Editorial staff at all the major newsrooms are, at the very, very least, 70 percent pakeha, and the higher up the food chain you go, the more male it gets. The patriarchy's day is just about done, but in the higher echelons of the media, the white male still rules the roost.
There are still fine reporters of all sorts of ethnicities, representing a wide range of culture and creeds. But they are in an absolute minority, and, unfortunately, often get lumped in with rounds that have anything to do with their ethnicity at all, pigeonholed by blood – Lincoln Tan ends up speaking for tens of thousands of Asian New Zealanders in his role as a NZ Herald reporter, but the paper is still shamefully lacking a proper Maori Affairs correspondent
It's a terrible oversight, and the media scene absolutely needs more voices from tangata whenua, and from the Asian communities, and from all of the fine cultures that have come to call New Zealand home. Their stories are desperately needed, or we'll never know what we are missing.
And we need to see the world through other peoples' eyes, or we stagnate as a species. A different perspective on everything in modern society should always be welcomed. The media needs people with different cultural backgrounds, and different sexual orientations, and not just as a patronising way of getting into those communities, but because all these fine people have a perspective that is often missing.
Fortunately, everybody of sound mind can agree on this, and the only people who don't want diversity in our media scene are straight up sexist, racist, trans-phobic fuckwits, and who gives a shit what those mouth-breathing, no-chinned sister-fuckers think?
The media itself can, for once, see which way the wind is blowing, and most newsrooms are only too happy to snap up young, keen reporters with a bit of beautiful colour to them. But it takes a long, long time to get that sort of change, on the generational level.
Look at female representation in the media. There are, thank goodness, far more female voices in the media than there used to be, with media courses often heavily skewing against the blokes. A very large proportion of the young journos nailing it day after day are women, and they do a fucking great job, even if they still have to put up with a tonne of bullshit casual sexism (just ask the Herald's Kirsty Johnson how much she loves getting asked how she finds breaking big, important stories when she is such a "cute. young thing", as if that's got anything to fucking do with it.)
There are more and more women at the next level of news, chief reporters and news editors and producers, but it's still taking too fucking long for them to filter to the top levels – of editors and publishers and corporate-level shenanigans. The sooner, the better.
Different voices sometimes have to shout to be heard at all, but they shouldn't stop yelling yet. And the bigger media outfits need to get out there and listen out for them, before they become totally irrelevant to much of their audience.
- Catherine Grant
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