Big Ideas

What happens when Australia’s best poets and writers walk into the world of scientists? How do they feed of each other’s brilliant, inventive minds to help us understand one of the most challenging experiences of our lives ... watching a loved one slowly lose their mind?  

A range of media outlets — including the ABC — have been criticised for their coverage of the latest Israel-Gaza war. There have been protests, apologies, and retractions from the likes of the BBC and CNN. But in a moment where it is notoriously difficult for foreign journalists to gain access to Gaza, what are the obligations of news media when reporting on the Israel Gaza war? 

Responsibilities of the News Media on Palestine was a University of Technology Sydney webinar, first recorded on November 10, 2023. 

Note: This is part two of the discussion. Listen to the first part here. 

Speakers: 

Monica AttardCo-director of the Centre for Media Transition, UTS, and former ABC broadcaster and foreign correspondent

Amy McQuireJournalist, editor, and PhD candidate at the University of Queensland

Antony LowensteinJournalist, film maker, and author, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World

Martin Newman (moderator)Journalism lecturer and coordinator of media law and ethics, UTS

A range of media outlets — including the ABC — have been criticised for their coverage of the latest Israel-Gaza war. There have been protests, apologies, and retractions from the likes of the BBC and CNN. But in a moment where it is notoriously difficult for foreign journalists to gain access to Gaza, what are the obligations of news media when reporting on the Israel Gaza war? 

Note: This is part one of the discussion. Listen to the second part here. 

Responsibilities of the News Media on Palestine was a University of Technology Sydney webinar, first recorded on November 10, 2023. 

Speakers: 

Rawan DamenDirector-general, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism

Zahera HarbInternational Journalism Studies Cluster lead, City University, London, former war correspondent 

Karen PercyFederal Media President, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, former ABC foreign correspondent

Antony LowensteinJournalist, film maker, and author, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World

Martin Newman (moderator)Journalism lecturer and coordinator of media law and ethics, UTS

Multi-award-winning Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty went to Afghanistan on a two-week assignment. He stayed for 9 years.At just 25, Afghan-born women's activist Zahra Karimi found herself facilitating a 5000-strong network of Afghan women.As the Taliban took over in August 2021, and the Republic of Afghanistan crumbled, both had to get out of the country they loved. With a mass exodus, came a mass deletion. Websites, files, records, social media accounts were all wiped to protect people from persecution by the Taliban. So who will tell the stories of Afghanistan as it was before authoritarian rule? Andrew and Zahra want those stories to be heard by the world. They join Big Ideas' host Natasha Mitchell at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

Technology's default setting is 'male' — more precisely a white, or at least, light-skinned male. Tracey Spicer exposes how technology and AI has embedded sexism and racism into the future. It's the next frontier of feminism. But who is responsible? Big Tech, refusing to spend money to fix the problem? The world's politicians, who lack the will to legislate? Or should we all be taking a good, hard look at ourselves?

In 2020, veteran science journalist Ed Yong intended to write a book about the world of animal senses. But fate had other plans — he was put on the COVID beat for The Atlantic, and later received the Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.

But year later he returned to the book and rediscovered an immense world: Flowers growing in electric fields, bees seeing in ultraviolet, the underwater symphony of the Great Barrier Reef. The sublime in the natural world. In his latest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed asks how animals can sense this when we can't.

If you find yourself locked up in a foreign prison on fake charges, what would you like your government to do? It's a question that rollicked around economist Sean Turnell's brain when the unthinkable became reality.

In November 2021, Myanmar's military junta arrested Turnell — then an economic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi — and thrust him into solitary confinement. He would be wrongfully imprisoned for another 650 days in one of Yangon's most notorious prisons. This is the story of how Turnell survived that time, and how a global coalition worked to set him free.

Has feminism been too white and too middle-class for too long? From India to Australia, five trailblazing women spanning generations, geography, and cultures join Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell to give their frank and fearless views  on the F Word — what it means to them and how it might evolve.

The road to peace is one littered with compromise. From Belfast to Bosnia, Dili to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, peace negotiations after bloody armed conflict have involved incredibly complex choices between what to prosecute and what to pardon. So what would you give up to obtain a lasting peace?

This Big Ideas episode was first broadcast on November 10, 2015. 

He was one of the most remarkable producer/director/actors to come out of Hollywood. The cinema wunderkind George Orson Welles. But he was also a troublemaker and outsider; maybe too creative and eccentric for his own good. Some of his work remained unreleased, and at the same time his movie Citizen Kane is studied as an epitome of cinematic art all over the world to this day. Big Ideas discusses the legacy of Orson Welles, and the struggles to make Citizen Kane.