When one of Australia’s best-known journalists announced that he was stepping down from his TV presenting duties because of racial slurs, shock waves rippled through the country’s media industry.
That’s what journalist Stan Grant said in one on Friday opinion piece for his employer’s website that he and his family suffered “relentless” racial abuse after he died during the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of King Charles III’s coronation. spoke about colonial-era violence against Australia’s indigenous people.
Mr. Grant has been a journalist for over 30 years and is a well-known presence on TV screens as the host of the national channel’s popular current talk show ‘Q+A’. On Monday, during his final appearance on the show, he said the attacks from social and other media had distorted his words and taken their toll.
“All I would say to those who have abused me and my family is if your goal was to hurt me, then you did it,” he said, adding that his absence would only be temporary. “I’m down right now, that’s me. But I’ll get up again. And you can come to me again, and I will meet you with the love of my people.”
In his statement, he accused his employer, ABC, of “institutional failure”. No one at the company, even those who invited him to participate in the coronation coverage, “has uttered a word of public support,” he said.
“I’m taking a break because we’ve shown once again that our story — our hard truth — is too big, too fragile, too valuable for the media,” he wrote. “The media only see battle lines, not bridges. It only sees politics.”
In the coronation segment, Mr. Grant spoke about how his people, the Wiradjuri tribe, had been declared a “war of annihilation” on behalf of the crown. The coronation ceremony is not “something distant, but just a ceremony without weight”. It carries weight for First Nations people because that crown weighed on us and we still struggle with it.”
The ABC received a number of complaints from viewers who felt the segment was overly critical. Two prominent radio hosts said the coverage “got the sentiment completely wrong” and was “bile”, while some news articles labeled Mr Grant’s comments as “tirades” and a “rant.” Other panelists criticize the monarchy called They did not receive the same amount of vitriol as Mr. Grant.
While Australia celebrates its multiculturalism, it lags behind other Western countries in the diversity of its government, boardrooms and media institutions, and still relies on a bloody colonial past that has never quite disappeared. Some of that reckoning will come later this year when the nation will hold an event referendum whether the constitution should include a body to advise the government on indigenous issues.
Mr Grant’s furlough announcement inspired other Indigenous and non-white journalists to speak out and detail the racism they allegedly encountered while working and the failure of their jobs to protect and support them understand the additional challenges they face.
Mr. Grant’s experience highlighted the high price Indigenous journalists paid for challenging mainstream prospects in an industry that has historically shut out their voices, said Narelda Jacobs, a television journalist and presenter at Network 10, who Belongs to the indigenous Noongar tribe.
“The media in Australia has been unbalanced throughout its history,” she said. “He was trying to keep his balance and then he was attacked for it.”
“When people try to highlight the issues we have with racism, they are attacked and put down and silenced by a segment of the media,” she added. “And there aren’t enough culturally safe environments to have these conversations about issues of national importance.”
Although much of the recent criticism has been aimed at ABC, journalists said the workplace issues were industry-wide. The company is one of Australia’s most diverse media organizations and one of only two state-funded national broadcasters to have a public accountability mandate that commercial media organizations do not have.
ABC on Sunday called that it would review how the organization responded to racism towards its staff and apologized to Mr Grant. On Monday, employees at the station walked out of their jobs in protest at the treatment of Mr Grant, carrying signs reading #IStandWithStan and #WeRejectRacism.
“It’s a sort of reckoning,” said Mariam Veiszadeh, chief executive of Media Diversity Australia. Mr Grant’s absence was felt so clearly because “there is nobody of his caliber, with a First Nations background and with his experience, who can fill the gap,” she said, and his departure was a blow to the many young Indigenous and non-white journalists who “base their hopes, aspirations and dreams on people like Stan Grant.”
