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TV host Karl Stefanovic has sent shots back today at a landmark study of Australia’s media landscape that found that the nation’s on-air talent is overwhelmingly white, without specifying if they meant funny stuff in the lunchbox white or full on skippy white.
Media Diversity Australia says its report – which found almost 76 per cent of those on Australian screens were from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds – is the first in-depth conversation around diversity in Australian media news since Kerry Packer decided it could be profitable to let a woman run a magazine in 1971.
According to MDA, just 6 per cent of TV hosts and presenters were from Indigenous or non-European backgrounds, despite these groups making up a quarter of the Australian population.
In fact, the study found that Australia’s media landscape was so vanilla it almost starting to resemble Australian politics.
MDA singled out Stefanovic’s employer, the Nine Network, as having “by some distance, the highest level of Anglo-Celtic representation with its journalists on air (87.8 per cent), particularly in their sporting commentary where white people are a distinct minority when it comes to the playing group.
The report conceded, none of the commercial networks had more than 5 per cent of presenters, commentators and reporters from non-European backgrounds.
The Today host has teed off on Twitter today, and highlighted the fact that growing up with a last name like his in Far North Queensland is basically the same as being South Sudanese in Melbourne
“I’m not sure how diverse you need to be to qualify for diverse, but I’m of Yugoslav, German and British heritage with a surname Stefanovic,” he wrote on Twitter.
“I used to be called a wog at school. I’m proud of my heritage. I’m pretty sure it’s diverse and Nine have always supported that.”
Stefanovic has taken it one further by cranking up the
Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina), which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties
We spoke to Stefanovic early this afternoon for a comment on this new slav-rebrand, but were shut down for cultural insentivity.
“It’s pronounced Stef-an o-vich.” he said.
“Get it right. I’m sick of you white dogs discriminating against my people!”
“This interview is over you racist pricks!”
