Why Does Australian Media Still Have The Same Problems? With Antoinette Lattouf
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A listener production. Women who have an opinion, women who are difficult, women who are challenging the status quo are often attacked and maligned and ridiculed and defamed in the media.
Hi, I'm Sarah, and this is Small Talk. It's not quite a news headline, but it is what the girls are talking about.
What challenges do women face in the media today?
And I am so thrilled to be here today with Antoinette Latouf. Welcome. Thank you for coming on. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today. You are the co-founder of Et Media. You have the podcast We Used To Be Journos. You are the co-founder of Media Diversity Australia, the author of now two books, and the most recent one being Women Who Win, which really just came out. When did this come out? Four or five weeks ago? Yeah.
It's very new.
And congrats on the writing festival being the most sold in Sydney.
Yes. And Melbourne?
And Melbourne. Congratulations. It's been a wild month. That's a huge month. I know we briefly met once before. I think my mum made us all take a selfie together outside of that.
That's right.
Outside of the, what was it, the opera house? We were in front of the opera house.
Yes.
Which you went on stage for, I remember.
Was that?
Yes. Being pulled up there? I can't remember. Yes, I was on stage for that. Everything's a bit of a blur. The past two years of my life were a bit of a blur. Yeah.
Yeah, tell us about how the book rollout's been. Should I tell you a little, should we start with what the book's about?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we're going to get into all of it, but please, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so it hasn't even been a year yet since I won the big court case against the ABC and I had titled this book and started writing the book during the process. And so I really wanted to sort of capture the raw emotions of what it takes to be a woman who wins, what it means to be a woman who wins, and how on earth throughout Australian history women have taken on these huge lopsided battles, David versus Goliath style battles, and how on earth they found the strength, the perseverance, the clarity to keep going, and also how they were treated by society and media at the time. Mm-hmm. And so I really started to write this book because I needed to figure out how the hell I'm going to keep going, what a win looks like for me, what it looks like for other women, what it means for Australian society.
And in many ways it was just an IV drip of courage. Each time I reached out to women or researched women who were no longer with us and spent hours and hours and hours and days and days and days deep into newspaper archives looking at the way they were spoken about as well because at the time of writing and even until now, Women who have an opinion, women who are difficult, women who are challenging the status quo are often attacked and maligned and ridiculed and defamed in the media. So at the very time I was being all of those things, targeted in all of those ways, I was reading stuff about convict women settlers in the early 19th century and how they were being jailed and persecuted and treated because they dared to swear.
Yeah. And I was like, oh, wow, how some things have changed and how few things have changed at the same time. So I really wanted to use the fact that a lot of people know about my case. A lot of people know about my win against the ABC. And I wanted to use my story as a way to tell the stories of other women because a lot of them aren't known and their wins aren't celebrated. And there's a reason why history forgets. or conveniently fails to celebrate women who've won.
Yeah. Well, not celebrating, but also if they are in the headlines, the media is awful. And we do the series on here, Big Talk, where we go back and revisit old news stories and sort of timeline it. And, you know, we've done Monica Lewinsky and like dingo ate my baby and like all this different stuff and it's it's the one consistent thing against across every single big talk we've done that has a female protagonist in it is what the media said at the time versus what actually happened yeah and exactly and it's so interesting talking to our moms and to like my grandma or whatever people that were around during those news stories and hearing their version of events just based on the headlines they saw growing up versus me then explaining well no actually this is what happened
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:25
2
What challenges do women face in the media today?
0:25–6:45
3
What does 'Women Who Win' explore about female empowerment?
6:45–7:24
4
How did Antoinette Lattouf's court case impact her career?
7:24–11:01
5
How does Antoinette Lattouf define a 'win' for women in society?
11:01–12:48
6
How does the media treat women who challenge the status quo?
12:48–13:28
7
What historical context does Antoinette provide about women's struggles?
13:28–54:20
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Big Small Talk
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