A year and a half ago, after ABC announced Sophie McNeill as its new Middle East Correspondent, AIJAC questioned how the ABC could give the sensitive post to a journalist who had openly taken sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After all, McNeill had once written a story for the website Electronic Intifada – a website that openly calls for Israel’s destruction.
Unlike her ABC colleague Fran Kelly, who said that once she began working as a journalist with the National Broadcaster, she ceased being an activist, McNeill has never recanted her pledge to use journalism to serve one particular narrative. As I pointed out in 2015, when you craft your reporting to further a political agenda, that makes you, by definition, an advocacy journalist.
Read the article by Aharon Shapiro in the Australia-Israel Review.