Screen vs Life

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, w...

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the ...

Dear Carolyn, As Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th US president tomorrow I am reminded of what I have lost in the build up to the 2016 election.  It is odd that we are no longer friends given that as an Australian I have no direct stake in the US politics. But you, as a recently naturalized citizen and ten-year resident of California, are directly affected. I knew when you sent me that message that you were trying to find out if I needed to be cut like a cancer from your life. You asked for photos of family, for updates on work, on life more generally, and what I thought about the upcoming US election. My response to this last question was deliberately vague. But in the end I didn’t keep secret my political leanings. As I daily witnessed a Facebook feed awash with pro-Hillary, pro-socialist propaganda, posted by you, posted by just about everyone one else I knew and worked with, it felt necessary to also start sharing the bits of news and information that I h...