ABC TV presenter Paul Barry whinges about the success of other white media presenters

The 2016 TV Week Gold Logie was recently awarded to Channel Ten presenter Waleed Aly, who is also the head of public affairs for the Islamic Council of Victoria, and a former “human rights” lawyer. The Gold Logie Award is for the “Best Personality on Australian Television”, and is nowadays chosen by the public through an online vote.

Undoubtedly, because of Aly’s background and outspoken political views, Leftist lobbyists pushed hard in the lead-up for him to win the award. But the credibility of the Logies in recent years has been seriously questioned, with News Corp columnist Rita Panahi “slamming the awards” as a “cringe-worthy joke” and stating that “They no longer celebrate the most popular but instead those with a publicity team behind them, determined to secure a nomination and perhaps a win”.

Mr. Aly deservingly came under fire for his ungracious acceptance of his award, and his “do not adjust your sets” comment, in which he appeared to mock Australian society for our alleged “racism” by implying that it was “unbelievable” that a non-white person might win a Gold Logie.

Yet, it should be obvious that any individual of any ethnic background is capable of succeeding on Australian television, provided they have some talent. The very fact that Mr. Aly did win the Gold Logie is testament to this. It also shows that Australian society is probably not quite as “racist” or “discriminatory” as many socially progressive commentators just dearly love to preach about.

But Mr. Aly’s victory did not stop some from preaching about the apparent dominance of white television presenters on Australian TV, and implying that in a still very white-dominant country, that this situation is somehow “unfair”. Paul Barry, host of ABC TV’s “Media Watch” dedicated quite a little rant to the issue, whilst selectively excluding some presenters, and not mentioning SBS TV’s affirmative action policies favouring non-whites. Nor did he mention the Aboriginal presenters on NITV, SBS’s dedicated Aboriginal TV channel. But Barry did also lament the dominance of white radio presenters.

Of course, any form of affirmative action is always a zero-sum game. If you reward one individual because of their arbitrary group association, you are penalising another individual because of theirs. Of course Mr. Barry didn’t suggest which particular white TV presenters might be apparently unworthy of their positions. Nor was it mentioned what percentages of people in racial terms actually train to become capable TV presenters in the first place. It was not demonstrated in any way that there is any vast talent pool of non-whites who are apparently missing out.

But to Barry, and others like him, such questions are probably not important. All that matters is the visible presence of non-whites on Australian TV, so that we do not symbolically appear as being “too white” a country. As if television presenting is some kind of “contest” between the races, or that the positions exist specifically to “reflect our ethnic diversity”. But in the deluded mindset of some social progressives, who prefer to see their arbitrary “racial equality” tokenism as having greater value than individuals being rewarded on the basis of their merits according to free market forces, it is supposedly an “injustice” to have some races outperform others.

But these “social justice warriors” are never concerned about Aborigines outperforming other races on the football field, or people of black African ancestry dominating on the basketball court; rather, it’s only when white people outperform other races (in a publicly visible way) that they perceive an apparent injustice and insist on some correction!

A similar mindset was present in the USA earlier this year, when no blacks were nominated for Hollywood’s 2016 Academy Awards, which led to the twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite “going viral” in the lead-up to the night. Of course many black performers and industry workers have won Oscars over the years, and some of Hollywood’s highest paid “A-List” actors are black. One “documented chart” showed that blacks have won 12.5% of Hollywood’s Oscars in the last 20 years, when blacks make up about 13% of the US population. There’s also been substantial examples of Hollywood “black-washing” happening in recent decades, where black actors have been granted roles in movies whose characters were intended by their original authors to be white. But anything for blacks and their advocates to “play the victim” and imply a conspiracy against them.

Being a successful television presenter undoubtedly requires certain talents — portraying an appealing persona that audiences find trustworthy, confidence in front of a TV camera, articulate elocution, an ability to perform under pressure etc.

Could it be that thousands of years of human evolution in vastly different climes, combined with distant interbreeding with completely different ancient human species, might have produced a situation today where some human races may display more ability as, or more behavioural inclination toward, becoming TV presenters?

Most social progressives have probably already made up their mind on this, and would probably not even dare ask such a politically incorrect question. Instead, these “social justice warriors” can’t bring themselves to even consider the possibility that white European people might have evolved to be generally better at doing some things than other races — like perhaps TV presenting, for example. And hence, perhaps it merely suits their ideology to tout a kind of “conspiracy theory” that implies whites are a “privileged” race that are being “unfairly advantaged” by television networks, or (remarkably) even Hollywood.

But the point is that, ultimately, television presenters are in their jobs to better themselves, and to serve the interests of their employers — the TV networks, who presumably want the best presenters to boost TV ratings and to reflect the company image. They are certainly NOT there to “publicly represent” their ethnicity or gender, or whatever other arbitrary category social progressives might choose to highlight. Of course very few obese people or midgets, or people with visible physical disabilities or deformities are TV presenters either, but to “equality” advocates, presumably some forms of discrimination are valid, and free market rules should apply. But not on race, it seems.

Perhaps if Mr. Barry feels so strongly about the issue, he should resign his own position as an ABCTV host to perhaps allow a token non-white to replace him. But let’s not hold our breath on that happening… As the saying goes, “in the game of life, always back self-interest”.

References:
“Australian TV news whitewash”, Media Watch (ABC), 16 May 2016
“Waleed Aly”, Wikipedia
“Ratings mean little as the Logies become a cringe-worthy joke”, Herald Sun, 11 April 2016 (Rita Panahi)
“This chart DESTROYS #OscarsSoWhite premise”, Allen B. West, 21 January 2016
“Whitewash? That’s not the colour of the SBS charter”, The Conversation, 29 April 2015 (Helen Vatsikopoulos)
“About NITV ”, NITV [National Indigenous Television] (SBS), 25 June 2015