Migrants, racism and the media – a perspective from Australia

In July 1997 when I told an Australia journalist friend of mine that I’m going to Singapore to take up a job there, he thought I was joking. ‘Are you kidding? Singapore of all places? With such a censored media? Good luck’ he said. Since I arrived here almost three years ago to teach mass communications, I have found a high degree of access to the mainstream media in Singapore. I have been recognised as a professional media practitioner, a recognition I did not get in Australia.

It is in Australia that I had to fight media censorship on a daily basis, not in Singapore. You may ask, ‘How come? Australia is supposed to have a liberal free media.’ It is free and liberal as long as you are Anglo-Saxon or act and talk like one, not if you are clearly identified as an ‘ethnic’ – a migrant who speaks with a non-Anglo Australian accent.

Some Asian countries may practice a high degree of political censorship of the media to ensure that the ruling elites remain in power and the status quo is not disturbed. In Western democracies, such as in Australia, which are made up of multi-ethnic migrant populations, there exists a unique form of media censorship which also ensures that the ruling elite, usually made up of the majority ethnic group, maintains its cultural hegemony, which in turn transforms into political power.

Maintaining cultural hegemony

In Australia, the majority Anglo-Saxon community maintains their cultural hegemony through the mainstream media with a peculiar form of professional standards known as ‘our style and standard’ which effectively keep out well qualified first generation ethnic migrant journalists and broadcasters from the mainstream media.

Before coming to work in Singapore, I lived in Australia for 18 years and worked in the media field for almost 15 years. In this article, I will use a lot of my own experience as well as of many other ethnic migrants, whom I interviewed for my Masters degree thesis on community radio as a human right. This will show how ‘cultural censorship’ functions in the Australian mainstream media.

In 1990, I was involved in a research project at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) looking at cultural diversity and racism in the media. After analysing a week of Australian mainstream media output, we found that Australia’s non-Anglo population was almost completely ignored. As a result, we developed a theory at UTS that racism in the media is not necessarily name calling, but lack of non-Anglo people on the Australian airwaves who think and talk differently, and the way they are excluded from the media structures, especially in production and management.

Token ethnic

Since then, the mainstream media has gone a step forward in recruiting token ‘ethnics’ especially as TV presenters. But, they always speak with an Anglo accent and if they do report, they will follow the same mainstream (Anglo) way of interpreting the news.

Pakistani-born Miguel D’Souza recently had a short stint as a presenter on television. Recalling an earlier experience, when he was short-listed for a multicultural cadetship by ABC Radio, he made this observation: ‘I was jokingly told by a producer friend of mine at the ABC, you are the type of ethnic that they would find ideal. Because you got an ethnic name, you look ethnic, but you don’t sound like one. And sure enough, I found out later that I came third for two positions available’.

For years I have fought this barrier in Australia, where producers believe that your accent will not be understood by their listeners, if you don’t speak like an Anglo, but if the person you are interviewing on air has a different accent, its okay. That could be understood! In labour terms this will be called a ‘closed shop’ or protectionist measure – not about setting programming standards.

Unprofessional ethnic accents

A few years ago, after I had recorded a radio feature on international information flow and the Third World, the producer at ABC Radio said that he would like to present it. I asked him why? If it is a problem with my accent, I go on air for less than 10% of the time and the rest of the programme had interviews with people from five different Third World countries, who had stronger ‘ethnic’ accents than me. He then realised his folly and allowed the programme to go on air as it is. A week later he rang me and said that a listener, a mass communications lecturer at an university in Melbourne wanted a copy of the programme to use in his course.

A few years earlier, ABC Radio, which is Australia’s government funded national broadcaster, refused to broadcast a series I had produced on the relationship between the rich and the poor countries, funded under a special grant scheme for the International Year of Peace. They said the series was not up to their ‘style and standard’.

I broadcast this on the community radio network via the UTS radio station 2SER-FM. It won a UN Media Peace Prize that year beating productions from ABC Radio! The judges (who were mainly Australian diplomats not media people) said that the programmes have ‘given some refreshingly new perspectives on the relationship between rich and poor countries’.

In addition to my accent the ABC had another problem with my programmes – that I had presented Third World personalities (whom I interviewed overseas) as experts and the Westerners as the respondents. ABC usually does it the other way around, thus they found my programmes pro-Third World.

Subtle forms of racism

Racism works in many subtle ways within the mainstream media structures in Australia. Lily Tuwai is a New Zealander of Pacific Island descent who has a first class honours degree in mass communications from UTS. She has done some freelance work for ABC Radio’s Women’s Unit, which claims to offer access to women of any background.

Recalling her initial experience with them, Tuwai said: ‘My first encounter with the Women’s Unit was not very encouraging. They said I had problems with my accent in pronouncing certain words. It was ridiculous that something, which would be easy to read, we would go over and over looking for a particular way for it to be said. After awhile I realised that if I had white skin and came from New Zealand it wouldn’t have been a problem. When you are of colour they are scrupulous about the way they want things’.

Philippines-born Annamarie Antonio, has lived in Australia for over 20 years and has a broadcasting voice which comes out very well on radio. Yet, she has faced enormous problems in breaking into mainstream radio, though she’s got years of community radio experience. She also saw the ABC Radio’s Women’s Unit as the best path to do it.

Antonio says that the Women’s Unit’s dealing with her was very sophisticated. ‘Its clouded with polite and highly intellectual words when they deal with you in the proposals for the stories. When you start recording your voice and presenting your programmes on air, it becomes a real struggle’ she says. ‘Its all about questioning my professionalism’.

‘I’m speaking in English, but I have been told many times that I eat my words and apparently I put the emphasis in wrong places. Apparently I learned the wrong type of English, because my sentences are not ordered in the way they should be … it is a complex form of marginalising me,’ argues Antonio.

Australia has had a thriving community radio sector for over 20 years and it is here that most of us have been able to develop our broadcasting and journalistic skills. Thus, the radio industry offers a good yardstick to judging media standard setting procedures and discrimination. It is possible for many of us to develop professional broadcasting skills in this sector - but the problem is you can’t make a living out of it, as most of this work is done on a voluntary basis.

The success of the community radio sector in Australia could be attributed to a large degree to ethnic broadcasting. This is broadcasting in languages other than English. Ethnic broadcasters usually buy air-time from community radio stations mainly run by Anglo-Saxons. This is turn subsidises their English language programming, which is usually done by Anglos who don’t pay for air-time as these programmes are considered ‘station initiated programmes’.

Very few ethnic broadcasters have ventured out of their ethnic ‘ghettos’ to challenge the Anglos in English language broadcasting. Miguel, Lili, Annamarie and myself were among the first batch to do so, and once we did that and had the initiative and determination to press on, the barriers gradually came down.

Multicultural broadcasting

In the early 1990s, however, multicultural broadcasting became quite fashionable. This was broadcasting programmes in the English language with multicultural (ethnic) contents. There was also government funding coming into it – this was before the advent of Pauline Hanson and the John Howard government. Many of us ‘ethnics’ who thought that we were well qualified to take on this challenge, found that we were not needed. They were prepared to hire us as freelancers to pick our brains for programme ideas and contacts, but not as producers.

The Anglos wanted to do programmes about us, they were not interested in allowing us to do programming about us for them. The bureaucrats in Canberra even came up with a term to define us – Non-English Speaking Background (NESB). In my opinion this term has created a psychological barrier for the media gatekeepers when they have to assess our capabilities to work in the English language.

A good example is when SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) Radio set up a daily English language programme called ‘Worldview’ in 1995. SBS was set up in the late 1970s as a ‘special’ service to the non-Anglo migrant communities and until 1995 they broadcast in some 52 languages except English.

When this project was announced, many of us who have built up a reputation in the community radio sector for high quality current affairs and multicultural programming in English thought that we would finally get the break to enter mainstream (paid) radio broadcasting. It was not to be. Though most of us applied for the producer jobs, they hired almost exclusively an Anglo-Saxon team, some of whom were from the community radio sector.

Worldview or Angloview?

When I interviewed Andrew Kruger, the executive producer of Worldview in 1997, he said: ‘The audience we are trying to reach is not only multicultural Australia but all Australia. The brief for Worldview is to reach people from non-English speaking background as well as people from mainstream Australia.’ Whenever a SBS executive uses the word ‘all Australia’ we know that what they mean is that NESBs are not qualified to broadcast to all Australians. But they did hire a few of us on a freelance basis. This was more on the insistence of Stafford Sanders, Kruger’s predecessor who came from Radio 2SER-FM. But he found resistance from SBS senior staff to his attempts to introduce presenters with non-Anglo accents, which ultimately led to his departure from SBS.

‘I found they (management) were resistant to strong accents, to a diversity of usage of English language. Their model for English remained sort of Anglo British English, in terms of how they expect people, particularly programme presenters to be speaking. People who we used as presenters who didn’t fit into that model got a rather hard time’ said Sanders. ‘If we use someone whose accent is too strong – they would say ‘who are not sufficiently fluent in English’ – it would be very hard for your NESB audience to understand the English’.

Recalling her experience with the Worldview programme, Antonio said: ‘They were saying you’re not constructing your sentences as radio pieces. I can’t understand what they mean by that. When I read my scripts to Anglo-Australian friends it made sense to them ... But it didn’t work inside SBS. I got into a real fight with them. I said I can’t understand why you say these things … then I was told that there’s something wrong with my accent. That’s what stopped me on the tracks. I thought SBS was meant to accept that’.

SBS has a marvellous ‘non-discriminatory’ charter, which is supposed to provide not only programming to ethnic communities but also give them a voice in the Australian media. That voice is there no doubt as long as you speak in your own language to your own people, immediately an ethnic broadcaster tries to branch into the English language arena tremendous barriers crop up.

SBS Television and Ethnic Talent

The experience of SBS-TV is a very interesting case study, but I do not have the space to go into detail. But let me give one fine example. In 1985 two ‘ethnics’ working as researchers started a weekly current affairs programme called ‘Vox Populi’. They were initially, supported by the management. As co-founder Voya Rajic put it: ‘I wanted to do a programme which will allow what I call silent Australia to speak up’.

Their presenter Vladimir Lusic had a strong Southern European accent and they even interviewed ethnic Australians in their own language and sub-titled it – a first for Australian TV. They also sent camera crews to community halls and got ethnic groups to discuss current affairs issues at home and abroad. They used ethnic journalists as freelancers to do reports for them – any journalist with an ethnic accent who rang SBS inquiring about work was immediately transferred to the Vox Populi desk.

Within three years, it became the highest rating current affairs programme on SBS-TV. At the end of a National Media Conference organised by the Ethnic Communities Council in Sydney, in December 1989, they sent a petition signed by over 300 people asking SBS to expand the programme to five nights a week, pointing out that it has accomplished both the access and equity principles of the SBS charter.

SBS management response to the petition was to decide that Vox Populi has overspent its budget and order the executive producer to stop hiring freelancers. The presenter and the production staff were gradually got rid of and within two years the production team became predominantly Anglo, but the presenter was an Aboriginal woman! When the presenter left the programme, SBS quietly scrapped Vox Populi, as by this time ethnic communities had lost interest in the show.

Lessons for Asia from Australian tokenism

The demise of Vox Populi also closed the door for any ethnic journalist without an Anglo accent to becoming a TV reporter in Australia. However, to protect themselves from any accusations of racial discrimination, SBS-TV has always made sure that they will have token programme presenters and news readers of ethnic backgrounds, especially Chinese and Indians. They of course talk with Anglo accents and don’t ever try to rock the boat in terms of programme contents.

This form of censorship is not peculiar to Australia, I think most Western democracies practice it. The same ‘style and standards’ formula is adopted by those American and British broadcasting services which are now broadcasting into Asia. They use Asian faces with American or British accents to present TV news programmes which are predominantly produced by white journalists from a Western perspective. It is high time media researchers, particularly in Asia, looked deeper into this phenomenon and developed new theories on media censorship.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lankan born journalist, broadcaster and media analyst. He has lived and worked in Australia for 18 years. Currently he is a lecturer at the Film and Media Studies Centre of Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore.