Dolly Parton had some great advice over the weekend for anyone caught up in disputes over racist imagery and commentary: “don’t be a dumbass”.
Asked about the removal of the word “dixie” from her show in the latest issue of Billboard, Parton said: “As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is: I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”
It’s a timely message for the editors at The Australian. And, in fact, all of Australian media right now.
Friday’s now-notorious cartoon by Johannes Leak had the double whammy of racism and sexism, characterising a 55-year-old US senator and vice-presidential candidate as a “little brown girl”. When pushed, The Australian editor Chris Dore played the “this cartoon’s not racist — you are!” defence, claiming it was a satire of Joe Biden’s views. Sure, Chris.
Prominent journalists from the ABC pushed back. Michael Rowland expressed sorrow for the “good journalists” at The Australian. Shalailah Medhora tweeted: “I can’t imagine what it must be like being a POC at the Oz right now.”
Benjamin Law asked white TV and radio hosts to identify the cartoon as racist. “Call it for what it is. Don’t euphemise ‘racist’. You have eyes … It’s not up for debate,” Law said. He then asked journalists to hold the masthead’s editorial management accountable: “Get past the fact you went to the same school and that you’re on the same Walkleys committee together.” Ouch!
In an internal email leaked to The Guardian, Dore called on his staff to rally around “one of our own” and blamed the criticism on “media rivals” (read: the ABC). Internal responses seem to have been muted.
For Annabel Crabb, the cartoon was a deliberate provocation: “Further discussion just generates clicks for shit work.” The Drum presenter Julia Baird concurred: “Hard agree. We won’t be discussing it.”
And, with that, the cartoon disappeared from the news cycle. By Sunday morning’s “Talking Pictures” segment on Insiders, the cartoon was one picture most definitely NOT worth talking about.
The traditional media’s response to the racism and sexism embedded in The Australian’s cartoon suggests that Australian journalists are largely resigned to the problem. The media is not rising to the practical challenge of confronting racism and, in the social media age, we can see exactly how quickly the dial shifts to “ignore”.
The Australian evidently took the hint and stopped digging. This brouhaha would have once merited a long “cancel culture” editorial matched with reader’s letters howling from the nether-regions of the masthead’s audience. But this time it produced a short, defensive editor’s note with four readers’ letters — two for and two against. (It would be interesting to see the emails between Sydney and News Corp’s New York HQ that informed that decision.)
It’s a hard call. Ignore, or respond and amplify? But we should judge it by results: walking past the News Corp standard entrenches it. Treating the cartoon as a one-off provocation or talking up the “good journalism” in the company while ignoring the bad risks legitimising the racism across the company’s mastheads.
News Corp has long been using cartoons to amplify extremist positions in its culture wars, relying on the Australian Press Council conclusion in a 2018 Herald-Sun case that: “cartoons… use exaggeration and absurdity to make their point. For this reason significant latitude will usually be given in considering whether a publication has taken reasonable steps to avoid substantial offence, distress or prejudice.”
In this context, how much social capital should the ABC spend supporting the “good journalists” at the company?
Last week ABC journalists were supporting an Australian reporter attacked for asking hard (if repetitive) questions of Dan Andrews; Twitter feeds were amplifying News Corp columnists (among others) as Insiders panellists. All very collegial.
But this ignores the fact that News Corp just as often ends up destroying the reputations of its own “good journalists”. Bill Leak, father of Johannes, was once respected as Australia’s best newspaper artist. Then News Corp recruited him into its culture wars, leaving him remembered more for his late-life racist cartoons than his outstanding earlier career.
Highlighting the good that individual journalists do, while burying the institutional racism and sexism, gets the mix all wrong. It feeds the myth that News Corp is just another news media organisation, more or less like all the others.
Maybe we should ask: What would Dolly do? And don’t be a dumbass.
Do journalists have a responsibility to call out News Corp’s poor behaviour? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
So, no point being a big-mouth when safely within a crowd of progressives and then going coy when one disagrees, so I’ll put my neck on the chopping block.
I don’t agree.
To my eye, “that” cartoon suggests that Biden is probably a sexist, racist old tool – which he probably is.
To my eye, it doesn’t in any way denigrate Kamala Harris (and, importantly, to my eye it does not caricature her in any racially unpleasant way)
It is irrelevant that it was published in a newspaper we progressives dislike.
It is irrelevant that we progressives didn’t like the cartoonist’s father.
And it is largely irrelevant that an editor has made a hash of justifying the decision to publish.
I’ll stop there, and await the swish of the axe.
I agree that the cartoon shafts Biden not Harris.
I don’t get this accusation of Biden being rascist, Barnino. Can you explain it to me, please?
It is demeaning and offensive to refer to a grown woman as a ‘girl’, but that’s not what Biden did. He was clearly referring to young females, and it’s neither racist nor sexist to call them ‘girls’. All he did was say that it was a good thing that young girls in the US now have a role model they can aspire to, and they now know that even the highest political positions in the land may be within their reach if they want it. Everyone is always calling for more diversity of ethnicity and gender in positions of power within society, but when an old white man expresses sentiments along those lines, he is pilloried for it? I don’t understand.
Not what he did in reality, I mean. I definitely think the cartoon was racist.
Maybe your neck is safe, this time Barnino… The cartoon wasn’t particularly funny, but It was clearly directed at Biden’s own patronising, sexist and racist “little black and brown girls” comment, and was skewering his opportunist politics. Crikey has overextended itself by joining the professionally outraged twitter mob here. It has an unhealthy obsession with New Corp too, a boring one.
Keep at NewsCorp Crikey. Just to annoy btri…
Agree. The intent of the cartoon clearly seems to be to suggest that Biden patronises Harris by focussing so heavily on her race and gender. You dont have to agree, but its disingenuous to suggest the cartoonist is merely dismissing Ms Harris as a “brown girl”.
I found it a tough one. If you follow American politics closely and have a good idea of Biden’s past, you could say it was “catchy”. However, if you’re not knee-deep into that stuff, it does come across racist and sexist.
The main problem I had with the cartoon is that it wasn’t clear what the intent was. If it was to skewer Biden’s language, then the setup in panel 1 and the punchline at the end of panel 2 don’t make sense. I think in this respect it’s easy to claim that people are reading into it what they want, which seems true to a degree, and allows a claim of racist-skewering intent without it being exactly clear that was what was actually intended.
Seeing the flood of opinion pieces making effectively the same point as Biden about the importance of the selection of Harris for members of the minority populations in question makes me think it’s at best an uncharitable twisting of Biden’s language. But I really don’t know what the cartoonist was intending – my takeaway is that the joke is that Harris will be the de facto person handling race relations in America, and that won’t make things better as the Democrats want them to be.
I think it’s important to tease out just why this cartoon is racist. Because I’m sure there are many people who do not have the analytical competency to work it out.
Biden’s words were that Harris would be an inspiration to little girls, especially little black and brown girls. This was a generic statement about certain people. Leak twisted those words to have Biden referring to Harris as a ‘little brown girl’. That makes it a generalism: there’s a black woman, call her a brown girl.
This is pretty much the definition of racism: if you refer to a person of colour by a demeaning epithet, you can be pretty sure it will be construed as racism.
And now I think it’s doubly important, given Barnino’s unenlightened comments.
Attacking that particular cartoon as racist really isn’t a hill worth dying on.
Biden has history with his treatment of women – he wasn’t nicknamed, “Creepy Uncle Joe” for nothing.
His history of comments on the ‘black’ vote also frequently reduce the individual to some sort of unified voice that couldn’t possibly exist and is racist in of itself.
It is easy then (especially for Republicans and their Murdoch overlord) to be cynical of Democrats choice of Harris. They are clearly trying to engage disenfranchised progressive voters by choosing Harris, as a black woman. And in the spin of that decision they are using the inspiration angle in her as a black woman, not Kamala Harris, the ruthless prosecutor, which killed her run at president.
All this of course is totally besides the point. Newscorp/Fox would rather us all engage in identity politics and these arguments than engage with what is actually going on.
Thanks for that..the crude cartoon was a little too nuanced for my poor dull head..I just thought that the cartoon cartoon Joe (as opposed to the real life cartoon Joe ) wouldn’t be that stupid to say those words..
Foot in mouth Biden could have said Harris is an inspiration to little girls of all ethnic backgrounds. Any way Sleepy Joe probably plagiarised from someone else, the guy has zero talent and you know what dementia does.
Yep, zero talent. Guess that’s why he’s been a successful legislator for over 50 years.
So was Hitler and a plethora of other looneys. Biden is sludge just slightly better than the Dotard.
“Bill Leak, father of Johannes…”
As one commenter in The Guardian said, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I prefer “the turd doesn’t fall far from the anus”.
The knee jerkers are out in force, as was the intent of the OZ.
How this can be considered a denigration of Harris rather than Biden just shows how poor are the critical faculties of the mob.
Nobody said it was a denigration of Harris, Izzy. It was a denigration of people of colour, and especially women.
I’m beginning to think some people completely missed the point of this story. They didn’t get it when it appeared, nor did they get it in the analysis.
You prove my point about lack of critical faculties.
Its clear Mercurial is a Biden groupie, he has the worship syndrome. Only a radical could interpret racism from that cartoon.