Just in time for our 30th anniversary this year, Shaun Brown dismantles the SBS subtitling unit.
What does the managing director have against SBS TV continuing to have an exemplary, world-renowned subtitling capacity? Why is he reducing the subtitling unit of SBS TV to dust?
The subtitling unit is one of the, if not the, finest subtitling units in the world. In 2007, the team won the AUSIT Excellence Award in recognition of its high standards and for its outstanding contribution to the translation and interpreting industry. The jury commented on its particularly high quality, its professional presentation and its contribution to multicultural society.
The SBS TV website even promotes the 2007 AUSIT Excellence Award. But why does it even bother to promote that any more? On Wednesday, May 19, we learned that the subtitling unit was to lose more than 10 staff, and this is on the back of a number of previous rounds of redundancies.
What’s left? Not much but a Clayton’s subtitling unit. It’s now an extremely minuscule department, with hardly anyone left in it — and this has been the only way that Brown was able to get around/get away with trying not to have a subtitling unit at all.
Never mind SBS TV is supposed to be a multicultural broadcaster, and never mind the fact it says so in the SBS charter, or the fact that SBS was built up from off the back of the subtitling unit. Brown wants to get rid of the subtitling unit, but he knows he can’t get away with getting rid of it completely. So he continues to hack away at it — whittling and hacking away — until very soon, there is going to be nothing left.
How apparent it was at that first-ever meeting Brown held with the subtitling staff, where he casually remarked to a room full of dedicated subtitling staff that he thought it was hard to eat your dinner and read subtitles at the same time. Quite the sophisticated, worldly reply, right there.
The dismantling and destruction of the subtitling unit has been deliberately orchestrated by Brown. Soon we will blink, and the wonderful, beautiful subtitles that have given so much joy and happiness to so very many people all over Australia will be gone. Thirty years of the most scintillating, glorious yellow subtitles down the drain.
I would much prefer to flush Shaun Brown down the drain.
SBS lost the plot several years ago when it started putting advertisements in its movies. Consequently I now no longer watch SBS movies because I refuse to have artistic creations butchered to sell tampons and soap powder.
SBS has gone from the the pinnacle of excellence in multicultural television to some hybrid sitting between the ABC and commercial channels with the worst aspects of both.
The only redeeming feature left is the news. Judging by everything else has been stuffed up at SPS it is only a matter of time before that degenerates into a pale imitation of commercial television.
Subtitling is the key to the ability to interchange cultural expression whereby one gets a different perspective of life from the cultural viewpoint of directors of different nationalities. Once this is gone, SBS may as well morph into a commercial channel and get over and done with.
Since he took over the seat of “power” at SBS Shaun Brown has done his best, for reasons known only to him, to drag that organisation down from the heights of excellence they once enjoyed.
How he manages to continue in that position is obviously due to the indulgence of persons with an interest in having him there and not the interests of SBS and its staff.
It is time his tenure was cancelled, cancelled immediately for utter incompetence.
Haven’t watched SBS since the male s?xual dis-funcction ads arrived.
They could argue that they are still going to fulfil two of the criteria in the Charter:
(d) contribute to the retention and continuing development of language and other cultural skills; and
(e) as far as practicable, inform, educate and entertain Australians in their preferred languages;
However without the subtitling they cannot contribute much to these ones:
(b) increase awareness of the contribution of a diversity of cultures to the continuing development of Australian society; and
(c) promote understanding and acceptance of the cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Australian people.
Their programs will no longer contribute to increasing understanding between the ethnic communities, and between the ethnic communities and the Australian-born population.
If Shaun Brown is too lazy to read subtitles then what is he doing running SBS? Get rid of him as he has been the architect of the slow degeneration of what was once a superb television channel.