Here’s a brief rundown of Australia’s media diversity over the past 40 years. It starts in 1977, when 8-year-old Irfan Yusuf was forced to watch the news for one hour with his mum. It was Channel 10’s Eyewitness News with a blonde Anglo lady named Katrina Lee accompanied by an Anglo bloke whose name now escapes me. The closest thing to a “woggy” or “desi” looking reporter on that show was Eddy Meyer.
On Monday, I met Eddy for the first time at the Sydney launch of Media Diversity Australia, a new group of young media practitioners who share one thing in common – they don’t look anything like Katrina Lee. Then again, they also don’t look like me or my mum. But they are committed to making sure Australian media, its faces and its stories, are more reflective of the reality of Australia.
If you watch most commercial news channels, you’d think Australia was only located in Toorak or Mosman. Reporters that look like the Asian fruiterer where my mum buys mangos, or my Sydney-born dentist of Pakistani heritage, or my best mate’s Tokyo-born wife, rarely get a chance to report on Australia as it really is. For years, the only Indian bloke on Australian television was Apu from the Simpsons. Even today, despite Lee Lin Chin and Stan Grant and Fawzia Ibrahim, our mainstream media seems to largely operate a White Australia Policy.
Waleed Aly was guest speaker at Monday night’s launch. He spoke about the intersection of media and diversity and why both producers and consumers should care. Aly argued that in many cases the established house style in many newsrooms is to commit to an error, to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, whether it be the pronunciation of names. He used the example of Kerobokan Prison in Bali whose name he was ordered to mispronounce on radio despite knowing better.
So how do we get around this replication of error? Well, for a start, such errors wouldn’t happen if we had more people in our newsrooms who spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Gosh, how hard is that? Aly described it as a kind of narrowcasting of the newsroom.
Part of the role of journalism is to make those in power more accessible to those they claim to represent. It allows punters to poke fun at politicians, including the very white skinned ones that often don’t possess enough Australianness to sit in Parliament.
Media is an essential element of our civil society. Yet in Australia, our civil society consists of people of all colours and textures, speaking all kinds of languages. Let’s consider Muslims, too often the flavour of the month. How does one generalise about a group that includes migrants from over 180 different countries? Then we read about this thing called the “Chinese community” which should lead people to wonder whether we are talking about Lee Lin Chin’s family from Singapore or Beverley Wang’s family from Taiwan? Do all Mandarin-speaking Aussies subscribe to the Xi Jinping Thought On Socialism With Chinese Characteristics For A New Era as their guiding ideology?
If private citizens of all backgrounds cannot access or participate in media and similar institutions, it leads to a serious democratic deficit. Yet the number of people from diverse backgrounds in mainstream media are so small that they can be identified by name.
Aly wryly noted that the less visual the medium (such as print and online), the more diversity is tolerated. It’s as if the industry doesn’t want us to see and hear diversity, only to read it.
Perhaps the only diversity on commercial television is in reality TV. After all, you can’t stop black and brown and yellow people from cooking or building houses. But what of more scripted shows?
Media diversity is an important issue not just for the industry but also to its consumers. If all the mainstream media can throw at us by way of diversity is Waleed Aly, I’m sorry but that’s just not good enough. And Waleed agrees with me.
Immediately after World War II, Australian soldiers occupied Hiroshima, and returned home pronouncing it correctly. That is, with all syllables equal, as if it was spelt Hiro Shima. Media too, checked out the phrase books, and pronounced it correctly as well.
However, in America, malice prevailed and the pronunciation drifted to “hahaROSHima!” Eventually Australian media followed suit, as if they didn’t want to sound like dickheads in the company of their peers. They still pronounce it that way, even though large numbers of them know that it is wrong. Ignorance has nothing to do with it. It is cowardice.
Thank you Roger Clifton, Ignorance is cowardice, how true is that.
Replace race and nationality with ugly or fat or disabled and the thrust of the article remains the same.
Where do all the blonde female newsreaders come from? Is there a cloning factory somewhere? Couldn’t agree more.
out of a bottle.
Presumably blonde from bottles and all trying not to age too obviously. The push to conform to an image is ubiquitous.
I’d be interested in knowing how many “Indonesians” (inverted ccommas because I’m included Aussie born) are studying for their Master of Journalism, Media and Communications at Uni? I know for a fact that where I work any Asian heritage potential journo would be grabbed pretty quickly if they were any good.
There should be some who can at least pronounce Indonesian words Mike. My wife and I, both Aussie born and our five Aussie born children can all understand and, to varying extents, speak Indonesian and anyone should be able to learn the pronunciation easily because the spelling is nearly phonetic. For that same reason I can read Turkish aloud quite accurately although I don’t speak the language. Japanese when written in Roman script is also very consistent and sgould be easy to pronounce.
Fair enough. I live in a regional area and the “news” on commercial radio must be mass produced elsewhere because they can’t pronounce local common place names correctly. They probably wouldn’t even know where Indonesia is. I suspect the news editors look for the cheapest “journalist” they can find that can read a script…….
I remember viewing the excellent foreign correspondent reports of Prakash Mirchandani on the ABC. No mention here.