Lack of cultural diversity in newsrooms should ring alarm bells

Research released last week shows Australia’s newsrooms are lagging behind the changing face of our culturally diverse country. For an industry whose success hinges on understanding what makes its audience tick, it just makes sense for Australia’s media to better reflect its incredibly diverse viewers, listeners and readers.

Research from the University of Sydney, UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, and Media Diversity Australia confirms the journalist workforce remains overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic and white.

This finding should be setting alarm bells off in newsrooms across the country.

At its heart, modern journalism relies on understanding of audience, their consumption habits and interests. In the golden age of journalism, journalists may have relied on the newsworthiness of an article to hold it up, but increasingly, the media is motivated by what is going to drive the most eyeballs and clicks their way in a bid to vie for advertising dollars.

This simply isn’t possible unless our news creators reflect the changing face of Australia and truly understand their experiences.

A good parallel to this is gender diversity. Women make up 50% of the Australian population. The most recent census data shows nearly one in two Australians have a parent born overseas, and one in three were born overseas themselves.

We wouldn’t accept newsrooms that failed to have adequate gender representation, so why should we accept it when it comes to cultural diversity?

The failure to prioritise culturally diversity in newsrooms is also at odds with changing public sentiment about migration and multiculturalism.

For the past 15 years, research from the Scanlon Foundation has shown increasing recognition of the value of multiculturalism and the good that immigration brings to both our country and economy.

Similarly, we are seeing this recognised in corporate Australia, with the growing prioritisaton of diversity and inclusion reporting and initiatives. We are also seeing this in politics, where our new federal parliament is the most diverse in its history.

That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions to the rule. For example, SBS’s diversity is built into its foundation, with a charter ensuring that the broadcaster “reflects Australia’s multicultural society”. Similarly, Media Diversity Australia, is a non-profit founded by journalists to deliver research, programs and partnerships that strengthen diverse representation in Australia’s media.

So what can the media do about this lack of diversity? The obvious answer is recruiting high performing staff from diverse backgrounds.

But media companies must also ensure they have practices in place that create an inclusive culture and that nurture innovative solution by getting diverse perspectives around the table.

Our newsrooms need to understand and harness the value of diversity of thought and lived experience, and seek to continually improve workplace practices so these are embedded in their culture. For example, undertaking learning experiences to ensure workforces are culturally responsive would be a great first step.

We also need to recognise that this issue goes beyond diversity and inclusion. Increasingly, the terms ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ is being traded for ‘culturally and racially marginalised’, in recognition that one of the barriers to greater diversity in workplaces in race and racism.

The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion report, also released last week, showed the proportion of Australians who believed racism is a problem has increased from 40% to 60% in the space of a single year. One in three migrants from non-English speaking background reported experiencing racial discrimination, compared with just 11% of Australians and 12% of migrants from English-speaking countries.

Media is an industry that has been under threat these past decades as a result of evolutions in technology and news consumption habits. With its fate now intertwined with the capacity to engage and attract audiences, the risks are too great for media companies to ignore the need for greater cultural diversity.

Embracing cultural diversity is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do for media to better connect with its diverse audience.