MasterChef can’t escape identity politics amid ‘bamboo curtain’ claim

According to critics, the insidious ingredient of white privilege has found its way into the MasterChef surrounds.

Masterchef judge Melissa Leong, left, with 2020 contestant Poh Ling Yeow.

If Martin Luther King Jr were with us today, surely he would tell us that we should judge reality television chefs not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their dishes. Because in this age of identity politics, there are those who have discerned the insidious ingredient of white privilege in the light-hearted escapism of MasterChef.

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald last week, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu complained about a “bamboo curtain” holding back Asian-Australian contestants, declaring she didn’t watch the MasterChef final “because my team had already lost”. We are left to presume that her “team” was the Asian-Australian contingent.

I am certain that very few of us would set our television viewing diaries according to the ethnic make-up of the programs available — be they our “team” or others — but each to their own, I guess. It strikes me as a racially-charged and identity-obsessed way to use your remote control.

MasterChef judge Melissa Leong.

Mei Yu apparently saw beyond the fact that one of Masterchef’s judges, Melissa Leong, is Asian-Australian; that Asian-Australians and a wide range of contestants from myriad backgrounds have populated the show from the start; that inaugural series runner-up Poh Ling Yeow and second series winner Adam Liaw have gone on to successful television/food careers of their own; and that the program has delighted in sharing a variety of cuisines from our rich multicultural menu. Instead, Mei Yu saw a Vietnamese dish failing to defeat French dishes in a fine dining contest, apparently, and insufficient Asian-Australians among the guest chefs.

Sadly, I didn’t see much of the series this year and readers will correct me if I have missed the rise of white privilege or cultural imperialism. But to me this show has always exhibited the potential for reality TV to be engaging, educational and unambiguously inclusive.

Variety is the spice of life and newspaper opinion columns would be tedious if we all agreed with everything. But given my last column in these pages was about the green Left monoculture of the Nine Media opinion pages, this MasterChef racism column helps to fill out the picture.

Variety at the SMH and The Age tends to be across a spectrum from this sort of inane identity introspection to the informed progressivism of Peter Hartcher and Julia Baird, and from the Twitter-level green Left advocacy of Peter FitzSimons to the whimsical activism of Elizabeth Farrelly – readers are not treated to mainstream realism or, heaven forbid, conservative voices. Tom Switzer is a regular contributor who — given his weekly program as the ABC’s lone right-of-centre voice on Radio National — seems to exist as a professional exception who proves the rules.

Inaugural MasterChef winner Julie Goodwin with runner-up Poh Ling Yeow. Picture: Supplied

Opinion columns should include some fun, of course, but I shudder to think about the reception if I dared to write a column about the steely-eyed allure of Penny Wong or the diplomatic legacy of Julie Bishop’s formidable fashion sense.

Yet the Nine papers also ­published Monica Dux last week detailing her “crush” on Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Battling a pandemic outbreak that has been encouraged if not facilitated by his own government’s bungling, Andrews, according to Dux, was “incredibly reassuring” and “exciting” as well as “suddenly hot, too”. Perhaps if there is room for this sort of indulgence and frivolity, readers might expect a little space for some mainstream voices too.

Over at the ABC, Media Watch host Paul Barry often has his eyes, ears and mouth covered for fear of dealing with reality. As I have detailed in this column previously, the ABC veteran has used his program to run partisan and deceptive reporting on the drug hydroxychloroquine.

Used safely and successfully for decades to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the drug has been used extensively to treat COVID-19 patients and as a potential prophylactic to prevent infections. Researchers in China, Europe and the US have reported positively, while some studies, too, have found it ineffective.

Seemingly because Donald Trump has talked it up as a “wonder drug” and told the world he’s taking it, Barry seems eager for hydroxychloroquine to fail. The trouble is that he is not sharing all the facts with his audience.

He has failed to report that two trials are underway in Australia at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and through the University of Queensland in Brisbane. And he declined to share with his audience a letter from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia explaining that doctors and other medicos were self-prescribing the drug for possible use during the pandemic.

We can expect Media Watch also to ignore experts such as Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey A. Risch who wrote last week in Newsweek that hydroxychloroquine has proven “highly effective” and that because some health systems are not using it, “tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily”. Professor Risch says this is partly because it has become “highly politicised”.

“In the future,” he says, “I believe this misbegotten episode regarding hydroxychloroquine will be studied by sociologists of medicine as a classic example of how extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence.” That debate should not be delayed because the lessons would be useful in the here and now.

On Media Watch, Barry has also mischaracterised what experts, from a Nobel laureate down, have said about the drug on my program, The Kenny Report, as well as misled viewers about what I have said. And for almost a month he has failed to report a promising study in Michigan by the Henry Ford Medical System. This Detroit study covered more than 2500 coronavirus patients across six hospitals and found that treatment of seriously ill patients with hydroxychloroquine halved the death rate from 26 per cent to 13 per cent, without heart-related side-effects.

To most of us that is encouraging news. But on past performance, Barry and other sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome will find it galling.