Wed Oct 2

The ABC’s racism review is scathing. Can Aunty find the strength of character to properly address it?

Written by: Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

I am writing this because no one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support. Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me. I don’t hold any individual responsible; this is an institutional failure.

These words, written by Stan Grant ^[1], who at the time was one of the ABC’s most high-profile First Nations journalists, catalysed the ABC into commissioning a review that has now revealed systemic racism across the national broadcaster.

The review was conducted by the Indigenous law firm Terri Janke and Company. Its report, Listen Loudly, Act Strongly ^[2], sets out failures of culture, management and senior leadership.

Failures of culture were demonstrated by the prevalence of overt and covert racism.

A First Nations staff member was asked: “How much of you is Aboriginal? Don’t worry. You don’t look it.”

Another staff member said:

whenever you raised [racism] with someone, you’d have to be so careful because if they got upset, you were the one who would get in trouble, you know, cause you’d be going out and upsetting the nice White people. And [they would say]: ‘Don’t say that. That’s not what we meant. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re so sensitive. You’ve overreacted.‘

Failures of management abounded, especially in middle management, where some were good at handling issues concerning race but most were not.

One staff member said:

there is an overall sense that managers are just not up for the job.

Senior leadership was likewise of uneven quality, although when a staff member circumvented middle management and went right to the top, the experience was positive:

I went to see David [managing director Anderson]. He was great. He listened. It was difficult for him.

The more common experience was reflected in this observation:

As an organisation, they don’t understand they have a structural issue. If the Managing Director says at Senate Estimates that there isn’t a problem, then middle management wouldn’t think there is an issue. And we all feel like we are being gaslighted.

Laundry list of issues

These responses represent a small cross-section of the data in the report, derived from the testimony of 99 current staff and 21 former staff, 80 women and 30 men.

Most gave their accounts in personal interviews, while others used group forums or provided written submissions. Many said they came forward because they cared about the ABC.

The preponderance of women indicates there is an especially acute issue concerning what is called intersectionality, meaning the intersection of two attributes, in this case race and gender, that tend to arouse discrimination. The report finds the most severe accounts of racism and racial discrimination described to the review team were directed towards women of colour.

A man in a suit holds his chin in thought.

ABC Managing Director David Anderson apologised to those who’ve experienced racism within the organisation. Mick Tsikas/AAP ^[3]

The report canvasses not just the day-to-day interactions reflected in the comments above, but also:

gaps in the management structure
shortcomings in human resource management
the incapacity of the ABC to respond effectively to external attacks on its journalists
narrowness in recruitment
inequitable career progression
inadequate complaints-handling processes
inequities in pay
poor training of managers.

A test of character

There are 15 recommendations covering all these problems and the ABC has issued a statement ^[4] saying it has adopted all of them in principle. In some cases it has gone further and begun implementing them already.

It has appointed a new Director, First Nations Strategy to the senior leadership team, engaged the former Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan as a change agent and engaged the prominent First Nations academic, Jackie Huggins, as Elder-in-Residence to provide advice and support.

These are among a long list of actions ^[5] put out by the ABC alongside the release of the report.

There are new committees, staff consolidations, reallocations of management reporting lines and the like, but the real test is still to come: the test of courage and character that the ABC has failed so conspicuously, not just in the Grant case but in others, including the ongoing matter of Antoinette Lattouf ^[6].

Both she and Grant were victims of sustained external attacks. Recommendation four of the report addresses the ABC’s demonstrated incapacity to cope with these. It says a centralised team should be set up to which staff can turn when attacked by external media organisations or individuals.

The ABC’s response to this is confined to a general statement about improving its systems and processes. Considering it was a sustained external attack, led by News Corporation, on Stan Grant that led to his resignation and the setting up of the review, it is a singularly vague and lame response.

The pressures of diversity

An especially insightful part of the report articulates the complex challenges facing journalists from First Nations or cultural and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds.

One such challenge is referred to as “cultural load”. This means these journalists are not only expected to do their own stories like everyone else, but to provide contacts and cultural advice to other journalists who have come to rely on them for this kind of support rather than develop their own contacts and cultural understandings.

Another is that stories with a cultural dimension raise presumptive suspicions by managers that journalists from diverse backgrounds will not be able to cover stories about their communities impartially.

At the same time, there was a lack of recognition among managers of the burden of community expectations these journalists carried when reporting on matters involving their cultural background.

One journalist summarised it like this:

we can’t go to our managers to actually talk about this because I’m worried that if I do say something, I’m going to be scrapped off this story or I’m going to be labelled as biased. And they also don’t know at the end of the day that when we go home and we are in proximity with those communities, we also bear the brunt of their anger and frustration. There’s a lot of backlash and assumptions about what we can do in our capacity.

This is an acute dilemma for managers and staff, but it seems clear that whatever editorial policies are in place to resolve it are inadequate. The ABC’s action list has nothing to say about this.

Altogether it is a lacerating document and it demonstrates to a sobering degree how closely the ABC’s conduct reflects the overt and covert racism in the wider Australian community.