ABC stands by Media Watch segment on Julie Szego despite backlash over accuracy

The ABC has stood firmly behind a Media Watch segment covering the columnist Julie Szego’s sacking from The Age, which a string of LGBTQIA+ and human rights organisations have branded as inaccurate.

The segment, which went to air on Monday, introduced Szego as an Age journalist of almost 25 years. Host Paul Barry told viewers the columnist had been “cancelled” after a row “about a news piece” she’d written for the paper. The piece was some 5000 words long on gender transitioning among children.

“[It] includes growing doubts among doctors in the UK, Scandinavia, France and Spain, over the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” Barry said, before cutting to excerpts of an interview with Szego. “To me, the article seemed cautious and considered, and certainly newsworthy.”

In an open letter to the ABC this week, however, a number of organisations including Amnesty International, the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union and the Trans Justice Project charged the broadcaster with omitting broad medical consensus around gender-affirming care, including from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the American Medical Association.

The letter called for an on-air apology for the “lack of care” taken to ensure accuracy and fairness, as well as for the ABC to commit to engaging with trans and gender-diverse leaders for future stories.

The organisations also claimed the Media Watch segment failed to acknowledge that the original article that led to Szego’s sacking contained references to fringe conspiracy theories and links to known anti-trans misinformation groups.

One of the organisations referenced in Szego’s story, now published on online platform Substack, was the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, otherwise known as SEGM. In April last year, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine described SEGM as an “ideological organization without apparent ties to mainstream scientific or professional organizations”.

Trans Justice Project director Jackie Turner said that beyond inaccuracy, the Media Watch framing lacked due scrutiny and runs the risk of legitimising coordinated misinformation campaigns, as is seen in the UK and the US.

“So disinformation of this kind is being used by anti-trans lobbyists to attack our rights, lives and access to gender-affirming health care,” Turner told Crikey. “It’s really important that in an environment that’s increasingly hostile to LGBT people, overall, the media are engaging in an accurate and fair way.”

Still, the ABC maintains the segment was fair and balanced. Media Watch executive producer Tim Latham told Crikey that the show stands by its story and the importance of airing “differing points of view”.

“It was a fair and balanced account including plenty of criticism of Ms Szego, her article and her views and it offered significant airtime to the counterpoints,” Latham said.

“Media Watch invited the director of the Trans Justice Project Jackie Turner to comment for the segment in which she disputed the accuracy of Szego’s article and called many of her sources ‘ideological, misleading, or explicitly anti LGBTQIA+’.”

He pointed to the three statements provided to Media Watch, which were published on the ABC’s website in full for audiences to read. The statements included comments from trans rights activist and writer Natalie Feliks, who called Szego’s article “misinformed, propaganda and lies”, as well as Patrick Elligett, editor of The Age.

In her statement to Media Watch, Feliks detailed her concerns at great length, including the rise of trans-exclusionary radical feminism in Australia that she said was symbolic of a general rise of Nazism in Australia.

Elligett clarified in his statement that Szego was sacked not for her views on “gender-identity politics” but instead her repeated public disparagement of the newspaper and its staff.

“The Age is committed to covering gender issues in a way that few other outlets, including the ABC, have the stomach for. Any objective assessment of our reporting corroborates that fact,” Elligett told the ABC.

“I won’t reveal private criticism of authors and their work, but Julie has publicly stated that one of those reasons was the perception she had become too close to an activist community on gender issues. In my view, that disqualified her from writing news on the topic.”