SBS CEO and managing director Michael Ebeid to step down
The chief executive officer and managing director of multi-cultural and specialist broadcaster SBS will step down in October after 7.5 years at the helm.
SBS said it will commence the search for Michael Ebeid’s replacement immediately.
Ebeid will make an announcement about his new role in coming weeks
In April, one of Australia’s best-known media executives, John Sintras, returned to Australian shores to become the network’s chief audience and content officer, replacing Helen Kellie who passed away in December last year.
One of the best leaders in our industry! All the best, Mike.
It is interesting that nearly every mention of Mr Ebeid’s departure is essentially a cut-and-paste from the SBS media release. There is, of course, another view of his tenure, [edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy] And while the real value of staff salaries has fallen due to his intransigent obstructiveness in enterprise bargaining, executive salaries have increased predictably. Ebeid’s commitment to the Charter is also evidenced by an email to marketing instructing there to be no subtitles shown in promos, the almost complete absence of any foreign language material (other than the predictable Scandinavian crime) on SBS 1, and his effectively selling off two channels worth of bandwidth to North American networks while appointing a sequence of British executives who fancy a few years in the colonies with fancy salaries but who know nothing about multicultural policy (as is evidenced by the endless stream of documentaries about British food and British railways). This is addition to his failed attempt to increase the level of advertising in programs when it remains the thing most objected to by SBS viewers, one of many evidences of the contempt with which the place now treats its audience, in addition to the shameful shifting of timeslots for the most popular programs in another shameful attempt to maximise revenue. Ebeid has also presided over the complete evisceration of a once proud SBS news and current affairs department so that all serious challenging investigative journalism has vanished in the interests of appeasing a government which sees fit to cut funding to any network which challenges it. That, of course, is the key and the summary of everything in his seven and a half years, the desire to appease government demands and make SBS into a state broadcaster more than a public broadcaster. The timing of his departure is typically opportunistic, running off before a couple of difficult government inquiries begin, and after pulling off a World Cup scam which claimed SBS rescued it for viewers, whereas SBS caused the debacle in the first place by selling off the rights to Optus after having already secured them, this to massage the SBS accounts to please Senate Estimates. As for his own behaviour in the company, following his very first initiative of building an executive bathroom next to his office in the Artarmon building, he also pursued an almost fetishistic obsession with the Eurovision Song Contest which led to the total absurdity of Australia entering the contest, thereby somehow justifying annual junkets for himself and his partner to whichever location the contest went to. I’m sure he enjoyed his nest-feathering tenure, but some of us see through the headache-inducing managerial jargon which fills his emails (and those of his managers), and we will not miss this government poodle at all.
Thank you Nicola for the unofficial summary of Mr Ebeid’s tenure, it accords much more with reality than the relentless corporate propaganda we have been subjected to so far.