Request for independent review of TVNZ’s reporting on Palestine/Israel

Letter presented to TVNZ on Saturday 3 May 2025

Alastair Carruthers

Board Chair

Television New Zealand

Victoria Street

Auckland CBD

Kia ora Mr Carruthers,

Request for independent review of TVNZ’s reporting on Palestine/Israel

Over the past 18 months of industrial scale killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military in Gaza we have been regularly appalled at the blatantly-biased reporting on the Middle East by Television New Zealand.

TVNZ’s reporting has been relentlessly and virulently pro-Israel. TVNZ has centred Israeli narratives, Israeli explanations, Israeli justifications and Israeli propaganda points on a daily basis while Palestinian viewpoints are all but absent. When they are presented they are given rudimentary coverage at best. More often than not Palestinians are presented as the incoherent victims of Israeli brutality rather than as an occupied people fighting for liberation in a situation described by the International Court of Justice as a “plausible genocide”.

This pattern of systemic bias and unbalanced reporting is not revealed by TVNZ’s complaints system which focuses on individual stories rather than ingrained patterns of pro-Israel bias. Every complaint we have made to TVNZ has, with one minor exception, been rejected by your corporation with the typical refrain that it’s not possible to cover every aspect of an issue in a single story but that over time the balance is made up.

Our issue is that the bias continues throughout TVNZ’s reporting on a story-by-story, day-by-day basis – the balance is never achieved. The reporting goes ahead just the way the pro-Israel lobby is happy with.

We have lost count of the number of times TVNZ has reported on Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem when they should be described as Occupied Gaza, Occupied West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem. This is the designation of these territories under international law and New Zealand government policy so why is it so hard for TVNZ to get these simple basic facts correct.

Similarly the Israeli military should be described as an Israeli occupation force in relation to the occupied Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance groups should be described as just that – as “resistance groups” or “armed resistance groups” rather than using Israeli terminology of “terrorists” or militants. “Terrorists should be reserved for groups labelled as such by the United Nations. No Palestinian resistance groups have these designations at the UN.

When the presenter on TVNZ’s premium current affairs show is able to repeatedly mislead viewers with an outdated Hamas charter, almost 20 years out of date in fact, as a way to condemn the organisation then the pro-Israel lobby is having its racist, Islamophobic, propaganda work done for it by TVNZ.

The damage to human rights, justice and freedom in the Middel East by western media such as TVNZ is incalculable.

It is prolonging Israel’s illegal occupation, its apartheid policies, its ethnic cleansing and theft of Palestinian land. TVNZ is part of the problem – a key part of the problem – and we are asking the board of TVNZ to conduct an independent investigation into its pro-Israeli bias.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Ngā mihi.

John Minto

Co-National Chair

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa