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Radio fixated on white male presenters, says George Donikian

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  • Radio fixated on white male presenters, says George Donikian

    The Age, Australia
    July 31 2014

    Radio fixated on white male presenters, says George Donikian

    Neil McMahon

    Meet George Donikan, Irishman.


    When Greek-Armenian broadcaster George Donikian was establishing
    himself in radio four decades ago, his ethnic origins presented a
    problem. So he agreed to fake them.

    "I wanted to be me but they wouldn't let me," Donikian recalls.

    Ironically, his surname had been considered fine in regional radio in
    Queensland. But once he hit the big time in Sydney, he was told he had
    to make himself fit in to a world of broadcasting that didn't have
    room for presenters who broke the white Anglo mould.

    "You've got a job tomorrow," a prospective boss told him. "But I can't
    do Donikian. You can be George White, George Green, any colour George
    except Donikian.".

    "So I said, 'OK, what you're saying is, I'm too ethnic. How about I
    take one letter off my name and make it Donikan?'. And he said, 'Yeah,
    good. You've got the job'."

    Weeks later, Donikian was invited to be host of a St Patrick's Day event.

    "The minute I walked in they said, 'You're not Irish'. I said, 'To be
    sure, to be sure'. I became an honorary Irishman for the next eight
    years."

    Four decades on, Donikian wonders how much has changed. In a recent
    column, Radio Waves noted the glaring gender imbalance among on-air
    presenters; just as glaring, as Donikian points out, is the industry's
    reluctance to accept broadcasters who don't fit the ancient and
    preferred profile of white Anglo male.

    "The most conservative things on the planet are television programmers
    and radio programmers," he says.

    In the 1970s, Donikian was an up-and-comer in the radio industry.

    "It was 'the jocks' - and it was too hard to put the jocks on
    jockettes. It was out of America, it was the programming of the west
    coast. Somehow you couldn't have a woman's voice coming out and saying
    it with the same resonance."

    That was, and largely remains, an unbroken tradition. "We've never even tried."

    Radio listeners have been long conditioned to expect and accept names
    and accents - and genders - that don't challenge the status quo. When
    the ABC launched its youth broadcaster Double J in the 1970s, one of
    its standard bearers was one Bill Drake - whose real name, Holger
    Brockman, was considered too "ethnic". In Melbourne, the famous voice
    of music radio, Lee Simons, had similarly abbreviated a name that
    didn't fit the accepted mix.

    "What I didn't realise until I got into the business is that there
    were a whole lot of multicultural boys and girls - well, no girls -
    just boys," Donikian says. "All they did, as I had to do, we had to
    change our names. It's like a bit of Hollywood. They didn't want it to
    be too ethnic. And Australian radio has remained white Anglo-Saxon
    Protestant for a lifetime. And male."

    Remarkably, little has changed, he says. Regarding women on air, he
    notes: "Have a look at SBS radio and that will tell you something. We
    don't have a fairer mix. The diversity component on radio is
    extraordinary. It's still way too narrow."

    Donikian was a pioneer in changing our perceptions and expectations.
    After years as the innocuous 'Donikan' on Sydney radio, he was then
    tapped to front the launch of SBS television in 1980. The station went
    out on the UHF band - "ultra hard to find. They gave us the bottom of
    the ABC tower instead of the top of the tower. They weren't into
    sharing, it was about telling us what our place was."

    Broadcasting largely remains an outpost of an old Australia, Donikian
    says, with our cultural and gender diversity at best an after-thought
    in programming decisions. It's instructive that among the high points
    of his public fame were when he was satirised via Steve Vizard's
    comedic impressions on the sketch show Fast Forward.

    "I hated it," Donikian says. "Vizard did it too well. The attempted
    over-pronunciation was too raw for me. People didn't realise the
    struggle and the energy that we spent to get that presentation down
    pat. We had to come out of English, pronounce the name in the correct
    manner, and then come back into English. And although they said, 'You
    did it seamlessly', it was a departure - and a very different style of
    presentation to anything that had been seen in Australia. I can
    remember getting a lot of flack - people would think, 'George is
    making those affectations on purpose'. It was never anything on
    purpose, we were trying to be as international as possible."

    Today, three years after ending his last mainstream commercial venture
    as a newsreader for Channel Ten, Donikian has branched out as a
    speechmaker, media trainer, mentor and public voice for the diverse
    community for which he has been a standard bearer. He looks at the
    modern media and wonders that so little progress has been made. "I
    hate this blokeyness - everything's Russy, Kenny, Billy, Johnny - I
    despair. It's like everything we tried to do is anathema."

    Back in the 1970s, he had to ask his father what do about not having a
    profile that met the industry's expectations. "I said to my father,
    'What do I do?' He said, 'Change your name. You can always change it
    back'."

    http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/radio-fixated-on-white-male-presenters-says-george-donikian-20140729-zxp9x.html


    From: Baghdasarian
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