A few days ago we posted Greg Wilesmith’s reaction to the evidence given to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion by Ms Jillian Segal AO, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism.

In that evidence Ms Segal emphasised how important, in her view, was the obligation on the ABC Board, under s8[i][c] of the ABC Act, “to make sure” (in her words) “the reporting is accurate”. 

“Accurate, and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”, is what the Act actually says.  And important that obligation certainly is.

We might expect that the Special Envoy would feel obliged to ensure that her own sworn testimony to a Royal Commission was accurate, too.  But, as ABC Alumni Director Jonathan Holmes points out in this companion piece to Greg’s analysis, it was not.

In his earlier article, Greg Wilesmith posed some pertinent questions about Jillian Segal’s proposal that a standing committee of “independent people” should be set up to monitor and report on the coverage of the Middle East by the ABC and SBS (and on no other topic, and no other media organisation).  

The Commissioner herself, Virginia Bell SC, asked an even more pertinent question during Ms Segal’s testimony:

COMMISSIONER BELL: …The SBS and ABC continue to be trusted news sources. Looking at the ABC, its statutory structure is one way of creating an entity that is independent and one can see in terms of developing public trust in a broadcaster that if it's independent and controlled, ultimately, by an independent board, that may give some confidence. You envisage putting on top of that structure a committee of individuals… including those who have a particular as it were bandwagon. How is it, in your view, consistent with promoting the trust in the ABC as independent, if people know that there is a monitoring committee, whatever you want to call it, that has been selected to represent particular views?

Precisely.  To which Ms Segal replied that perhaps it wouldn’t have to include people from “the community” – meaning the Jewish-Australian community – “as long as they are people who are aware of and understanding of modern-day antisemitism and modern-day hatreds” – which one suspects would amount to the same thing.

Virginia Bell’s question gives us reason to hope that she will not be recommending the adoption of Ms Segal’s extraordinary proposal.  We might hope, too, that she will take the Special Envoy’s constant complaints about the inaccuracy of the coverage of the Middle East by the ABC and SBS with a large pinch of salt.

As the ABC’s Ombudsman confirmed later that day, of the thousands of complaints she has received about alleged ABC bias and inaccuracy in its Middle East coverage since the Hamas attack of October 2023, she has upheld precisely four.

Meanwhile, however, it might be useful to subject Ms Segal’s testimony to the kind of rigorous fact-checking that Jewish organisations have for decades demanded of ABC reporters.  If we do, we find that in her two-hour testimony, she was responsible for a multitude of inaccuracies and plain untruths.

Here are some of them:

MISTAKE NO 1: Ms Segal repeatedly said that the UK communications regulator is called Ofcam.  It isn’t.  It’s called Ofcom (short for the Office of Communications).

MISTAKE NO 2: More seriously, Ms Segal claimed that Ofcom can institute its own inquiries without having to wait for a complaint from the public, whereas the Australian regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) cannot.  This is wrong, as the Chair of ACMA, Nerida O’Loughlin, told the Royal Commission the following day. It did so just last year into the radio antics of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O.

MISTAKE NO 3: Ms Segal went on to confuse the Ofcom investigation of a single documentary aired on the BBC with the later revelations of a BBC whistleblower.

In October 2025, Ofcom found that the BBC had been in “serious breach” of its rules by airing an independent documentary about Gaza whose narrator was the son of a Hamas minister, without declaring that fact to its viewers. (Ofcom’s investigation in this case was in response to complaints. It was not an “own motion” investigation.)

Ms Segal did not mention that finding at all.  Instead, she claimed, while comparing the powers of Ofcom with those of ACMA, that Ofcom had instigated its own inquiry into BBC bias in November 2025.   That inquiry, Ms Segal told the Royal Commission, criticised the editing of a Panorama documentary about Donald Trump’s re-election, and also various aspects of the BBC’s Middle East coverage, including the use of the picture of an apparently starving child who was actually suffering from an illness that meant she was unable to absorb food. 

This Ofcom investigation is a pure invention by Ms Segal.

The issues she mentioned, and many others, were raised by a former member of the BBC’s own Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in a letter to the BBC Board which was leaked to the London Daily Telegraph.  Ofcom played no part at all.

MISTAKE NO 4: Ms Segal then claimed that as a result, the “Director-General of Ofcom” had resigned.  She meant, of course, the Director-General of the BBC, though no one in the hearing room corrected the obvious error.  In any case, Tim Davie’s resignation, and that of the BBC’s News Director, Deborah Turness, were mainly caused by the row about the Trump Panorama program. They had much less to do with problems with the BBC’s Middle East coverage.  And again, Ofcom played no part.

What is true, as Ms O’Loughlin also told the Royal Commission, is that since 2023 ACMA has not upheld a single complaint about the coverage of the Middle East by either the ABC or SBS.

MISTAKE NO 5: The Royal Commission turned to the question of whether or not the ABC Ombudsman is independent.  Not really, argued Ms Segal, because the Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, is appointed by the ABC Board, and is part of the ABC culture.  And she went on:

MS SEGAL: It's also important that the community should get regular updates and reports about all the complaints, and that there should be a database of complaints that we all know what is happening, but that is where you get independent ombudsman doing those things rather than ombudsman inside organizations.

The implication most people would draw, I suggest, is that the ABC Ombudsman does not produce regular updates and reports, or maintain a database of complaints.  Perhaps Ms Segal hasn’t noticed the comprehensive website on which the ABC Ombudsman details ALL the complaints she has upheld, and the principal complaints that she has NOT upheld; or the six-monthly and annual ABC Ombudsman reports that tabulate in detail the thousands of complaints the ABC receives.

The Ombudsman’s reports on the few serious breaches of the ABC’s Editorial Policies that she HAS identified are detailed and unsparing.  For example, her finding on the ABC’s failure to correct in anything like timely fashion a misstatement by a senior UN official in May 2025 about 14,000 children in Gaza who “will die in 48 hours unless we can reach them” – a breach cited again and again by Ms Segal as an example of the inadequacy of the ABC’s complaints system.

One is entitled to wonder whether Ms Segal, or her “standing committee”, would be any more thorough.

MISTAKE NO 6: And then Ms Segal blamed SBS for using the casualty figures issued by the Gazan Ministry of Health without telling its viewers, on every occasion, that the Ministry is controlled by Hamas, a terrorist organisation.  And she went on:

“It is well known and even accepted by the United Nations that those statistics have been grossly inflated and that when they have done a recount of the numbers, they have found them to be grossly inaccurate.”

This is simply untrue.  The UN has said repeatedly that the Gazan Ministry of Health estimate of 70,000 deaths in Gaza since October 2023 is probably too low because so many bodies are still buried under the rubble.  And even the IDF admitted in January this year that those statistics were “broadly accurate”.

There is no doubt, as the evidence of Australian Jews and of independent experts to the Royal Commission has amply demonstrated, that the rise of antisemitism in Australia, especially in the form of on-line hatred, is real, shocking and horrible.

There is no doubt either that the current stage of a decades-old series of conflicts and wars, a stage that began with Hamas’s attack on southern Israel in October 2023, has been a primary cause of that recent rise.  

But for Ms Segal, and those she claims to represent, to blame the ABC and SBS for this horror is simply to blame the messenger.  And it does nothing to strengthen social cohesion for the Special Envoy to reinforce and magnify some Jewish Australians’ mistrust of the public broadcasters – still the most trusted news services in Australia – and to denigrate the efforts of their internal complaints procedures and the external regulator.

Especially when she does so by propagating serious inaccuracies, and some outright untruths, in her sworn testimony to a Royal Commission.  

Don’t hold your breath for corrections, any time soon, from the Office of Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism.

- Jonathan Holmes for ABC Alumni