What looks like objectivity to white journalists looks very different to those who are, to quote Grant, ‘on the other side of history’
And, self-righteous creatures that we are, it is all too easy to avoid debating people with whom we disagree because it is easier to label them as racists. End of discussion.great evil, from which many other evils flow. I agree that combating it is the imperative.There are people in all the media organisations that are part of this moment – particularly News Corporation and the ABC – who resent and reject suggestions that they and their organisations are racist. That’s understandable.
What looks like objectivity to white, Anglo journalists such as myself – the children of the empire, the beneficiaries of colonialism – looks very different to those who are, to quote Grant, “on the other side of history”. Objectivity is an intellectual and professional discipline. It lies in the method the journalist brings to their work – not in the individual journalist.
And yet the panel discussion that preceded the televised coronation ceremony had a thrown-together, last-minute feel to it. It was not the considered, nuanced offering that I would have hoped to see from the ABC, given there were months to prepare. Was he meant to leave his Indigeneity – “the core of who I am”, as he puts it – at the door? White journalists are never asked to do that. Indeed, it would be hard to work out what it meant to do so, we are so blind to our own assumptions.
As for News Corporation, frankly it is much less interesting. Nothing that has been said in this controversy by its outspoken commentators is in the least bit surprising. They have used the occasion for a good kick at the ABC, in line with the well-established parameters of dreary culture wars. Social media influences mainstream media and vice versa, each amplifying the faults of the other, yet also opening a window on parts of society until recently ignored or denied.
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