with a roster of popular conservative commentators, was founded and chaired by Maurice Newman.
Film
As far as the film industry is concerned, the obvious predominance of Hollywood in the Australian market need not be further elucidated. As detailed by Neal Gabler in his 1988 book An Empire of their Own, it is insufficient to say that Jews “run” or “control” Hollywood. Rather, Hollywood is their own creation, an institution founded and built from the ground up by Jewish filmmakers and entrepreneurs who had fled to California to escape the legal reach of the Edison Trust. To separate Jews from the history of Hollywood is as futile as separating the history of Salvation Army thrift stores from the Methodist Church.
Australia briefly had a native film industry prior to the advent of Hollywood, one quickly destroyed by mismanagement and political interference. The government banned the popular and financially lucrative Bushranger genre for fear of it encouraging criminality, and by the 1930s the Australian film industry had been completely swallowed up by Hollywood through local Jewish entrepreneurs like Nathaniel Freeman. As Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s first managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Freeman “led the local industry from the 1930s to the 1960s, presenting such landmark attractions as Ben-Hur (1927), Gone with the Wind (1940) and Dr Zhivago (1965).”[15]
In the hideouts that the American film industry does not reach into, Jews have also played prominent roles in the establishment of local film festivals and independent cinema operators, leaders of government film bodies and CEOs of Australian-based film production companies.
Conclusion
Whilst Jewish influence is significant, this review of the major components of the Australian media shows that it is far from the direct organisational stranglehold held by Jews over America’s media. There is still a fair degree of gentile ownership, in particular at the newspapers and television networks operating in country. But even though Australians are still in charge of large portions of their own media, this media appears universally hostile to the interests of the White Australian majority. Above and beyond direct ownership or editorial control, other methods are utilised to keep Australia in check, in particular on the question of Israel.
The most politically brazen of these is the Rambam Israel Fellowship program founded in 2003 (but ongoing since the early 1980s) by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. The program involves shepherding a group of Australian politicians and journalists on a lavish and tightly controlled tour of Israel, one designed to inculcate a pro-Israel perspective and “broaden their knowledge” on the right of Israel to defend itself. The most recent compilation of people who have taken part in a Rambam trip is a who’s-who of Australia’s top journalists, with a particular focus on members of the Murdoch press.[16]
Where a journalist or media figure has not been directly compromised through a Rambam fellowship, broad institutional pressure exerted by Jewish and Zionist groups is almost always successful at ‘cancelling’ and pushing oppositional journalists out of their job. Australia’s media is highly concentrated, with one of the lowest levels of media diversity in the western world. Two media conglomerates, News Corp. and Nine Entertainment, account for the lion’s share of private media ownership, making the institutional targeting of a journalist a straightforward task. Countless examples can be found over the last 30 years, the most recent being Lebanese-born ABC journalist Antoinette Lattouf, sacked from her job at ABC Radio Sydney after Jewish pressure groups took issue with her social media posts critical of Israeli actions in the ongoing Gaza war.[17]
Where cajoling with all-expenses-paid Israel trips and pressure on an institutional level does not work to silence critics of Israel, Jewish behaviour or the racial status quo in general, the final step of recourse is the legal system. Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, introduced under heavy Jewish lobbying, is designed for only the most recalcitrant opponents. Mainstream journalists and media figures rarely fall afoul of this extreme measure. Instead, it hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the head of anyone in Australia who contemplates a public violation of the taboos of the 21th century. Rare victims of Section 18c, such as journalist Andrew Bolt in 2009, will quickly find Jews working together to ruthlessly censure their target. As of June 2024, Jewish Attorney General Mark Dreyfus is in the process of drafting new and even more forceful ‘hate speech’ laws that are purported to include custodial sentences.
As with so many other questions of political influence in Australia, the state of the Australian media must always be placed squarely in the context of Australia’s position as a colonial outpost of the American Empire. Most of the above-mentioned media outlets, in particular television, struggle with audiences shifting towards American media. The average Australian under the age of 35 is more likely to spend their time watching a product on Netflix or Disney+ than tune into a drama series on the ABC or a commercial network. They gather their news from Instagram, X and YouTube rather than radio broadcasts or newspaper articles. They listen to playlists on Spotify rather than tune into youth radio stations. Accordingly, the question of who owns and directs the media in America is no less relevant for finding out who influences the minds of Australians.
In all, the anti-White tone evident across the media is a note-for-note recreation of the anti-White perspectives that encompass the thoroughly Jewish media landscape in America. Putting aside even the significant degree of Jewish influence outlined in this essay, which is utterly disproportional when considering their population size, Australia has long been downwind of the political climate of the United States. None of the decisions of America’s ‘thought-makers’ exist in a vacuum, and they always seem to find their way Down Under. When all attempts at presenting a public defence of the Australian people from the threat of racial obliteration are either self-censured or inevitably result in censorship or legal retribution, can one honestly say that Australians control their own media? Clearly true control lies elsewhere.
SELECT SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Inglis, K.S 1983 This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne: Australia.
Lyons, J 2021 Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment, Monash University Press, Melbourne: Australia.
Stone, G 2000 Compulsive Viewing: The inside story of Packer’s Nine Network, Viking O’Neil, Ringwood: Australia.
Young, S 2019 Paper Emperors: The rise of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, NewSouth Books, Sydney: Australia.
[1] All five broadcasters can be freely accessed by anyone with a television and a digital connection, with no subscription or payment required. In the case of the ABC, the broadcasting is taxpayer funded and the commercial networks, whilst subsidised, operate on advertising revenue. The SBS employs a hybrid model of advertisement plus government funding.
[2] McAdam, A 2014, ‘The ABC’s Marxists’, Quadrant Magazine, retrieved from: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/abcs-marxists/
[3] A landmark indigenous land rights case, one largely engineered by Jewish lawyers.
[4] Holmes, O & Butler, B 2021, ‘James Packer’s ties with Israeli PM and spy chief became ‘national risk’ – report’, The Guardian Australia, Friday 7 May, retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/07/james-packer-ties-israeli-pm-spy-chief-national-risk-report
[5] Lopez, M 2000, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics: 1945-1975, Melbourne University Press, p.402–403.
[6] See Rutland, S 2021, Lone Voice – The Wars of Isi Liebler, Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne Australia.
[7] Jakubowicz, A 2014, ‘What’s on for SBS in the fight for public broadcasting’s future?’, The Conversation, April 28, retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/whats-on-for-sbs-in-the-fight-for-public-broadcastings-future-25762
[8] Produced by Malcom Smith, who lived with his family on a Kibbutz in Israel for 3 years and would later go on to become head of the ABC Drama department, and co-directed by Ben Lewin —Australian Jewish News 1995, ‘Malcom Smith A Renaissance Man’, 5 May, p.33.
[9] Historically, talkback radio saw some of the last defenders of White Australia allowed in the public sphere in the form of presenters such as Norman Banks and Ron Casey.
[10] Dissident commentators have often falsely hinted at a degree of Jewish heritage from Murdoch’s maternal side, a rumour that originates from the somewhat Jewish-sounding surname of his Irish-descended maternal grandfather.
[11] Milliken, R 2006, ‘Zalmenas (Zell) Rabin (1932–1966)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, retrieved from: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rabin-zalmenas-zell-11474
[12] The first edition of The Monthly in 2001 was headlined by Robert Manne, publishing ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right.’
[13] Sanderson, B 2016, ‘The Jewish War on White Australia: Refugee Policy and the African Crime Plague, Part 2’, The Occidental Observer, June 8, retrieved from https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/06/08/the-jewish-war-on-white-australia-refugee-policy-and-the-african-crime-plague-part-2/
[14] See Saunders, F.R 1999 Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, London.
[15] Greenberg, J 2007, ‘Sir Nathaniel Bernard Freeman (1896–1982)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, retrieved from: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/freeman-sir-nathaniel-bernard-12513
[16] Saeed, D 2023, ‘Which Australian journalists and politicians have gone on trips to Israel and Palestine?’, Crikey, November 3, retrieved from: https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/11/03/australian-journalists-politicians-trips-israel-palestine/
[17] Bachelard, M & Jaspan, C 2024, ‘Secret WhatsApp messages show co-ordinated campaign to oust Antoinette Lattouf from ABC’, The Sydney Morning Herald, January 16, retrieved from: https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/secret-whatsapp-messages-show-co-ordinated-campaign-to-oust-antoinette-lattouf-from-abc-20240115-p5exdx.html
