Made me laugh.
Unbiased, quality commentary and now more diversity... which explains why a LW Progressive Muslim Apologist was talking just before her.
I thought we had diversity in broadcasting... I thought that is what SBS was.
ABC’s diversity push? Forgive me for chuckling
The Australian
October 17, 2016
Chris Kenny
Forgive me for chuckling at the ABC’s new diversity push. Apparently new managing director Michelle Guthrie wants to boost the national broadcaster’s quota of program producers from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB).
Fair enough, you might think — although, of course, their English standards will need to be adequate, and we presume everyone will be employed on merit so that there won’t be any poor young graduates denied a journalism cadetship or researcher’s job because they had the misfortune of growing up in a household that spoke the mother tongue.
It has always struck me as curious that the most common accents heard at the ABC are from the United Kingdom. Switch on the television or radio any day and you’ll hear journalists, newsreaders and hosts who have the ring of the British Isles about them. Even the Australian accents tend to be as cultured as we hear in this country.
The accents you don’t strike on the ABC are the most common ones on the streets of our cities, suburbs and towns — the western Sydney rasp, Queensland backblocks drawl, clipped intonations of Chinese and Vietnamese Australians, sing-song South Asian tones or those familiar hints of Italian and Greek pronunciations. It is strange — we don’t even hear the pleasant peculiarities of Aboriginal English.
Nup, the ABC prefers the most English of English, where possible — a cultural cringe if ever there was one.
So any effort to make their staff more representative of mainstream Australia will be a winner for audiences and can’t help but improve their plurality and therefore their perception. But don’t bank on it. Promises about diversity from the ABC have to be judged against their record.
At some stage in the future they will point to their NESB statistics and tell us they have improved. We might see a greater variety of skin tones and names and back stories but there is a fair chance we won’t hear a wider variety of accents — if the past is any guide the mainstream Australian accents will still give way to the influences of the British Isles.
And crucially, the one thing we can be certain of is that the ideological diversity — the most important aspect of pluralism — will still be missing. Will there be mainstream voices, right-of-centre views or, dare we dream of it, even a conservative thought or two?
No. The ABC will continue to ignore the issue of intellectual diversity. It will continue to ignore its charter obligations to reflect this country rather than lecture it.
We will have every shade of Green Left host and journalist continuing to undermine and skew the work of the shrinking quota of objective professionals.
And as they wander the corridors of Southbank and Ultimo, they will never have to bother themselves with confronting mainstream, right-of-centre or conservative views except through antagonistic interviews and appearances by Institute of Public Affairs guests. Oh, and those awkward surprises sometimes dished up at the ballot box.
