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May 2026

“ABC Misinformation Report” dossier published

In May 2026 a 58-page dossier titled the "ABC Misinformation Report" was published by an "Independent Research Group" of four Jewish Australian researchers, who kept their identities hidden, they said, to avoid harassment. It argues that the ABC, a publicly funded broadcaster with a legal duty of accuracy and impartiality, showed "a pattern of systematic missteps that resulted in disinformation" in its Gaza war coverage, and that this "vilifies Israel and, by extension, Jews" and contributed to antisemitism in Australia. The report was covered by The Australian (Chris Kenny), The Jerusalem Post and Quadrant.

The dossier groups its examples under three headings it calls the "famine", "baby killers" and "genocide" narratives. Among its claims:

  • Images of sick children presented as starving: it says the ABC used images of children with genetic or medical conditions, including a boy with cerebral palsy shown during an interview with the Prime Minister on 27 July 2025, as evidence of famine. The ABC acknowledged the boy's pre-existing condition in an article on 31 July 2025.
  • "14,000 babies": the ABC broadcast a UN official's claim that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours. The ABC Ombudsman later found that ABC News Breakfast and ABC News Mornings breached the ABC's editorial standards on accuracy and on correcting errors (standards 2.1 and 3.1a), and Afternoon Briefing breached the accuracy standard (2.1), in its coverage on 21 May 2025 (finding published 19 June 2025).
  • "Genocide scholars": it says the ABC described the International Association of Genocide Scholars as "the world's leading association of genocide scholars" when reporting its September 2025 resolution, without telling audiences that membership required no academic qualifications.
  • Sources: it says the ABC relied on sources linked to Hamas, often without disclosure, and that ABC headlines in the two weeks after 7 October 2023 were four to five times more sympathetic to Gaza than to Israel.

The dossier says that where the ABC acknowledged errors, corrections were "delayed, minimised, or buried in low-visibility formats". These are the dossier's claims; apart from the Ombudsman findings and ABC clarifications cited above, they have not been tested by the ABC or an independent body.

More sources:

Source: The ABC Misinformation Report (Independent Research Group, May 2026) - full PDF
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