Culture

Channel 9’s Vaccine Campaign Video Is The Whitest Thing We’ve Ever Seen

The most diverse person in the clip was a brunette.

by Millie Roberts  1 June 2021
Channel 9 Vaccine

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A new Channel 9 vaccine rollout campaign has been dunked on for featuring absolutely zero people of colour.

The minute-long video, captioned ‘this is our shot’ features 15 white personalities rallying the viewer to get jabbed, with most getting vaccinated on screen themselves.

“Covid has affected each and every one of us,” The Block host Scott Cam says. “Now we have a shot to get our lives back to normal.

He’s joined by Eddie McGuire, Hamish Blake, Richard Wilkinson, Georgie Gardener, Peter Overton, and more.

The video aims to highlight how mass vaccination will help protect communities, keep Australia’s borders open, allow us to travel and openly mingle, protect failing businesses and industries, as well as saving lives. All very true and pertinent.

“Start a conversation with your doctor about your shot,” the call-to-action urges.

We can all imagine the predominant market of Channel 9 viewers, and the choice of personalities like Cam and McGuire would resonate with older audiences, especially when there’s currently vaccine hesitancy within that age group.

But what the video draws attention to is the lack of representation at Channel 9 in the first place. The 2020 Media Diversity Australia report, titled ‘Who Gets To Tell Australian Stories?’ said that “more than 75% of presenters, commentators and reporters have an Anglo-Celtic background.”

This is compared to only 6% of presenters, commentators and reporters coming from an Indigenous or non-European background.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, one-in-four Australians were born overseas, and one-in-two have a parent born overseas — proof enough that Australia’s cultural fabric isn’t just white people on the news desk.

Also, their choice to draw a single wildcard outside the Channel 9 payroll, and then pick Amy Shark, was a real Uno reverse move.

To her credit, being brunette, she was the most diverse pick there.