Australian news presenter Erin Molan's stance on behalf of Israel and against antisemitism is informed by her desire to fight for her values and create a better world for her daughter to live in, she explained to The Jerusalem Post ahead of her attendance of Thursday's International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, detailing how she endured death threats and navigated her own way through a media landscape in which opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often presented as fact.
Molan, who gained prominence for her passionate Sky News Australia monologues on the Israel-Hamas War, said that she motivated to make the speeches because the deep empathy she was able to feel as a mother and her exposure to suffering when growing up in Indonesia during the violent fall of the Suharto regime. The Australian newswoman said that she was deeply impacted by those enduring poverty, leprosy, and civil unrest.
"I got exposed to people in pain very early on in my life, which is something that not a lot of kids in Australia would get exposed to," said Molan.
As a 14-year-old gymnastics coach, Molan would walk home distributing her salary, and wouldn't have a cent left by the time she got to her destination because she met a needy person at every traffic light or street corner.
"When people say 'you're a child killer, you don't care about kids dying in Gaza' — I care more about them more than almost anyone else that I can imagine. I'm just smart enough to understand who their enemy is. I understand why they die, and it's nothing to do with Israel," Molan explained. "I think I've always been someone who's cared deeply, and my dad taught me to always do what was right and to say what was right, to stand for what was right, even when it was difficult, and even when you knew that it might not work in your favor and you knew there might be consequences that were not ideal."
The consequences for speaking her mind were harsh, with Molan and her daughter receiving death threats. The 20-year veteran of Australian public life was used to being lambasted online, but there was true fear that these new threats were being issued by those willing to meet them out. The Australian Federal Police had to escort her from the underground car park to her radio show job, and had to cancel events at the station because of bomb threats.
Some of the threats were specific to her six-year-old daughter and the sites she frequented. For a period, Molan's daughter had to stay with her father because they were worried about the girl's safety with the news presenter. For a long time, Molan said she was unable to relax, even at home, jumping even when an Uber Delivery arrives because of the tenseness drawn by the volume of threats.
"It's definitely hard," said Molan. "I'm sure my mother would prefer that I got a job in a dress shop or something, but she also understands better than anyone that I'm my father's daughter and that this is my purpose in a lot of ways — and it's selfish as well. It's not just because I care about people in Israel and I care about the Jewish community — I do deeply — but selfishly, I care much more about my daughter's future and the kind of world that she will grow up in. And I'm not silly enough to think that it ends with Israel or ends with the Jews. It never does. So it's been very difficult in a lot of ways, 18 months, but nowhere near as difficult as it has been for people impacted directly by October 7 and beyond."
Better to speak up than live through world situation five years from now
It was better to speak up now and brave the threats and months of fraying nerves, said Molan, than to live through the world situation five years down the line if people like her didn't speak up.
"What's happening now in Israel is happening in Australia, and it's already starting," said Molan. "Islamic extremism poses such a massive threat to everyone, unless we are brave enough to call it out and to fight it."
Around the world there were terrorist attacks, raising Molan's concern, including repeated car ramming attacks in Germany. When a terrorist is driving through a crowded Christmas celebration, she noted, they weren't checking to see their religion or creed.
Molan — who grew up in the country with the world's largest Muslim population, spoke fluent Indonesian, and just a few months had visited close and devout Muslim friends in the country — warned that good Muslims were hurt the most by Islamic extremism, and therefore had to speak out louder.
"I feel like we need louder voices from their community, because Islamic extremism hurts them more than anyone else," said Molan.
Molan's made the long journey from Australia to participate in the Diaspora Ministry's antisemitism conference to engage more voices in speaking up against antisemitism.
"At the moment, the battle in this space is too big to not take every single opportunity and platform that is given to me, and that's always been my mentality since the end of last year," Molan said, referencing her departure from Sky News. "I think every opportunity to speak, to travel, to engage is really, really important."
Molan said that she tried to avoid echo chambers at great cost because they were ineffective, and one of the things that she liked about the conference was a wide array of people from different backgrounds. Some may be "people who I may not agree with but I think if you want to change minds, and if you want to try and make a difference, then you have to be willing to have a dialogue with people that you may not necessarily see eye to eye with."
Speaking out about the Israel-Hamas War and antisemitism is all the more important to Molan when other Australian media outlets had been using opinion and facts interchangeably to create narratives. She noted that on Sky News she had a commentary show, and it was labeled as such, but hard news programs were weaving into stories opinions that were "clearly reflective of the reporter or the organization itself, rather than the reality."
Sometimes the media bias was subtle, removing certain facts, such as one news network that covered the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Molan recalled the outlet's segment featuring emotional music while showing the return of a crying Palestinian man to his family — omitting the information that the prisoner had been convicted for a terrorist attack.
She mentioned that press wires, used by outlets that didn't have the resources to deploy journalists to certain regions or subjects, would fail their customers with their coverage by neglecting to mention issues like casualty counts being sourced from Hamas-controlled institutions. Sometimes the bias was more blatant, explained Molan, recalling how she had once heard the Australian Broadcast Corporation radio describing in passing how it was "day 400 of Israel's illegal invasion of Gaza."
"Most people don't have the capacity to invest time in investigating stories. So if you're a news source that is packaging things like that, it's completely wrong," said Molan. "It's wrong for not identifying to your audience that this is at your take, this is an opinion, or this is an agenda you're prosecuting rather than straight news. And there's a place for opinion, absolutely, but it's the deceit in which it's not conveyed that this is not facts."
Molan said that she always thought about who she was speaking to when explaining stories, and their reliance on her to set the record straight on issues they couldn't research themselves, and she feels she has been able to better represent her opinions since taking a more independent position at 69 X News. Molan said that in December she was told she lost her position at Sky News due to budget reasons, and lost her other radio, newspaper, and magazine, but that it turned out to be "the greatest blessing of my life."
"It was the thing that I'd feared in 20 years in television and media. I'd fear losing my job, and once it happened, it was actually the most freeing experience of my life in terms of being able to legitimately be — and this sounds very wanky — authentically myself."
Molan no longer felt that she had to juggle the difference in style and tone between platforms like opinion shows covering European and Middle Eastern wars and a breakfast radio show that was more comedic and trying to appeal to a less conservative Western Sydney market.
69 X News is part of Elon Musk's drive to invest and develop news programming on the platform formerly known as Twitter. With Musk's news platform, Molan said she felt that she felt truer to her own positions, and wasn't channeling teams or corporations. Five weeks in and 60 million views later, she excitedly explained that on her new show and on her YouTube channel she got to interview everyone from presidents of African and European states and to citizen journalists.
"I get to do my take, and I'm obviously someone that is very pro-Israel, pro-the Jewish community, [and] against terror. So it gives me this incredibly big platform to continue to fight passionately for the kind of world that I want and the kind of values that I have, and to eradicate the kind of evil that I don't want as part of this world."
