High-profile Indigenous journalist Stan Grant says he left Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC, last month because he felt sickened by the way the news media are fuelling hatred and despair.
Grant, who became the permanent host of the ABC panel show Q+A in 2022, publicly stood down from the role in May and drew international attention to the struggle of Indigenous journalists in Australia.
Last month he announced he was walking away from his 40-year broadcast career, after he and his family had received racially motivated threats, attacks by the media and abuse on social platforms.
The proud Wiradjuri man and award-winning journalist revealed to MOJO News the cumulative impact — and his optimism for change.
“I felt sick every time I was on television. I felt as if I was doing something wrong,” Grant says.
“I felt that I was increasingly part of the problem. It became impossible to change the culture from the inside.”
The introduction of new technology has left the mainstream media behind, he says: the media are struggling to adapt and have become redundant because “the form no longer works”. He says the media are “yelling into a void and the people are turning away”.
“I am in that industry, in a prominent position: I could not and would not do it anymore," Grant says.
"I had exhausted the moral possibilities of that form of journalism.”
He says “it was healthier" to walk away from "the nightmare" the mainstream media are locked inside.
“Every single door I walked through, I walked through alone.”
Grant has been outspoken on the racism and isolation he has faced as a high-profile First Nations journalist in Australia.
“When I first walked into the newsroom there was no Aboriginal journalist — no journalist of colour — on our television screens.”
Things have slowly improved over time. Last year, Media Diversity Australia (MDA) reported that the share of appearances on TV by presenters and reporters of Indigenous background had improved to 5 per cent since 2020, but this was inconsistent across networks.
A not-for-profit organisation set up by journalists in 2017, MDA called on Australian mainstream media leaders to help build a more representative industry.
Grant says that although he has seen change and progress over the past four decades, he has also been a witness to “a culture that is locked in this endless dogfight that sees the worst in us”.
He found himself “in the media continually having conversations that reinforced difference and division".
"We like the noise, the view, the mayhem, and then we just watch and blame everybody else. We don’t blame ourselves,” he says.
“I was targeted for racist attacks because the media created a narrative that allowed for that type of hatred to fester, so I was also implicated in the very hatred that I was a part of.”
For Grant, such disparity goes against the value of harmony to his people.
“I had to be able to find a space to speak my values, the truths as I see them — to speak to the love of people in our society," he says.
As he moves on from the mainstream media, Grant says it is time to find a constructive way of having conversations.
“I will still be a part of public discourse. But I will be a different presence,” he says, adding that he has had enough of the way the mainstream media convey “an impression that the world is falling apart”.
He talks of the 'media world' as a parasitic industry: an industry that latches onto public fear and anxiety, leaving the public “feeling terribly sick afterwards”.
He is now intent on trying to reframe stories with a sense of optimism, not despair — “to try to have the hard conversations that we need to have, but to have the conversations in a way that are constructive and build better outcomes”.
“I am committed to try and explore new ways of having old conversations.”
He is reimagining the media sphere, and speaks to the possibility of covering 'hard' news topics, the ones that divide opinion, by embracing those differences in love and a shared humanity.
To Grant, the people know what they don’t want, but they also don’t know what they do want.
"[It is time] we speak to the public's need for better discourse and the public's need for a better media," he says.
"Media will follow," he adds, "because their business model, apart from anything else, is no longer sustainable.”
Right now, the mainstream media are contributing to a failing democracy, he says, because they have lost their moral core. It should be about “creating connection before confrontation — before we disagree, we have to agree”.
“Democracy requires vigorous disagreement but it must start from a shared commitment to a constructive outcome.”
Grant says it took courage for him to walk away from the industry he has been a part of for 40 years, but it was the right decision.
“I feel lighter, I feel more virtuous, I feel more at home when I walked away than if I stayed there."
Recently appointed as the Asia-Pacific director of the Denmark-based Constructive Institute, which will operate in conjunction with Monash University, Grant says he has finally found a place where he can be true to himself and which shares the values he holds dear.
Grant says that after leaving the ABC, he had no plans to do anything else but knew he “just didn't want to do that anymore”.
Within the week, he was contacted by the Dean of Arts at Monash University, Professor Katie Stevenson, who asked him to join the university's School of Media, Film and Journalism. She also introduced him to the Constructive Institute.
“I'd never heard of it. I looked it up and I said, 'Who are these guys?' These guys are me: this is my family. This is where I want to belong,” he says. “They chose me. It was a coincidence.”
He says the Constructive Institute immediately resonated with him, and knew “they were virtuous people, moral people, people committed to change".
"They had a mission to do something good in the world and I am a part of it and I love that,” he says.
“It was the right time, it was the right place and I know it will be the right outcome.”
The Asia-Pacific hub of the Constructive Institute will open in 2024.