When one of Australia’s most high-profile journalists announced that he would be stepping down from his television hosting duties over racist abuse, it sent shockwaves through the country’s media industry.
The journalist, Stan Grant, said in a Friday opinion piece to his employer’s website that he and his family were victims of “relentless” racial abuse after he spoke of colonial-era violence against the indigenous people of Australia during the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles III Australia.
Mr. Grant has been a journalist for over 30 years and is well known on TV screens as the host of the national broadcaster’s popular current affairs talk show “Q+A”. On Monday, in his final appearance on the show for now, he said the attacks from social media and other outlets had twisted his words and taken their toll.
“To those who abused me and my family, I would like to say, if your goal was to hurt me, you succeeded,” he said, adding that his absence would be temporary. “I’m down now, I am. But I will rise again. And you can come to me again, and I will meet you with the love of my people.
In his op-ed, he accused his employer, the ABC, of ”institutional failure.” No one at the company, not even those who invited him to participate in coverage of the coronation, “has uttered a single word of public support,” he said.
“I am taking time off because we have once again shown that our history – our hard truth – is too big, too fragile, too precious for the media,” he wrote. “The media sees only battle lines, no bridges. It only sees politics.”
In the coronation segment, Mr. Grant spoke of how an “exterminating war” had been declared against his people, the Wiradjuri tribe, in the name of the crown. The coronation ceremony was not, he said, “something that is far away, that is just ceremonial that has no weight.” It carries weight for First Nations people, because that crown put a weight on us, and we still have to deal with that.
The ABC received a number of complaints from viewers who found the segment overly critical. Two prominent radio presenters said the coverage “completely misinterpreted the mood” and was “bile”, while some news articles labeled Mr Grant’s comments as “tirades” and a “diatribe.” Other panelists critical of the monarchy said they didn’t get the same level 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 reckons with a bloody colonial past that has never completely disappeared. Part of that reckoning will come later this year, when the nation will hold a referendum on whether to include a body in the constitution to advise the government on indigenous issues.
The announcement of Mr Grant’s furlough inspired other Indigenous and non-white journalists to speak out, detailing the racism they said they encountered on the job and the failure of their workplaces to protect them and support or to understand the additional challenges they face.
Mr Grant’s experience highlighted the high price Indigenous journalists paid for challenging mainstream perspectives in an industry that has historically excluded their voices, said Narelda Jacobs, a television journalist and presenter at Network 10 who is of the Noongar Indigenous tribe.
“The media in Australia has been unbalanced throughout history,” she said. “He was trying to keep the balance, and then he was attacked for it.”
“When people try to highlight the issues we have with racism, they are attacked and taken down by some of the media, and they are silenced,” she added. “And there aren’t enough culturally safe environments to have these conversations about issues of national importance.”
While much of the recent criticism has been directed at the ABC, journalists have said the problems in the workplace are industry-wide. The company is one of Australia’s more diverse media organisations, being one of two publicly funded national broadcasters to have a public responsibility mandate that commercial media organizations do not.
On Sunday, the ABC said that it would review how the organization responded to racism affecting its staff, and apologized to Mr Grant. On Monday, broadcaster staff left the track in protest at Mr Grant’s treatment, holding signs reading #IStandWithStan and #WeRejectRacism.
“It’s a bit of a reckoning,” said Mariam Veiszadeh, the CEO of Media Diversity Australia. Mr. Grant’s absence was felt so acutely because “there is no one of his caliber, with a First Nations background, with his experience who can fill the void,” she said, and his departure was a blow to many young native and non-white journalists who “pin their hopes, aspirations and dreams on people like Stan Grant.”