How does Israeli propaganda become Australian news?

On 19 August 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu called Anthony Albanese “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”. On 20 August, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) wrote to Netanyahu that his statement was “inflammatory and provocative” and had harmed the community he claimed to defend. On 21 August, Sharri Markson opened her Sky News Australia interview with him by asking: “Why do you believe history will remember him as a weak politician?”^[1][2][3][4]

The question gave his accusation another platform. ECAJ’s answer was already public, but the interview did not put it to him.^[2][3] The passage from political advocacy to Australian news happened through the questions asked and the challenge left out.

Propaganda can work through selection as well as invention: repeat a political accusation, build its assumptions into the questions and leave the strongest available counterargument unanswered. That is the criticism of this interview. Sky helped Netanyahu advance his case when its journalistic task was to make him substantiate it.^[2][3]

The questions helped sell the accusation

The dispute followed Albanese’s 11 August announcement that Australia would recognise a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s letter to him, dated 17 August, called the policy “appeasement” and said it “pours fuel on this antisemitic fire”. Sky reported obtaining a copy.^[5][6]

ABC Media Watch reproduced five of the interview’s eight questions. After the “weak politician” opener, Markson asked whether Netanyahu was shocked by antisemitism and violence in Australia, adding “the lack of action and the lack of leadership from the very top, from our Prime Minister”. She asked whether his word “appeasement” referred to Europe’s dealings with Hitler in the 1930s, and whether leaders like Albanese showed “a similar complacency now”.^[3]

The first question invited Netanyahu to repeat his verdict. The leadership question supplied a failure as a premise. The appeasement question made explicit a Hitler analogy absent from the text of his letter. In each case, the framing helped carry his charge forward.^[3][6] Asking what evidence connected Palestinian recognition to antisemitic attacks would have made him defend the connection.

Markson also asked about Gaza plans if a deal were agreed and put allegations of deliberate starvation and genocide to him as “libels”.^[3] Calling the allegations libels framed them as false before he answered. The viewer was being offered a political defence with the interviewer already supplying part of its language.

Markson defended the interview to Media Watch, arguing that viewers needed to hear Netanyahu explain civilian protection and aid. She said leading editors and journalists had called it “outstanding, first-class and agenda-setting”. Sky’s spokesperson accused the ABC of “a long history of anti-Israel bias”.^[3]

Hearing a prime minister explain his position has public value. An exclusive interview gives a journalist access to answers that may otherwise be unavailable. That access makes direct questions more valuable too. The audience could have heard Netanyahu’s case and seen it tested against a specific contrary account.

The challenge was already available

ECAJ supplied that account from a position of strong support for Israel. Its letter opened by asserting the Australian Jewish community’s proud record of support for the country. It said Netanyahu’s attack had “played straight into the hands of opponents of Israel and antisemites” and undermined efforts by the community and government to combat antisemitism. ECAJ also criticised Albanese, calling his July criticism of Netanyahu “excessive and gratuitously insulting”. Its companion letter addressed the Australian Prime Minister directly.^[2][7]

The objection had reached Sky’s coverage. On 19 August, Australian Associated Press reported ECAJ co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin saying Australian Jews did not feel abandoned by their government. According to The Nightly on 20 August, he told Sky: “Firing off tweets that contain elements of abuse in them, I don’t think that’s the way to operate.”^[8][9] Netanyahu could have been asked why an organisation committed to supporting Israel thought his intervention was damaging Australian Jews. Instead, the interview left that contradiction unresolved.^[2][3]

Markson had openly described her perspective. In October 2024, she told Ynetnews that, “as someone who stands with Israel”, telling its story was her duty. Ynetnews also reported her insistence that Sky management had never directed presenters or reporters to be pro-Israel.^[10] A declared position makes the broadcaster’s scrutiny of a matching claim especially important. Sky’s response to Media Watch challenged the critic’s bias; it did not explain the absence of ECAJ’s challenge.^[3]

Serious danger demands serious journalism

Jewish Australians faced real violence. An arson attack gutted Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue on 6 December 2024. On 4 July 2025, a man set fire to the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation while about 20 people were inside. Netanyahu’s letter referred to the July synagogue attack and a disturbance at an Israeli-owned restaurant that night.^[11][12][6] His warning deserved attention. His political explanation required evidence.

Within a day of the Adass fire, Netanyahu had called it “impossible to separate” the attack from Labor’s “extreme anti-Israeli position”. On 26 August 2025, five days after the interview, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) director-general publicly attributed the attack to direction by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That public intelligence assessment came after the interview and cannot exclude a hostile climate as a contributing factor.^[13][11][14] It underlines the need to distinguish a political diagnosis from evidence about who directed an attack and why.

On 14 December 2025, a terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach killed 15 people. ASIO had raised the national terrorism threat level to probable in August 2024, and the Community Security Group NSW warned authorities of an elevated risk at the Bondi event in a document dated 26 November 2025.^[15][16] The danger was devastatingly real. Netanyahu’s claim that Palestinian recognition fuelled antisemitism still requires its own evidence.

Sky should explain why ECAJ’s letter or Ryvchin’s comments were not put to Netanyahu, and what evidence the programme used to test his accusation against Albanese.^[2][9][6][3] The failure to put the available challenge matters because it left the audience with an accusation amplified by the interviewer and unanswered by the people it purported to represent.

An exclusive interview should make a powerful politician answer harder questions. When the broadcaster adopts his premises and leaves a strong, available challenge unasked, it gives his propaganda the standing of news.