Antoinette Lattouf’s mission to make Australia’s media less white
In 2016, a photo popped up on Antoinette Lattouf’s Facebook memories feed. It was from six years earlier and had been taken at the launch party for the ABC’s 24-hour news channel. Unusually for an Australian media outlet at the time, the staff of ABC24 (now known as ABC News) was racially and culturally diverse. Among the network’s journalists were Lattouf, who is of Lebanese heritage, and Chinese-Australian reporter Isabel Lo.
Looking at the photo of the smiling journalists, a thought occurred to Lattouf. Only one of the non-white reporters — newsreader Jeremy Fernandez — was still at the network. Lo had noticed the same thing and the pair began investigating the exodus.
Antoinette Lattouf says calling out the Australian media for a lack of diversity has cost her friendships.Credit:Louie Douvis
After contacting about 10 former colleagues, they found some had left happily. Many, however, departed the public broadcaster feeling frustrated by the experience and disillusioned about their future career prospects.
“We heard again and again about routine micro-aggressions and covert discrimination, about middle management treating them like box-ticking hires,” Lattouf says.
In her own career, she had been told to work with a voice coach to remove her “western Sydney accent” and that it wouldn’t matter if she stuffed up because the network “needed brown women”.
The realisation that Australian media had a systemic diversity problem led Lattouf and Lo to found Media Diversity Australia, which strives to make the nation’s news outlets more reflective of modern multicultural Australia. It was a non-profit born from fury.
“When we started out, Waleed Aly and I were the only Arabs on commercial television,” Lattouf says. “There was not a single Indigenous person or person of colour on any breakfast television show. We love to pat ourselves on the back and say we are a thriving multicultural democracy, but Australia woke up to a sea of white faces, including on the ABC. I thought, ‘f--king get real’.”
Previously a reporter at SBS and Network Ten, the 38-year-old is now a co-host of Southern Cross Austereo’s daily news podcast, The Briefing. Last month, she published her first book, How to Lose Friends and Influence White People. As well as recounting her experiences as a journalist and diversity advocate, it serves as a manual for those who want to become champions for racial equality. Each chapter ends with a list of pithy tips (DO “be honest about your shade of white; DON’T “rely on old and disproven tropes that the best person gets the job”.)
At Lattouf’s suggestion, we’re eating lunch at La Shish, a Lebanese restaurant in Guildford, the western Sydney suburb where she grew up. Guildford has one of the country’s highest concentrations of Arabic-speaking refugees, and it’s where Lattouf’s parents settled after fleeing Lebanon’s sectarian civil war in the 1970s. “This is very familiar territory for me,” she says.
When I arrive, Lattouf has already ordered an array of dishes for us to share. Eager to show off the range of their menu, the restaurant staff bring out even more courses during our interview — enough, indeed, to feed a hungry family. There’s fried cauliflower and vine leaves, lamb skewers and fattoush salad.
The food at La Shish, a Lebanese restaurant in Guildford, is both plentiful and delicious.Credit:Louie Douvis
Lattouf insists I try her favourite menu item, sambousek: fried pastries filled with ricotta and feta cheese, plus another serving filled with minced meat and pine nuts. The food is delectable as well as plentiful.
Lattouf says she decided to become a journalist in primary school, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to her. “There wasn’t anyone around me who had been to university, wasn’t anyone who was a professional. I just knew I wanted to be a storyteller.”
When she told her high school careers adviser that she wanted to study journalism at a top university, the adviser replied that the local TAFE might be a more realistic option. Incensed at being encouraged to stymie her ambition, she moved to a selective public school and made it into the University of Technology Sydney’s highly regarded journalism program.
“Throughout my life, I’ve had to fight for everything,” she says when I ask where she gets her gutsy attitude, her willingness to challenge authority. “I’m the fifth of seven children so I had to fight for the slice of pizza on the table. I had to fight to be heard because I was a female in a very patriarchal Arab family and was brought up to believe marriageability was my biggest currency. My father said to me: ‘no one will like a woman like you with so many opinions’.”
Lattouf says it can be uncomfortable to be her friend or boss: she challenges people on their racial blind spots and expects those around her to work at self-improvement. “Even in writing this book, there are a couple of friends I’m no longer in contact with, but that’s OK,” she says.
Last year, Lattouf called out the Kennedy Awards — which recognise excellence in NSW journalism — on Twitter for a 60-person judging panel that included five white men named Peter but only 15 women and no people of colour. Among the white judges was her boss at the time.
In her book, she criticises Waleed Aly for a controversial 2017 interview in which The Project host questioned the credibility of former Collingwood player Héritier Lumumba’s claims he had suffered racial abuse, including being called a “chimp”, at the club. Lattouf notes that she considers Aly a friend and he sits on the board of Media Diversity Australia, but she felt it important to make her objections known.
Lattouf notes that while white Australians sit at the top of the racial hierarchy, they do not have a monopoly on racism. For example, she writes in her book that some Arab Australians — including members of her own family — hold discriminatory views towards Indigenous Australians and African migrants.
And she doesn’t exempt herself from criticism. “If I’m asking white people to hold themselves, their families and their employers accountable, I have to do the same,” she says. “We need radical honesty and self-accountability.”
When Lattouf was preparing to launch Media Diversity Australia, then-ABC host Yassmin Abdel-Magied was under attack for posting “LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)” on her Facebook page on Anzac Day in 2017. Lattouf and co-founder Isabel Lo decided to not speak out to defend Abdel-Magied because they feared they would become targets for abuse themselves and damage the brand of their fledgling organisation. After receiving deaths threats Abdel-Magied left Australia for London and recently told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age she is considering giving up her Australian citizenship.
“It’s something I regret, it’s something where I was a bad ally,” Lattouf says of her silence. “I put my own self-interest ahead of doing what was right. I wasn’t prepared to lose friends or career opportunities.”
The receipt for lunch at La Shish, in Guildford. Credit:Louie Douvis
People of colour, she says, are often punished mercilessly for speaking out while white people find it much easier to find forgiveness. That’s why Lattouf stayed silent in 2019 when Kerri-Anne Kennerley humiliated her live on-air for wearing a short white playsuit.
“Did you forget your pants today,” Kennerley asked, before describing Lattouf as “thirsty”.
Only a few months earlier, presenter Yumi Stynes, who is of Japanese heritage, had accused Kennerley of sounding racist during a discussion about Australia Day and sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. “I saw the disproportionate backlash directed at Yumi and the ‘poor white woman’ sympathy that Kerri-Anne got,” Lattouf says. “I knew that she was denigrating me on air and it was awful but if I pushed back, I’d probably be framed as the angry brown woman and slut-shamed further. One of us would come out unscathed, and it wouldn’t be me.”
How to Lose Friends and Influence White People by Antoinette Lattouf.
She has found that challenging white dominance can lead to backlash from surprising places. In 2020, Media Diversity Australia published Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories?, a major report on cultural and linguistic diversity in Australian television news and current affairs. This study found that only 6 per cent of television presenters, commentators and reporters have an Indigenous or non-European background compared to 24 per cent of the population. All of the country’s free-to-air television national news directors were white men.
Lattouf had expected hostility from conservative shock jocks and complaints from commercial television executives. But she was shocked to find one of the report’s most vocal critics was a former journalist whom Lattouf had considered a mentor: they had even attended each other’s weddings. In social media comments sections, the former mentor labelled the report “junk” because of its estimates (drawn from the Australian Human Rights Commission) about how many Australians have an Anglo-Celtic background. He then published a piece in The Australian attacking the report. “I cried because I was so disappointed and hurt,” Lattouf writes in her book. “I cried because I thought he was an ally and friend.”
Lattouf has now stepped back from operational duties at Media Diversity Australia and is working on journalistic projects that have nothing to do with race. “Do I see my life and my future as an anti-racism diversity advocate? No, because I never sought to be one in the first place. I’m looking forward to going back to being a journalist and a storyteller,” she says.
While the Australian media still lags countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada in terms of diversity, she sees promising signs of improvement. For example, the ABC, Channel Nine and Channel Ten breakfast programs now have Indigenous co-hosts in Tony Armstrong, Brooke Boney and Narelda Jacobs respectively.
“There is a renewed interest and appetite for change,” Lattouf says. “People are not necessarily ready to take everything on, but there’s less defensiveness. I think there is a change and I’m excited about it.”
La Shish Lebanese restaurant, 265 Guildford Road, Guildford, 9632 1847. Open: Monday-Saturday, 9am-10pm, Sunday 9am-9pm.
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