Important cultural moments are complicated and usually about many things at once.
The controversy surrounding ABC journalist Stan Grant is about the shortcomings of the media, about the role of News Corporation in our national conversation, about the nature and duties of the ABC and, of course, about racism.
The racism has the effect of flattening the debate. The imperative for all decent people is to condemn it and support the victim.
That reduces the space and the energy available to interrogate the other issues.
Thus, if you had ever wanted to criticise Stan Grant, or the ABC, you might well conclude that this is not the moment.
And, self-righteous creatures that we are, it is all too easy to avoid debating people with whom we disagree because it is easier to label them as racists. End of discussion.
Racism is one of the great evils – possibly the great evil, from which many other evils flow. I agree that combating it is the imperative.
And yet, there are other things to say.
There are people in all the media organisations that are part of this moment – particularly News Corporation and the ABC – who resent and reject suggestions that they and their organisations are racist. That’s understandable.
These people would, doubtless, never shun or consciously deny a job opportunity to a person because of their race, or support explicitly racist laws or attitudes.
But here is the sense in which the allegation is true, of all of us and all our institutions. Stan Grant said in his speech at the end of last Monday’s Q&A: “To my people, I have always tried to represent you with pride … I have just wanted to make us seen.”
Those who protest that the golden oldies of the ABC – Kerry O’Brien, Tony Jones and so forth – would have never allowed themselves to become the story in this way miss the point. Indigenous journalists do not, and cannot, have the same relationship to the institution of the ABC, or the wider Australian media, as white journalists.
Nobody has ever asked me to represent my people (British and Jewish). Nor, I am willing to bet, have they asked this of O’Brien and Jones. It would be ridiculous, because our representation is part of the dominant culture, and therefore invisible.
What looks like objectivity to white, Anglo journalists such as myself – the children of the empire, the beneficiaries of colonialism – looks very different to those who are, to quote Grant, “on the other side of history”.
We can argue about whether “racism” is the correct term for this kind of institutional and cultural blindness, but I’d rather talk about what to do about it.
I am not saying that objectivity in journalism no longer matters. Quite the reverse. I have long argued that objectivity is one of the things that makes journalists worthy of their keep, and might ensure the survival of the profession.
But we have to understand the word properly, rather than use it in the intellectually bereft fashion that dominates most discussions about the media. Objectivity means reporting in line with the evidence. It does not necessarily mean “balance”.
Objectivity is an intellectual and professional discipline. It lies in the method the journalist brings to their work – not in the individual journalist.
If we did a better job of truly objective reporting, then perhaps we would, in Grant’s words, have the “language to speak … to the gentle spirits of our land”.
But our media institutions have for decades, in line with the rest of society, been blind to parts of the evidence. Trying to see more completely is the never-ending journey.
So to the coronation broadcast that kicked off the current fuss. Personally, I found the earlier ABC reporting of the Queen’s funeral flat and alarmingly sycophantic.
I wanted a more complete view of the history of the monarchy, and our national relationship to it.
So I was relieved that the coronation coverage was, for my money, more objective.
And yet the panel discussion that preceded the televised coronation ceremony had a thrown-together, last-minute feel to it. It was not the considered, nuanced offering that I would have hoped to see from the ABC, given there were months to prepare.
Perhaps, with better program planning, a wider range of Indigenous people could have been heard, or even First Nations voices from other former British colonies. I would have liked more ambition.
But instead Stan Grant was forced to do an outsized portion of the cultural labour in confronting a historical narrative. He presented the view from the objects of British colonialism – the victims.
It wasn’t Grant that made it all about him. Rather, that was the unavoidable outcome of his situation – being made to bear all that weight. Being made to represent.
Was he meant to leave his Indigeneity – “the core of who I am”, as he puts it – at the door? White journalists are never asked to do that. Indeed, it would be hard to work out what it meant to do so, we are so blind to our own assumptions.
Finding a way to evolve important professional imperatives, such as objectivity, in the light of a more complete understanding of the world is a difficult and complex task. It is a task that falls particularly to the ABC, because it is funded by us – the multicultural Australian community. We have a right to demand that it act with integrity and courage in these matters.
I don’t have a simple answer as to how it might be done, but I do think it is essential to begin the work and make it a high priority.
We are, after all, coming to it much too late. Less than a decade ago it was still possible to get the impression, when watching the ABC, that Australia was a nation of fair skinned Anglo Celts.
As for News Corporation, frankly it is much less interesting. Nothing that has been said in this controversy by its outspoken commentators is in the least bit surprising. They have used the occasion for a good kick at the ABC, in line with the well-established parameters of dreary culture wars.
Given the tiny audience for SkyNews after dark, and the niche audiences for the print mastheads behind their paywalls, we have to ask if most Australians would even notice what News Corporation journalists were doing were it not for the publicity given by the ABC, under the rubric of “balance”?
As for social media, it is one of the reasons that a more diverse range of voices is now heard in the media.
That is its strength, and also its weakness. Views once not regarded as respectable, or a legitimate part of the public conversation, are now visible.
Social media influences mainstream media and vice versa, each amplifying the faults of the other, yet also opening a window on parts of society until recently ignored or denied.
So when Stan Grant talks about whether “those of us in the media” are part of the problem he is, I think, out of date. There is no longer a clear boundary between “us” in the media and you, the audience. For the first time in human history, the ability to publish news and views is held by almost everyone.
We have to draw the boundaries of public conversation anew. We have to work out the difference between censorship, and responsibility.
Meanwhile, it is surely part of good citizenship for those on social media to take on some of the responsibility that comes with the freedom to publish. Yindyamarra, or as Grant put it “I am not just responsible for what I do, but for what you do.”
There is a sense in which the public conversation is always broken. And yet it lurches on. To quote the great Leonard Cohen, there is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.
Perhaps I am naively optimistic, but I hope that we will find the light peeping through these cracks.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group
