Antoinette Lattouf delivered an impassioned session at Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, telling the marketing and media industries in Australia to carefully consider their approach to, and dealings with, the “legacy” media.
“There has been a marked shift away from trust in traditional institutions. People now have more faith in individuals, their neighbours, in that guy on Reddit with the anime avatar, than they do in the government,” she said.
She was referencing the Edelman Trust Barometer and a 2024 Roy Morgan survey, showing that Gen Z now has more faith in social media than the press. In fact, just nine per cent of the youngest consumers turn to the traditional print titles for their news.
The reasons for this decline in trust are straightforward. First, she believes that the press no longer stands for truth and integrity. Lattouf explains that PR professionals now outnumber journalists seven-to-one, meaning that the stories Australians read are not, in fact, news, but pieces designed to curry favour with advertisers, sell products or simply fill column inches and on-air minutes with easier-to-digest stories.
The second reason, Lattouf believes, for the declining trust in the traditional media is evidenced by the “orchestrated letter campaign” to have her removed from the ABC. She said the media is no longer the purveyors of truth without “fear or favour”. Instead, it kowtows to those with influence.
The third reason is the “monolithic” nature of editorial leaders in TV newsrooms that Media Diversity, an organisation she co-founded, laid out in a piece of research.
“When we looked at the composition of editorial leaders in newsrooms and television newsrooms, who is on-air, audience attitudes, that’s when I really got to see the distinction and the widening gap between audiences and trust when it comes to legacy media, particularly audiences that come from marginalised or multicultural communities,” she said.
This, she added, was further evidenced by the emails that were subpoenaed from senior ABC staff and a story in The Australian about her with the “journalistic rigour and accuracy of a drunk uncle live-tweeting a family feud”.
It’s a problem that, in her mind, will only widen with 49 per cent of Australians either born overseas or having a parent born overseas; a third of Australians speaking a language other than English; and, by 2050, India set to overtake England as the most common place of birth for Australians outside the country.
Her plea to marketing and media industry heads?
“My advice to you, particularly as an industry that sheds staff like it’s a seasonal tradition, that doesn’t have the audience numbers that it once did, why would you compromise your ethics and your integrity for a slow-sinking ship?”
Lattouf has been embroiled in legal battle with the ABC, with a judgment reserved for a later date. Lattouf alleges that the ABC breached its enterprise bargaining agreement and the Fair Work Act by unfairly dismissing her on the basis of her political opinion, and/or” race.
The ABC, meanwhile, says Lattouf brought the organisation into disrepute by breaching a management directive, its editorial and social media policies for posting the below quote from Human Rights Watch on, in Lattouf’s words, her “personal” Instagram.
Lattouf believes that she ended up in the headlines by no accident. Her parents, as she explained to the room, were refugees from Lebanon.
“I grew up against the backdrop of my mother in particular, who had endured horrific violence and dispossession. They were both pulled out of school when they were 10 years old to work on the land because their parents were very poor,” she explained.
“It wasn’t until very recently that my mother would share some of the things that she endured; she repressed a lot of it and only did that because she was seeing imagery on our phones and on our screens [from the war in Gaza], and she said: ‘I too slept on the school floor, I too waded through the rubble to try and find survivors, I too went days hungry, I too wondered if I would be killed next’.”
Following her “formative” public education, to which she is “indebted”, Lattouf embarked on a career in journalism, becoming one of the first Arab female on commercial TV and public broadcasting; she “even dabbled in a show on Sky News”.
After trying to change “the system” through mentorships and advocacy, she felt “tired” and turned her hand to softer news.
“Unfortunately, career plans don’t always go to plan. You can’t factor in things like recessions or an unfolding genocide. You can’t factor those things in and [with] the speeding up of the decay of trust in legacy media, I was trying to gaslight myself to be like, ‘Oh I’m not going to pay attention to the fact that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in World War One, World War Two, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine combined. I’m just going to pretend that I need to go to the gym’,” she said.
“I was trying to fight everything in my body as a journalist, which is speaking truth to power and giving a voice to the voiceless.”
That said, Lattouf does not hate the ABC. Nor does she feel it is beyond repair.
“This is why independence and journalistic rigour from publicly-funded institutions like the ABC matter more than ever. It is absolutely worth fighting for. It’s essential for our democracy that we have a well-resourced, independent and trusted ABC,” she said.
