Government broadcaster, the ABC, is launching a review into how it handles racism after journalist Stan Grant left the firm after being subject to “relentless” racial abuse and being unsupported by senior figures at the TV channel.
ABC managing director David Anderson announced the review on Sunday in an all-staff email on Sunday, apologizing to Grant and expressing sadness that Grant has been subject to such “sickening behavior”.
On Friday Grant resigned after the fallout from the “heavily criticised” coverage of King Charles’s coronation earlier this month left him “dispirited”.
“I am writing this because no one at the ABC – whose producers invited me on to their coronation coverage as a guest – has uttered one word of public support. Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me. I don’t hold any individual responsible; this is an institutional failure,” Grant said in a letter on the ABC website.
In his email to staff on Sunday, Mr Anderson said: “The ABC is never above scrutiny or criticism. However, the nature of the anti-ABC reporting from some commercial media outlets is sustained and vitriolic.
“This has real-world consequences for ABC presenters and journalists who are personally attacked and vilified. How the ABC supports people in these moments is important.
“Stan Grant has stated that he has not felt publicly supported. For this, I apologise to Stan.
“The ABC endeavours to support its staff in the unfortunate moments when there is external abuse directed at them.”
Since Grant stepped down on Friday, a number of former and current ABC staff have come forward and spoken about how the broadcaster treats its “non-white staff”.
Quoted in The Australian, Pakistani-Australian comedian Sami Shah said on Sunday: “My time at the ABC was some of the most exhausting and unrelenting racism I’ve ever experienced. From audiences, but especially from management who dismissed its severity and in the end practised it themselves. And that was just two years in local radio.
“Stan Grant’s experiences would be on a level I can’t imagine,” he said.
Osman Faruqi, who was born in Pakistan and is culture news editor for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, wrote a column in the weekend newspaper about his experiences at the ABC.
“The higher up the organisation you go, the fewer and fewer diverse faces you see (of the 17 people that comprise the ABC’s leadership team and board, only one is not white), contributing to a culture that is, at best, dismissive of the needs and concerns of staff and audience who aren’t white and, at worst, actively hostile to them,” he said.
The Project’s co-host and ABC radio presenter Michael Hing said that he had “considered leaving the ABC several times over the years because of the ongoing racial abuse that all white management teams are too often incapable of (fully) understanding.”
