The National Press Club is receiving criticism after international journalist Chris Hedges complained it had bumped him off a speaking engagement.
As Dr Lee Duffield reports, Hedges believes the decision to drop a proposed televised address on the catastrophe in Gaza was caused by underhand lobbying.
THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB has distinguished itself by presenting many authoritative speakers on a broad range of important national issues.
Its luncheon addresses are aired at length, certainly as live broadcasts on ABC radio and television, a great service to democratic life.
In the conduct of such events, the club has a reputation for promoting honest curiosity and taking a non-partisan approach.
Consequently, I was nonplussed and made wary to hear that one of the Sky News political staff, named Tom Connell, had been made president of the club earlier this year.
Whatever the man’s own good intentions, Sky News disregards the conventions of non-partisan journalistic objectification, which is a trademark of the Press Club. See here his work resume on the news side, in the form of coverage of the 2025 Federal Election.
Then on 3 October, the acclaimed American journalist and commentator Chris Hedges published an article stating the club had dropped him from a speaking engagement set for 20 October.
He set out extremely graphic information about his extended service in Gaza, and attacks on journalists and civilians, including children,n by Israeli forces, which was to have been included in the address.
The club denied Hedges’s statement that the rejection was due to pressure from the Israel lobby and that it was to make way for a speech by the Israeli Ambassador.
In a statement, the club did allow that the problem was with the content of his address.
It said it had:
...tentatively agreed to a date given his stature and expertise on the matter of Gaza.
...and when more details of the address were made available, we decided to pursue other speakers on the matter.
According to Hedges, the Chief Executive Officer of the Press Club, Maurice Reilly, cancelled the proposed event and told him, “that in the interest of balancing out our program, we will withdraw our offer.”
Hedges, though, was proposing to speak in the genre of correspondents relating their experiences in the field, which can be compelling to hear, with a ring of truth — while open to doubt and being questioned. The particular address was also going to challenge official Israeli versions of certain fatal attacks he had seen, which he said were reported uncritically by world media outlets.
Easy checks by the club could have established well in advance that Chris Hedges was both a noted journalist and a person prone to commitments, transparent in identifying himself as a socialist, a Presbyterian Minister, and an environmentalist.
On what he has written about the cancelled Press Club address, it was bound to have a polemical effect. But as said, he remains also a journalist who was proposing to say baldly what he saw in the field — ghastly as it was.
Additionally, the National Press Club is at least nominally a club for journalists who would presumably be very concerned to hear one aspect of the narrative, the killing of journalists in Gaza, especially over 278 Palestinian media workers. Many of those had been providing news for outside media outlets, which were themselves banned from the territory by the Israeli Government.
In pulling a high-profile speaker, even “tentatively” engaged, on the explosive issue of Gaza, the National Press Club was treading on thin ice and courted the suspicion and even obloquy now coming at it from left of centre and elsewhere.
Club CEO Maurice Reilly may not have realised this would happen if he lacked a media background.
The club statement indicates he is engaged in choosing speakers, in conjunction with Connell of Sky News and the club board.
So far as I can ascertain from a cursory investigation, Reilly appears to be an experienced line manager with a background in the clubs industry.
If true, it is not quite right that he should be triaging speakers on political topics for a professional journalistic forum, concerning himself with matters of “balance”.
It might be wise for the ABC as host broadcaster to take a hard look at how this forum is run, by whom, by what set of principles, to ensure its own principles are not being put in any jeopardy by continuing to promote it.
Amongst Dr Lee Duffield’s vast journalistic experience, he has served as ABC's European correspondent. He is also an esteemed academic and member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review and elected member of the University of Queensland Senate.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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