SBS has chosen internal candidate Mandi Wicks as its next director of news and current affairs, two months after staff pleaded with the board to appoint someone other than a white Anglo male to reflect the multicultural charter.
Wicks may not be a diverse candidate, but she does come with a strong track record in promoting Australia’s diverse communities through her role as director of audio and language content at SBS for nine years.
She is only the second woman to lead the news team since 1978. Apart from Irene Buschtedt between 1993 and 1995, every other director of news has been a white man.
The appointment of Wicks comes the month after a Media Diversity Australia report, Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories?, showed that free-to-air networks are disproportionately white compared with the wider Australian population, and most senior executive and board members are of Anglo-Celtic heritage.
Non-European and Indigenous Australians, who combined form 24% of the population, made up only 11% of free-to-air news personalities – a figure inflated by the inclusion of SBS in the report, the report said.
Making the announcement, the SBS managing director, James Taylor, pointedly referred to Wicks’ connection to Australia’s diverse communities through her current role.
“Mandi’s leadership of a diverse and complex team of over 300 staff – and their unrivalled connections with communities – is critical to SBS’s unique offering in the Australian media landscape,” Taylor said. “Her pursuit of excellence, trusted leadership and digital expertise will continue to be invaluable to SBS as we continue to strengthen our commitment to communities.”
Wicks takes on a newsroom that was rocked by historical allegations of racism and bullying in June, which prompted Taylor to call an independent lawyer to investigate the claims last month.
“SBS regularly engages external independent parties to assist with operational matters,” a spokesman for SBS told Guardian Australia.
The screenwriter Kodie Bedford sparked an outpouring in June when she said on Twitter that she suffered “micro-aggressions, forms of paternalism and racism” from a colleague during her time as an SBS cadet in 2008. She said she was always introduced as “the Indigenous cadet journalist”.
In response Taylor said at the time he was “committed to a culture that stands opposed to any form of racism or exclusion”.
The independent investigator, who is interviewing staff individually, followed the appointment of two Indigenous elders in residence “to provide support and cultural empowerment to staff” and train a number of “SBS inclusion champions” as part of measures to address the concerns.
“I see this as our moment in time to enhance those attributes that make SBS an extraordinary place, with an extraordinary team, and implement some positive changes to make us a leading inclusive workplace – not just in the media sector, but across all industries,” Taylor told staff in July.
The veteran news director Jim Carroll, due to retire after seven years in December, will hand over to Wicks at the end of the month.
The appointment comes a fortnight after a likely successor to Carroll, SBS’s executive producer of news since 2013 Andrew Clark, announced his resignation citing “new opportunities”.
A journalist by trade, Wicks was a manager at DMG Radio Australia (now Nova Entertainment), which is owned by Lachlan Murdoch.
Wicks developed the SBS settlement guide to assist new arrivals into Australia, and most recently, the SBS Multilingual Coronavirus Portal.
“There is no other news provider that understands and reflects Australia like SBS, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to ensure we continue to play a crucial role in providing diverse perspectives from Australia and around the globe, in service of the SBS Charter,” Wicks said.
