The Weekend Mumbo: Australian media isn’t ready for The Voice debate
Welcome to The Weekend Mumbo.
It is a bittersweet one for me as this is the very last time I will write for Mumbrella. More on that later though…
The critics have won this round with prominent and celebrated broadcaster Stan Grant taking himself off air a week ago before offering a passionate and inspiring Q&A sign-off speech this Monday.
Stan Grant by any measure was the least effective Q&A facilitator. His worst trait which he was much more often called out for than any discussions around indigenous issues was that he treated women on Q&A panels atrociously, frequently interrupting them and talking over them and cutting them off. If you counted how often he did that compared to the men in the Q&A panels, ironically often older powerful white men, it was a very obvious and serious issue for the show and the ABC.
Despite a mass of complaints the ABC did nothing about it.
Grant unlike all other moderators in this format spent most of the time talking and giving his opinion or slanting the narrative to what he regarded as important, not what his panelists did.
He copped a lot of criticism for this as well.
In his last Q&A the first audience question was a plated Dorothy Dixer all about how badly Grant had been treated. It was inappropriate , unprofessional , embarrassing and undignified. The producers were obviously in on it. Like many Q&As granted facilitated the story became Grant not the important issues the show is supposed to air.
Grant’s heritage and life story are important but Grant always seemed to make that story a part of any narrative he was facilitating.
That is not journalism. That has been Grant’s choice and the ABC’s choice as the ABC never stood Grant up for his poor facilitation or behaviour in particular towards women panelists.
The ABC just let Grant play his behaviour out – behaviour which whether right or wrong was not neutral journalism ever, which surely the ABC should have been pushing.
To compare Grant with Adam Goodes is wrong.
Goodes was doing his job and he was put upon repeatedly by a racist public and not supported by the institutions that had a responsibility to do so.
Grant was not doing his job properly and the ABC weren’t either by letting him get away with not doing his job – journalism .
They are both to blame for the mess.
Grant may have been an “opinionated” journalist (AU media is filled with these let’s all be honest), but I I think you’re missing the point. I didn’t always enjoy his rhetoric, just like I don’t particularly enjoy Sky News but being pushed out of media because you’re receiving endless death-threats is NEVER an appropriate. Especially for someone who doesn’t even hold prominent social media accounts, plenty of his “critics” actually communicate these threats via ABC’s official accounts.
You can criticise his commentary just like you can critique Goodes athleticism, but both of them were not pushed out of their jobs for not doing their jobs. They were pushed out because of racism not just across the public but also prominently across the racist Australian media landscape (don’t forget the criticism Goodes copped from prominent Australian “journalists”), that’s were the comparison is.