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Status active
Type 🏛️ media
Country 🇦🇺 AU
Website www.ettemedia.com/
Concepts Tribal Epistemology
Last activity 2026-07-30 dod
Confirmed active via official site during landscape research

Ette Media

ETTE Media is an independent Australian media company founded by journalists Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf. Unlike outlets that report the news, ETTE's focus is teaching audiences how to read the news — spotting spin, decoding headlines, and identifying who benefits from a given framing, in an environment of algorithmic distortion and declining trust in mainstream media. In practice this plays out as an irreverent, conversational two-hander rather than a lecture — casual banter wrapped around genuine policy substance.

Like Constitutional Clarion and Lamestream, it is a small, founder-led operation rather than a formal institution — included here on the same basis: DOD's interest is in the accountability and literacy work being done, not the size of the entity doing it. Media literacy is a precondition for citizens being able to use accountability mechanisms at all — an electorate that can't tell coverage from spin can't meaningfully hold power to account through the press.

What it covers

  • Platform regulation and government mandates colliding with corporate compliance — the channel's most-viewed video, "Why PornHub blocked Australian users" (11 Mar 2026, 15,772 views; transcript supplied by a DOD contributor), covers Aylo (Pornhub's parent company) blocking Australian users rather than complying with the government's new age-verification law — penalties of up to $49.5 million per breach — drawing the UK's earlier experience with the same law (a reported 77% traffic drop, a surge in VPN use to route around it, and Ofcom's assessment that compliance was nonetheless largely achieved) into a discussion of who should bear responsibility for keeping children off porn sites, and the privacy/surveillance trade-offs of age-verification schemes
  • A media-accountability gap, illustrated by a contested case — the channel's second most-viewed video, "'Undercover Jew' media mess escalates" (26 Nov 2025, 12,540 views; transcript supplied by a DOD contributor), covers The Daily Telegraph's internally-named "UNDERCOVERJEW" operation — first reported by Crikey, which obtained the outlet's internal planning documents — in which a Telegraph crew sent pro-Israel activist Ofir Birenbaum, wearing a Star of David cap, into Cairo Takeaway, a Sydney restaurant known for pro-Palestinian social media posts and street art, to film staff's reaction to his presence — footage showed no notable reaction to Birenbaum himself, though a separate, real confrontation followed once staff realised a journalist and cameraman had been filming them without identifying themselves. The episode's core argument is that Australia's media self-regulation bodies (the Australian Press Council among them) have no mechanism to hold an outlet accountable for a story that was leaked rather than published. At the time of recording, the fallout had produced a defamation claim (Birenbaum against the restaurant) and a trespass cross-claim, in which the restaurant's Federal Court filing described the operation as a "cruel experiment" intended to "increase social division." Crikey later reported that the matter was settled in March 2026, with the Telegraph and the restaurant each publishing apologies — the restaurant for "false and defamatory" posts about Birenbaum, the Telegraph for the distress its sting caused
  • Its flagship podcast, "We Used to be Journos," breaking down the week's news and how it was covered
  • Media ownership, editorial decisions, and the incentives behind them
  • Practical media-literacy skills for a fragmented, algorithm-driven information environment

Sources

See also