SBS: The home of institutional racism

There are 2 very big problems that are becoming glaringly obvious at Australia’s multicultural public broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). First, is it’s clearly partisan reporting on political news. Second, its political partisanship is explicitly racist and bigoted.

Take for example SBS's representation, or lack thereof, of Candice Owens.


Owens is a black female political activist in the US who rose to fame on social media when her satirical video on coming out as conservative went viral. She has since teamed up with conservative heavy weights such as Turning Point USA and PragerU to launch a career as a political activist and pundit. Most notably, Owens the brainchild of Blexit, a movement that aims to educate black Americans about how politicians exploit black American concerns to gain their vote, and encourages them to ‘exit’ the democratic party. 


Even if you disagree with her politics, Owens is indisputably an independent, strong, articulate, black woman, who makes reasoned arguments against the democrats exclusive claim to the black vote. 


You would think that, given stats showing that black voters for Trump has risen to as high as 24% from around 15% in August 2020, SBS’s extensive coverage of the US elections would include a story profiling Owens, at least in relation to this phenomenon. But alas, no. Instead what we get at SBS is articles like this: "Twitter suspends fake accounts posing as Black Donald Trump Supporters".


A search for Blexit on the SBS website returns a single hit for an article called “I’ve been used: Kanye West distances himself from politics”. Blexit and Owens are here briefly mentioned somewhere near the end without any contextualisation or evidence, to imply that Kanye was deceived by Owens.


A search for Candace Owens on the SBS website returns 5 hits. These "news" articles fail to give even a brief profile of who Owens is, rather, makes vague mention her in relation to some media controversy about bigotry, such that she is represented as a bigot. Here are just 2 examples.


Example 1: In their article “Debunking three viral falsehoods about Kamala Harris” (16 Aug 2020), the following tweet is cited as part of an underhanded conspiracy to cast aspersions about the race of Harris:





This tweet posted by Owens is not directly contested, but rather framed as a “falsehood”. No mention of who Owens is and why she may or may not have the authority to level such a claim. Interestingly, SBS has also falsely referred to Harris “African-American" (4 December 2019).


Example 2 is a corker! The article title is “YouTube cuts racist feed during US hearing” (10 April 2019). The crux of the article is framed in its opening paragraph like this: “The YouTube live stream of a US congressional hearing on white supremacism was forced to disable the comments section after it was overwhelmed by users spouting racist remarks against Jews and other minority groups.” Then right at the bottom in the final paragraph SBS describes Owens like this: “The Republicans invited controversial figures to testify, including Candace Owens, a black activist who recently appeared to justify some of Adolf Hitler's domestic policies, in remarks she later walked back.” This is all we are offered by way of a bio for Owens, which alludes to her as a Nazi, as a Jew hater and as a white supremacist. 


Here is her testimony at the hearing, wherein she “walks back” her "justification of Hitler", and make sure you watch to the end:





Falsely highlighting the YouTube commentary as racist over and above Owens advocacy of black issues indicates quite clearly that SBS has a problem with her politics, and that they don't want to give her a platform to express these views. SBS clearly commit the “systematically racist” crime (according to the conventions of political correctness) of rendering a black woman invisible (not unlike the white liberal panelists sitting beside Owens at that hearing who have the audacity to "whitesplain" to Owens the racist implications of her own words).


You might contend that SBS is under no obligation to profile Owens, she is after all, not a main player in the US political landscape, and thus, not necessarily of great interest to Australian audiences. That may be true, but it does not excuse the blatant misrepresentation of Owens as an evil racist when SBS does deem it necessary to mention her at all. 


The reason I have chosen to focus on the lack of representation of Owens at SBS is because black women are generally revered as the sacred cow of a diverse and equitable society, and that is certainly reflected at Australia's multicultural public broadcaster SBS. Take for example SBS's representations of Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Harris is a contentious figure in US politics to put it mildly, even amongst diehard democrats, but a quick search of her name on the SBS (as at 12 October 2020) website returns almost exclusively positive headlines. Here is a small sample:


What this indicates is that SBS assumes the role of high priestess of state sanctioned racial and cultural diversity in Australia, and the model of racial and cultural diversity that they promote is one where the only good woman of color is a politically progressive one. Or as Biden so eloquently stated (and SBS failed to adequately cover):






As such, SBS absolutely FAILS honor its mandated responsibility, as laid down in its Charter, to “provide multilingual and multicultural broadcasting and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia's multicultural society”, and to “reflect the changing nature of Australian society, by presenting many points of view” (my emphasis). More specifically, insofar as SBS is a state sanctioned cultural gatekeeper that represents each culture as politically and culturally homogenous, SBS has evolved to perpetuate racist stereotypes. In other words, SBS is a prime example of systematic, institutional racism.


SBS needs to be defunded because it FAILS to reflect Australia’s society, and instead takes it upon itself to culturally and politically engineer that society according to a politically left agenda. And worse than that, it promotes leftism as the only morally right perspective by misrepresenting the facts.


This is not a new or particularly novel accusation with regard to Australian public broadcasting, but it is a worsening problem that needs to be addressed. #DefundSBS

Location: Melbourne VIC, Australia

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