By Emma Macdonald OAM
The seventh Women in Media National Conference focussed on the role of storytelling – particularly who gets to tell them and who is represented by them – in shaping the national conversation when it drew industry professionals from around the country to Sydney recently.
Ten-time Walkley Award winner Kate McClymont was the guest speaker at the inaugural Women in Media Oration, honouring ground-breaking broadcaster Caroline Jones (1938-2022) who was Women in Media Patron.
In front of a sold-out crowd of Australia’s media movers and shakers, McClymont discussed her remarkable investigative reporting career in which she has doggedly tracked and revealed some of Australia’s most egregious cases of corruption, fraud and misconduct.
“As journalists we have a duty to stay the course, no matter what. For democracy to count, journalists must hold a mirror to society and sometimes society doesn’t like it. But our job is to expose things without favour or fear, and sometimes there is a price to pay.”
McClymont has uncovered perpetrators in positions of immense power and privilege, such as former NSW Labor minister Eddie Obeid, controversial neurosurgeon Charlie Teo and disgraced High Court judge Dyson Heydon. And she centres much of her work on the impact of wrongdoing against victims.
She told the dinner that “courage is a very powerful force” and it had been necessary for her to continue telling her stories against forces who wished to silence her – at times threatening her life and that of her family.
The theme of safety for women, and for storytellers, particularly in online and social media forums, was examined in panel discussions, along with the need for greater diversity and managing increasing workloads in a sector facing major disruption.
The “Media and Men’s Violence Against Women” discussion included Our Watch’s Moo Baulch OAM, Indigenous screenwriter, director and actress Leah Purcell, and the Federal Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth.
Baulch said one of the biggest shifts she had witnessed over the last few years was “the voices of victim survivors being put front and centre of these stories”.
She also pointed to the massive scale of online abuse.
“I think the online space has taken us a little by surprise; the rate at which the vitriol, the misogyny, the racism, the homophobia has grown, and I don’t think any of us have the answers yet.”
The safety of women in media sharing stories online was further examined in a panel “Life Online: Risks and Rewards” led by Commissioning Editor of ABC News Digital and Women in Media board director Danielle Cronin and featuring eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, ABC’s Music and Pop Culture Reporter Mawunyo Gbogbo, and internet identity Lucinda Price (aka Froomes).
Inman Grant made a clear argument that tech bosses needed to be held accountable for the immense damage done on their profit-seeking platforms – including misinformation, harassment and abuse.
“Those technology leaders, those developing products, those technologists in Silicon Valley, 80 per cent are men. They have no lived experience in terms of gender or online abuse. So, they're not actually engineering out the misuse, or understanding how this impacts women.”
Gbogbo urged conference-goers to stay loud.
“If you get off the platforms, you don't say anything, you're letting them win. I want to leave you with one thing … speak up! There will be other people who feel the same way that you do. And if you're one of those people who feels that way, and you see someone stand up like that, then post comment, because it does make a difference."
Petra Buchanan, Strategic Advisor to Women in Media, expanded on the rampant nature of online harassment as evidenced by findings from the 2024 Women in Media Industry Insight Report. One of the critical challenges, is “the increased hostility, harassment, and bullying that women face, particularly those with a public voice in media, politics, and online forums”.
“The intimidation experienced by women with an online presence is leading to a silencing of their voices – a disturbing reversal of empowerment,” says Buchanan.
“Many women are taking a backward step professionally, avoiding leadership positions, retreating from online spaces, and lowering their public profiles because of online abuse.”
The survey found 57 per cent of women felt dissatisfied or unsure about their career progress with over one-third considering leaving their jobs.
One of the most anticipated sessions featured Women in Media Patron Ita Buttrose and Federal Court Justice Michael Lee who oversaw one of the country’s most publicly scrutinised defamation cases earlier in the year – Bruce Lehrmann vs Network Ten.
Justice Lee live-streamed the trial in effort to both satisfy the huge public interest in the case and restore openness and public confidence in the legal system.
Justice Lee admitted to flirting with the idea of a journalistic career but was put off by the “cynicism and alcoholism or both” which appeared to run rampant through the Fairfax newsroom where he was a copy kid. And he admitted the alcoholism bothered him less than the cynicism.
Lee and Buttrose discussed objective truth versus opinion, the vital need for working journalists to keep scrupulous contemporaneous notes to protect themselves, and the need to restore public faith in the legal system. To that end, when pressed, Justice Lee suggested the media could do a better job in ensuring that courts and judges were “held to account” when it came to suppression laws and anything that interfered with the principles of open justice. He encouraged more journalists to challenge suppression orders, as they have every right to do.
Diversity in the creation of narratives and in representation on our screens was the subject of the panel “Reflecting the Real Australia in Storytelling” presented by SBS. It brought together Bernadine Lim, Senior Commissioning Editor of Factual at SBS; Karina Holden of Northern Pictures (Love on the Spectrum, Better Date Than Never, Employable Me), Rosemary Blight of Goalpost Pictures (Top End Wedding, Cleverman The Sapphires); and SBS World News anchor Janice Petersen.
They stressed the vital importance of inclusion and how their work created stories that reflected the real Australia and connected with more audiences.
Holden said she felt a responsibility to break barriers of representation. “There is a sense of homogeneity on our screen.”
Lim said:
“My dream is that Diversity and Inclusion is not seen as a favouring the minority but is the new majority”.
A final session on “How to Say No” was hosted by Dee Madigan with strategist and creative director Kiranpreet Kaur Dhillon, ABC news and current affairs producer Ghada Ali, and psychologist Shuktika Bose resonated with the audience.
Bose helpfully suggested it was time to shelve the guilt and to “start with the small no’s first” before building to the larger ones, knowing that polite refusal was entirely reasonable.
Ali, who booked guests for The Drum and other ABC programs, countered that while a “no” always needed to be respected, she also hoped women who had worked hard for their success would also say “yes” to opportunities, particularly when it came to speaking publicly and sharing their stories.
“Know when to say ‘no’ but know when to say ‘yes’, when you are an expert in your field. Please say ‘yes’!”
The event attracted a record 450 participants, including 262 first-time attendees.
Among them was Chiara Dakin, a first-year journalism student at the University of Technology, Sydney.
“The wisdom I have heard from those amazing women is really life-changing. I have learned so much and seen so many famous faces, it has been wild!”
Former West Australian journalist turned social entrepreneur Catherine Fitzpatrick decided to attend after recently starting her own company, Flequity Ventures, to disrupt financial abuse and gender bias through better product design.
Fitzpatrick was the Commonwealth Bank executive who uncovered widespread abuse occurring in online banking transactions and has spearheaded whole-of industry reforms to crack down on the practice.
“I came to the conference because I know the media can change the lives of women experiencing domestic and financial abuse through the power of their storytelling and advocacy,” Fitzpatrick said.
“I have come away from the conference feeling incredibly inspired and having learned an enormous amount about issues that are top of mind for the media, such as AI, women’s safety and career development.
“It was a privilege to be part of it and I will definitely return next year.”
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