Media needs cultural diversity, joint university study finds

Media organisations risk alienating their audiences if they fail to embrace diversity, a new report finds.

Journalists Isabel Lo and Antoinette Lattouf of Media Diversity Australia. Picture: supplied.

The lack of cultural diversity in Australia’s television news risks outlets alienating audiences and forgoing advertising revenue, according to a report released today by four universities.

More than 75 per cent of presenters, reporters and commentators have an Anglo-Celtic background, in terms of frequency of appearance on screen in news and current affairs broadcasts. Non-European and Indigenous report and present the news only 6 per cent of the time, despite 24 per cent of Australia’s population coming from a culturally diverse background.

The report “Who Gets To Tell Australian Stories” was produced in partnership with non-profit group Media Diversity Australia and academics from Deakin, University of Sydney, Western Sydney University and Macquarie University.

MDA co-founder Isabel Lo said there was a business and civic case for news outlets increasing cultural and linguistic representation.

“Media organisations risk alienating an entire segment of their audience if they fail to embrace diversity. We need to stop seeing diversity as solely a political and moral choice, there is a strong business case too,” she told The Australian.

The results were compiled by analysing a two-week period of free to air news and current affairs TV programming in June 2019. The lack of diversity was revealed to stem from a leadership level down to on screen talent, with 100 per cent of free to air television national news directors in Australia having an Anglo-Celtic background.

“The most interesting part of the study was the attitude of a lot of news directors to the issue of diversity. A lot of them don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what it is, they conflate it with gender and age,” said Ms Lo, who was part of a team who launched ABC News 24 before working for CNN in London.

“If leadership can’t even recognise that there is a problem then how do we fix it?”

Australian news television was also found to be lagging behindmedia markets in the United States and United Kingdom regarding representation and organisational responses. Unlike in the US, the Australian media does not produce comprehensive data on the ethnic make-up of its newsrooms. The ABC does produce this data and it shows that 13.5 per cent of its news staff come from a non-English speaking background.

Western Sydney University humanities academic Professor James Arvanitakis said there were flow-on effects that resulted from news outlets having a more diverse makeup of staff.

“We saw this when it came to the same sex marriage debate and the lack of diversity in newsrooms meant people missed the spots where the no vote was going to be the strongest.,” said Professor Arvanitakis who was one of the academics involved in the study.

“It was a blind spot because the newsrooms didn’t have connections with these communities and didn’t have their finger on the pulse.”

“Mainstream media is also under siege in terms of loss of audiences and by having a more diverse representation they can reach audiences who they are currently not reaching.”

Professor Arvanitakis said the country’s media sector was lagging behind corporate Australia which has already moved towards a path of having targets to achieve diverse representation at all levels.

“There needs to be active recruitment. We can see this is in the STEM sector where more females are now enrolling. This has been a direct result of action by universities, employers and government. So you need to have specific policies to attract people.”