After a distinguished career spanning more than three decades, trailblazing Aboriginal journalist Stan Grant hosted his final show on Monday and stepped away from Australian TV screens indefinitely.
“Racism is a crime. Racism is violence. And I’ve had enough,” Grant wrote in a column last week explaining his decision.
The Wiradjuri man made history in 1992 when he became the first Aboriginal presenter on prime-time commercial TV in Australia. He was an international correspondent for CNN and Al Jazeera before returning home to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) after winning several awards in Australian media.
The ABC has described him as one of Australia’s most respected and honored journalists.
But he looked defeated on Monday night, visibly shaken as he signed off from his political panel show Q+A.
“To those who have abused me and my family, I will just say this – if your intention was to hurt me, you succeeded,” he said.
Grant’s decision to quit has reignited heated discussions about racism and media diversity in Australia.
“If one of the few local presenters on television whose career has taken him around the world cannot be immune to racism… what does that mean for anyone else following the same path? ” ABC journalist Ryma Tchier wrote on Twitter.
White-dominated newsrooms
Australia’s Indigenous peoples have a history of more than 60,000 years, and half of Australians were either born overseas or have parents who were.
But the media representing such a multicultural population is disproportionately white.
A 2022 study found that more than three-quarters of reporters or presenters on Australian TV were from an Anglo-Celtic cultural background. The difference was even more pronounced at the leadership and board level.
A Media Diversity Australia report prompted five TV networks to admit their lack of diversity. But the channels also questioned the report’s findings, criticizing how it determined cultural background, and criticizing the study’s short, two-week research window.
