Surprise! Saturday Night’s Election Coverage Is Going To Have A Lot Of White Dudes
Latham's back.
Saturday night can’t come quickly enough. After eight marathon weeks of election campaigning (the longest campaign since 1969!) it’s all finally coming to an end.
Soon it will be time to relive the hallowed Aussie tradition of heading to the local polling booth, grabbing a sausage on your way in, ignoring the party campaigners throwing pieces of paper at you, filling in our absurdly large ballot papers and heading home to watch Antony Green explain it all for us.
What the heck do I do with this? My dad’s a painter and could use it as a drop sheet. pic.twitter.com/PrAJhB9VQm
— Ahron Young (@AhronYoung) June 27, 2016
I’m a huge political junkie (or Junkee?) and I live for election nights. Wall to wall political coverage. Non stop analysis and commentary. “Is the swing on?” “Is the swing off?” “Who’s getting hit by the swing?”. I feel sort of sorry for normal people who don’t care about the results or are happy to wait for the Sunday papers to fill them in, but there’s always Netflix for you guys.
With only five days to go till the election, most TV networks (Seven, Nine, Sky News and the ABC) have announced their lineups for election night coverage. The good news? Antony Green is back! The bad news? There’s a lot of dudes. Like, a lot of dudes. And nearly everyone is white. Oh, and Alan Jones and Mark Latham will be making an appearance.
Set coming together for Saturday night. I just hope it isn’t quite as freezing then. #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/hisJ2WvteE
— Antony Green (@AntonyGreenABC) June 27, 2016
Alan Jones, famous for a bunch of totally outrageous things including ‘joking’ about throwing Julia Gillard into the ocean, will be providing electoral commentary on both Channel Seven and Sky News. Mark Latham, similarly famous for making totally ludicrous statements, will also be a panelist for Channel Seven.
Across Channels Seven, Nine, the ABC and Sky News the gender balance of commentators on election night is pretty woeful. There are 22 male panellists to just 12 women.
Gender breakdown of all network’s election coverage
The ABC actually has a 50/50 split on its election night panel (the first broadcast in decades without Kerry O’Brien!).
Gender breakdown for the ABC’s election night coverage
If you take out the ABC and just focus on the commercial networks it’s even worse: Just 30 percent of the election night panellists are women.
Oh, and did we mention that every single media panelist is white? The only thing more dude heavy and white than this country’s election night coverage is the Parliament we’re about to elect.
Lift your game, media.