“A sea of white”
Media Watch finds an abundance of Caucasian faces reading primetime news around the country.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
Following comments about Waleed Aly’s win at the Logies, Media Watch last night set its sights on an abundance of Caucasian faces reading primetime news around the country.
Excluding SBS, it could only find a handful of presenters not of Caucasian appearance.
“Turn on prime-time TV News in Sydney—apart from SBS—and this is who you’ll see: all white, except for the ABC’s Jeremy Fernandez,” host Paul Barry said.
“It’s the same story in Canberra.
“And if you switch the dial to Melbourne the picture’s much the same.
“Moving over to Hobart … there’s still not a brown or black face in sight.
“Nor is there one in Adelaide.
“In Perth, Ten has an indigenous newsreader, but all the others are white.
“Darwin’s ABC has a newsreader of Greek parentage, and the rest are white.
“And in Brisbane, the ABC’s Karina Carvalho was born in Sri Lanka.
“So, put all those 40 faces together and as you can see it’s a sea of white.”
17 Responses
It seemed more diverse years ago than now, with names like Indira Naidoo, George Donikian, Helen Kapalos and John Mangos
Perhaps Media Watch could have got a few class photos from the graduating university student bodies in journalism from 15, 10, 5 and 1 year ago and actually put things in perspective rather than hyper-ventilating about diversity.
I couldnt care less if they were black, white or brindle. Kay mcgrath is the best in brisbane and i dare say shes the oldest newsreader going around. Maybe the story should be about how most newsreaders and reporters are young and pretty and the older ones are dumped by 40….with a few( male) exceptions of course.
Kay McGrath is a top class news professional. I was initially against her being bumped to weekends to make way for Sharyn Ghidella, but Sharyn is of the same class so that’s fair enough.
Long may these ladies grace our airwaves.
No way in hell am I prepared to say there shouldn’t be more diversity, because I agree there should be … but Media Watch’s analysis seems a little trite. 4 identifiable non-caucasian faces out of 40 is 10%, which isn’t too far off the various ABS, government, and independent figures for the Australian population (e.g. 9.8% of the population is of non Australian or UK ancestry).
That said, I haven’t yet watched Media Watch. Maybe he addresses that…
“Maybe he addresses that…”
Nope. Like you, I am all for diversity – ethnicity, gender identity, disability, etc, but in most cases I think representation should broadly reflect the relative proportions in our society. There are circumstances and situations where it would be appropriate to perhaps over-represent a certain group but not as a general rule.
Yeah, I’ve since watched it. He had a fair point to make about Waleed’s Logie win (though someone’s gotta be first), but he would’ve been more correct if he’d disagreed with the newspaper article & pointed out the anglo/non-anglo newsreader proportion closely reflected the population.
(40 out of 24 million is a terrible sample size to derive anything from anyway. I’m quite surprised it turned out so close, & it’s way too small to reflect specific ethnicities.)
I was actually more annoyed at the use of a heavily-accented asian voice to read out snippets from A+’s Chinese website (I think it was in the previous weeks ep). That was unnecessary, even though I’m not sure if it was meant deliberately as representative of the source or just unthinkingly racist.
Either way, I noticed the same segment didn’t use an English-accented voice to read quotes from the Grauniad…
Its a fairly racist observation implying there is something wrong with “white” people presenting the news. If the same approach was applied to non white folk in other areas of our lives the shrill of racism would be overwhelming. I enjoy MW most weeks, but on this one its very muddled
Nobody’s implying there’s anything wrong with “white” people presenting the news. What they’re _saying_ is that the proportion of non-“white” people isn’t representative of the population at large.
And, if you’ll scroll up, you’ll see I think they’re wrong about that…
Maybe a lot of those ‘so called white’ people are of mixed decent as well. what are the percentages of ethnicities across Australia? Maybe that’s the reason why many of those anchores reflect this balance. I’m sure these news anchors deserve their jobs and put in a lot of hard work to get the positions they have.
Ah excuse me. Turn on MediaWatch and see a Caucasian host too. Pot calling the kettle white, in this case.
Not sure I quite agree with your comparison as it suggests only those who are non-Caucasian can comment on a lack of racial diversity. That would mean I should stop blogging on it too. Burying the argument wouldn’t help address it.
Channel 7 Brisbane has an indigenous journalist/reporter in Marlena Whop.
Yes there are more in reporting (although proportionately I imagine it’s worse). Media Watch focussed on presenters. Would have been good to include SBS rather than exclude.
They didn’t include SBS because it would have completely destroyed their rather flip and superficial argument. Slow news week for Media Watch obviously…
Veritas, I Agree. The last thing I want to see is non-white presenters on TV just because their employer can tick a diversity box. They should be there because they are good at their job, with diversity second.
Perhaps prime time is still largely white, there was a time when it was less diverse than now! I immediately thought of Jeremy Fernandez on ABC News and Lee Lin Chin. Also Kumi Taguchi on News 24, Karina Cavalho at 7pm Brisbane; Miriam Corowa on ABC Weekends. I recall when Katrina Lee was the only female newsreader in prime time.