ABC executive tells court there was ‘pressure from above’ over Antoinette Lattouf’s position | Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The ABC executive who sacked Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch post has conceded he felt “pressure from above” after the then ABC chair, Ita Buttrose, sent him all the complaints she was receiving.

Under cross-examination in the federal court which is hearing Lattouf’s unlawful termination claim, the outgoing ABC content chief, Chris Oliver-Taylor, said there was a “strong view” from colleagues about “having someone who has published strong views, either way, on air”.

Lattouf was hired as a casual host on ABC Radio Sydney’s Mornings program for one week in December 2023. She was taken off air three days into a five-day contract after she posted on social media about the Israel-Gaza war.

“The pressure was now building, the concerns were rising,” Oliver-Taylor said of the situation on Tuesday 19 December 2023, after Buttrose wrote to him directly and said she would be forwarding on all complaints she received about Lattouf’s presence on the broadcaster directly to him.

“We were trying to build a scaffold around Ms Lattouf, to protect her and the show … at that moment in time that was holding, but the position was becoming harder and harder, I felt,” he said.

Lattouf’s lead barrister, Oshie Fagir, said Oliver-Taylor had been put in “a really unfair position … by your bosses”, to which Oliver-Taylor replied: “I don’t think that’s entirely true.”

“I think that due diligence should have been taken with regard to Ms Lattouf and Ms Lattouf would have made an excellent presenter for the ABC in other times,” Oliver-Taylor said, “but the published news meant that it was a very difficult decision that my colleagues had made. So there was pressure there, and I feel due diligence was not done as it should have been. There was pressure from above, I accept that.”

Oliver-Taylor was also asked when he first saw the Instagram post that triggered the presenter’s removal after her third shift on Wednesday 20 December 2023.

He said he saw a screenshot earlier that day when it was shared during an online crisis meeting by the head of audio, Ben Latimer, who had discovered the post and told him about it at 11.30am.

“It was a screenshot shared in the meeting by Mr Latimer during the Teams meeting, I believe,” Oliver-Taylor said.

Oliver-Taylor explained he does not have any social media accounts, and he relied on his colleagues to judge whether Lattouf’s posts were acceptable or not before deciding she had breached editorial impartiality and failed to follow a direction.

He was unclear, however, who had given Lattouf that direction, which the ABC says was not to post on social media, saying he believed it was Steve Ahern, the former manger of ABC Radio Sydney.

This conflicts with earlier evidence from Anderson and Lattouf that it was Lattouf’s line manager, Elizabeth Green, who had spoke to the presenter on the Tuesday afternoon. The contents of that conversation are disputed by Lattouf, who says she was not told not to post at all.

“Who gave Ms Lattouf the direction, to your understanding?” Fagir asked.

“I believe it was Ahern,” Oliver-Taylor said.

Oliver-Taylor texted the managing director, David Anderson, about his decision at 12.30pm, according to published documents.

It was a dramatic reversal of the ABC’s strategy, because at 11am Anderson had assured Buttrose in an email that he was “absolutely in damage control” and a decision had been taken to keep Lattouf on air.

“We have weighed up the consequences of prematurely pulling Antoinette Lattouf off air, versus managing this until Friday as per her contract,” Anderson wrote. “We have concluded that the best possible outcome from here is to manage this such that Ms Lattouf does not editorial engage in the Middle East conflict while on air for the remainder of her contract.”

Anderson was out for a Christmas lunch with Buttrose when the decision was taken to remove Lattouf.

Asked why Lattouf had been removed, Oliver-Taylor told the court: “Ms Lattouf was removed from air for breaching a direction, as well as after publishing a number of say, tweets, articles, posts, that continued the view that Ms Lattouf was not impartial whilst hosting a live radio show”.

Fagir read out a contemporaneous note from Oliver-Taylor which said “Ben [Latimer] informed Steve [Ahern], Simon [Melkman] and myself that she took things to social media” and “one was a comment about diversity of voices, and the other was a repost of how Israel is using starvation tactics in the war”.

Oliver-Taylor agreed he had written the note to himself but said “I did not check those posts”. He said he did not understand the content of the posts well enough to know “how that would play”.

“What I’m trying to say, is this was not the only issue we were dealing with this week. I was running nine live radio stations and four TV channels at the same time, it was 1,000 people, there were many things going on in that week,” Oliver-Taylor told the court.

The witness also said he was unclear who had complained to the ABC about Lattouf being hired but he relied on information from Anderson who had texted him about her social media feed being full of “antisemitic hate”.

“I don’t believe I knew this was a lobby by pro-Israel supporters, well, by people who held a different view to Ms Lattouf,” he said.

“I understood that there was a view Ms Lattouf held which … she had published. It was very clear she had published various things in the previous weeks leading up to her engagement with the ABC and then during her engagement with the ABC which meant there was a perception of bias for ABC Radio.”

The hearing continues.