Radio Australia Today Editorial

The Australian media gets it skewiff again

27 May 2009

This has not been an enchanting time for the media of my country.

First of all Sol Trujillo, former head of our biggest telco Telstra) claimed that Australia was racist. Trujillo, an Hispanic-born American, was referring to newspapers making joking references to his ethnicity during his tenure, calling him ‘amigo’ and the such. Apparently he was privately dismayed by these racial references. When he left these shores after what some have called a less-than-successful stint at Telstra, the prime minister himself (who was rumoured to have had a not very good relationship with Sol Trujillo), said ‘Adios’ at a media conference. This must’ve been the final straw for Trujillo, who told the world media this week that Australia was not only racist, but backward.

The newspapers today react in a way that just reinforces the point that they just don’t get the point. Melbourne’s Herald Sun has a headline saying ‘Adios Amigo’. The broadsheet Agecalls it a Mexican stand off. Yes, neither paper seems quite capable of understanding the nub of his complaint.

That’s bad enough, but barely a week after the media in Australia went into a frenzy about an Australian woman being held in Phuket for stealing a barmat, news comes through that an Australian photographer has been held by Somali kidnappers for NINE months. I don’t remember seeing much in the media about this story before this week, and it would probably still be buried if it wasn’t for a taped interview with the man, 37 year old Nigel Brennan, in which he begs for a ransom to be paid, and adds that the captivity has taken a heavy toll on the health of himself and his fellow captive, Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout. They had been on assignment when kidnapped.

Australian respondents to a news story on the kidnapping were rightly dismayed by the fact that these people have been held for so long with little apparent action, while the bar mat woman was front page news because of her situation. There were also a few comments about how the Australian prime minister commented on the bar mat woman, but little has been said about the captured journalists.

That’s the good thing about the instant reaction that the internet gives. It offers an opportunity for  media non-professionals to make their view known, and sometimes these views are just so spot on.

                                                               – Phil