Trish Bolton

I’ve been thinking a lot about an honours thesis I wrote more than 20 years ago, that thing you sweated through, that maybe your mother skimmed, that you stuck in the back of a cupboard somewhere never to be read or thought of again.

That thesis examined the unprecedented media coverage of 11 September 2001, after terrorists hijacked planes full of passengers, flying them into the World Trade Centre in New York, taking thousands of innocent lives.

As a then media and communications student, I was interested in the autonomy of journalists and editors and the internal and external forces that shape what mainstream media publish and don’t, about who gets to speak, who doesn’t, what can be said, what can’t, where it can be said, where it cannot.

Also on my mind was the effect of ideology on the construction and presentation of news, how it can marginalise dissent and reinforce and reproduce the status quo.

Although more than two decades have elapsed since that research, little has changed: the censorship that dogged mainstream media coverage of 11 September, the regurgitating of dominant narratives, ahistorical and lacking in critical analysis, is on steroids today.

I am, of course, talking about the genocide taking place in Gaza, the very word genocide rarely seen in print and, as rarely spoken on radio or television. In fact, I recently heard an ABC journalist and broadcaster I once admired, stumbling over the murder, bombing and starvation of innocent people, a genocide live-streamed, to call these atrocities, a situation.

The frame for almost all mainstream media discussion of the abomination being perpetrated on the Palestinian people, is 7 October, the date the horrific Hamas attack took place. The media, though, has steadfastly omitted to report the dispossession of Palestinians 77 years ago, and the decades-long terrorism, persecution and torture that followed their displacement.

The sins of omission continued, with the Freedom Flotilla, when journeying to Gaza to deliver aid and raise international awareness of the plight of Palestinians, barely getting a mention in mainstream media outlets.

The media, rather than fulfil their Fourth Estate obligations, and call out a genocide, has aided and abetted the distortion of language, the posturing that defends the indefensible, often uncritically reproducing propaganda in their headlines.

Many creatives, including writers, artists, poets, musicians and commentators have fallen under the censorship sword, including Khaled Sabsabi, Antoinette Lattouf, KA Ren Wyld, Clementine Ford and Grace Tame. Publishers, including the esteemed Aviva Tuffield, have also been chased down. The message to anyone who dares speak up is clear.

But there’s another scourge, one more powerful than censorship: self-censorship.

Until very recently, I dared not even like a social media post critical of Israel. I feared that any empathy for the desperate people of Gaza, any objection to a genocide would be conflated with antisemitism. And so I kept my head down, fearful I was being watched, fearful my fledgling career as a novelist would be cancelled.

I felt deeply ashamed.

I was even at one stage afraid that a piece I’d written more than two decades earlier, including a line about how the Labor Party had abandoned Palestinians in its uncritical and unswerving support of Israel, would be interpreted as antisemitic.

There were, from the beginning, brave voices decrying Israel’s unconscionable attacks, including many from the Jewish community, posting on social media, putting their life’s work and future at risk. More recently, Michelle de Kretser, on winning the prestigious literary award, The 2025 Stella Prize, gave one of the greatest and most moving speeches of our time

In her speech, de Kretser condemned the genocide being committed in Gaza, the shutting down of criticism of Israel, and the complicity of media, institutions and government. Her speech was almost entirely ignored in mainstream media, with only The Age giving it some air.

Writers, people who get precious little support, whose income is small and tenuous, who hope against hope for a grant, an award, anything that might support them to make their art, are especially vulnerable in a climate that singles out and punishes those who speak truth to power.

This is how self-censorship works.

And then, along came a simple T-shirt that proudly stated Readers and Writers Against the Genocide on its chest, on its back the powerful words of poets Evelyn Araluen, Omar Sakr and Sara M. Saleh, their poetry calling out the genocide and rallying the writing community.

See us now at festivals, see us all over social media proudly wearing our tees, see us in the streets and in your communities, see us supporting each other, see us speaking out for the voiceless.

Journalists are taught a basic golden rule when researching a story: who, what, where, when, why and how. The “why” went missing in the reportage of 11 September, it has been missed again in the reporting of the genocide in Gaza.

And so writers, along with many other creatives, are filling the void left by a compromised, complicit and often cowed media, refusing to be silent and silenced.

We are doing as artists have always done, we are bearing witness.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/06/writers-bearing-witness-in-a-time-of-genocide/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

WE HAVE NOT BEEN HOLDING BACK HERE.....