The media industry is facing challenges on multiple fronts. Still, whether it involves working with broken business models or the disruption of AI in creating content, there is always hope in the face of an uncertain future if you have the trust of your audience. In the chaos of media distraction and twisted truth, trust is everything.
So it is of great concern if the country’s most trusted news outlet squanders this valuable attribute. The federal court ruled that the ABC unlawfully terminated the journalist and Media Diversity Australia co-founder Antoinette Lattouf in December 2023. The evidence gave an unflattering insight into the broadcaster’s multilayered management and found that Lattouf had been unfairly fired for her political opinions. But what has shaken trust internally and externally is the impact of an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists.
You break trust with the broader community when an interest group can go to the top of an organisation and get its way. Lobbyists skip the process that everyone else must follow. And it hits particularly hard among people who struggle to have their voice heard.
For culturally diverse staff, offering a different perspective based on your insights and experience carries a risk. What should be a healthy process of testing the adequacy of a position can instead be a belittling experience, or you are labelled a threat to impartiality. For many journalists, Lattouf’s experience at the ABC is a familiar one of shutting down the person instead of discussing the position. If that wasn’t enough, the public broadcaster then pursued a legal argument that Lattouf had to prove the existence of a Lebanese race – a daring journey deeper into the territory of mistrust for a leadership team not following the compass of its company principles. The ABC withdrew the contentious race argument and apologised. Still, staff need to know it was withdrawn because senior leadership knows it is wrong and not just because of the angry response to it. We are weary of the cycle of corporate concern, review and apology, particularly when those involved continue to break new ground of mistrust with employees.
Even more significant for the ABC is the break in trust with a multicultural audience. These communities already feel silenced by a media industry that neither understands nor represents them. Building trust with our communities means nurturing inclusion and calm reasoning around our most contested and controversial news stories. Silencing one side of the story isn’t success. Shutting down voices is not “social cohesion”. But silencing and shutting down were the preferred responses of senior ABC management under pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists. We need a different approach to our most difficult conversations.
When I attended a multicultural community consultation event in Sydney I was surprised by the importance our culturally diverse leaders place on media representation in creating a sense of belonging. Of all the challenges the communities face, the issue of media representation and trust is persistent. They are also concerned about how misinformation and disinformation will affect them, particularly their brilliant and bright young people. They value trusted sources of truth but it is hard to trust Australian media when the reporting of your community doesn’t match what you know to be true.
There is now considerable constructive discussion about media literacy and educating multicultural communities about news and credible news sources. But the decline in trust in the media should not be a problem for the marginalised audience to fix. It is the responsibility of news organisations to improve their cultural literacy and be open to adapting their position so both sides are better equipped to lift public discourse, not shut it down.
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