Australia has changed. Its media hasn’t.
For years, ABC Australia’s ‘The World This Week’ has promised viewers a broad, global snapshot of major events shaping our world. But instead of delivering fresh, relevant, and balanced coverage, the program has increasingly turned into a highlight reel of reheated international stories — many of them American, outdated, and recycled.
The latest episode makes that failure glaringly obvious.
The lead story — inexplicably — was a petty spat between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It’s the kind of clickbait you’d expect from a YouTube gossip channel, not the flagship foreign affairs round-up of a taxpayer-funded broadcaster.
It didn’t stop there. The second story focused on the recovery of two Israeli hostages’ bodies — a grim development. Yet even this segment leaned heavily toward the Gaza conflict, repeating footage and analysis that had aired multiple times already, all while glossing over the Jewish victims themselves.
Then came a story on antisemitic violence in the U.S. — a rerun. And another Trump piece, this time about a Molotov attacker and proposed travel bans. Still in America, we were next treated to a Trump-Putin phone call and Russia-Ukraine drone warfare, both of which have also been previously aired. By this point, Australian viewers were half an hour deep into The World This Week, having barely left Washington and Kyiv.
India made a fleeting appearance — not for its historic Delhi-to-Kashmir train service finally beginning after decades of insurgency and isolation, but for a deadly IPL Bangalore stampede already covered earlier in the week. That event, tragic as it was, had already dominated multiple news cycles. But a monumental moment of infrastructure and unity, which held political, social, and strategic weight? Ignored.
It’s a pattern that plays out again and again. South Korea’s corruption case was filtered through American interests. Dutch politics were reduced to asylum policy debates. The Australian Deputy Prime Minister’s visit to Delhi was mentioned, but with no meaningful exploration of its diplomatic substance. Then came a strange detour into the 2007 Madeleine McCann case, followed by a eulogy for MASH* actress Loretta Swit.
The ABC seems stuck in an editorial time warp where the “world” means the US, Europe, and the occasional crisis in the Middle East — all served cold, long after their use-by date. Meanwhile, Australia’s neighbourhood — the Indo-Pacific — is barely a footnote. The Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and our own multicultural stories with global impact are invisible. And when India — home to over 1.5 million Australians’ heritage — makes global news, the coverage is still filtered through a Western lens of death, disaster, or dysfunction.
This isn’t just poor programming — it’s journalistic neglect.
A truly global bulletin should do more than repackage foreign wire stories and American culture wars. It should reflect Australia’s place in the world, not just its past media habits. It should highlight our region, our diaspora, our security, our innovation — and yes, even our optimism.
Instead, ABC’s The World This Week has become a lazy, disconnected, and increasingly irrelevant product, out of sync with the realities and priorities of the very nation that funds it.
Australia doesn’t live in Washington. Neither should our national broadcaster.
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