Fiona Dear, the new director of news and current Affairs at Nine, had to step into the newsroom to clean up a mess.
“I was angry as a woman who worked in that environment at that time,” she said.
An internal review identified widespread bullying and abuse of power at the media group. Nine launched the inquiry of its newsroom culture following allegations of abuse of power and “drunken, lecherous behaviour”.
“I was angry that I was given this opportunity and had to clean up someone else's shit," Dear said. "This sounds selfish, but I was angry. I have worked really, really hard in my career.
“And I was angry that the time that I get a dream job, there was no time for me to step back and say: ‘Wow, you got that. You achieved that, that's a pretty significant thing that you just achieved’. There was no time for me to mark that moment.”
She made the comments in a report prepared by the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, An Unfinished Story: Understanding Gender Bias in Australian Newsrooms.
The study, which analysed more than 200,000 articles with advanced machine learning techniques, found men wrote the majority of frontpage articles and were quoted exclusively more than twice as often as women.
And women more often cover “soft news” such as the arts, lifestyle, and entertainment while men dominate “hard news” such as sports, business, and foreign affairs.
Men are cited as experts more often and are quoted first more frequently in front-page stories than women.
At Nine, Dear’s strategy is to listen.
“People want to have a voice and they want to be heard,” she said. “That is my very first priority, it’s to give them back their voice because a lot of people here feel like they may have lost their voice over time.”
She has to change the culture within the newsroom.
“I want this newsroom to be the poster child for the business,” she said.
“It's going to be a slow process, but we have to change it. Simple as that. We've got no choice.”
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