Authors Ien Ang (whose Desperately Seeking the Audience, 1991, remains a seminal text on television production and consumption), Gay Hawkins and Lamia Dabboussy explore the history of SBS through a number of key issues, from multilingualism and multiculturalism to news values and audience reach. Two themes dominate the discussion: cultural difference, with Australia seen as a country bound together by diversity; and aesthetic quality – the tradition of associating public broadcasters with a higher standard of programing.

SBS has always sought to treat cultural difference as intrinsic to Australian society. The authors consider this in a dialectical fashion, moving deftly between the twin concerns of migrants adjusting to the prevailing Australian culture, and all Australians being encouraged to embrace an evolving multicultural society. In each case, the role of SBS has been crucial. If the mainstream media seems barely interested in providing product of specific relevance to new Australians, it is even less inclined to investigate non-Western cultures or to encourage its audiences to contemplate them, other than in the most superficial manner. One result is an anxiety-ridden local news media abounding with constructs such as ‘Islamic extremist’ and ‘Lebanese rapist’, with hardly anyone bothering to question the appropriateness of those ethnic modifiers.

The SBS Story deals well with the much ignored radio arm of the organisation. Multilingual diversity in radio and television play out in different ways: for the former, the emphasis has moved toward juxtaposing as many languages as possible, whereas for the latter the availability of subtitling potentially opens all Australians to programing in any language. The authors put forward the claim that SBS radio has enabled many migrants to participate in a national public discourse from which they would otherwise have been excluded. They convincingly point out the failings in arguments that ethnic language programing is merely consistent with encouraging an insular communitarianism.

While the book does an excellent job of working through matters of cultural difference, aesthetic quality, in tandem with its populist antithesis, proves a more troublesome concept. Looming large here is what might be termed the notion of ‘difficulty’. Recalling the notorious outcry over Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue poles – incidentally, like multiculturalism, a Whitlam government initiative – there has lately been a strong backlash in much cultural commentary in Australia against allegedly obscure, difficult or complex art and culture. For instance, Antony Ginnane, president of the Screen Producers’ Association, has been applauded for referring to the demanding nature of many new Australian films as ‘the cultural equivalent of ethnic cleansing’. Elsewhere, Sydney Morning Herald music writer Bernard Zuel finds it necessary to vilify those who make ‘difficult’ music, claiming that there are ‘none so gutless as those scared to be heard, danced to and enjoyed’. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the exhibiting of those now infamous photographs, the debate around the Bill Henson case frequently degenerated into sweeping attacks on artists and their alleged inability to connect with wider society.

How much longer must this monstrous deceit – that serious art is somehow always synonymous with wilful difficulty – continue to be perpetuated by critics on both sides of the cultural divide? So far as audiences are concerned, it is an attitude that reaches its nadir when, as former SBS public relations manager Mike Field conveys, the watching of subtitled programs becomes for many too much effort (evidently the reason why subtitling is completely absent from commercial television). When whole new worlds of culture and knowledge can be ignored for such spurious reasons, surely it is behoves critics to abandon the ‘difficulty’ stereotype and instead think about encouraging individuals to be both more eclectic and more discerning in their range of cultural engagements – to escape what Robert Hughes has called ‘the dead hand of monocultural impulses’.

It is in this respect that, to my mind, The SBS Story at times falls short in its reasoning. The complexity of notions of both media and audience in cultural debate can no longer be captured by a simplistic opposition between highbrow and popular. On occasion, the authors dance deftly around these concepts, yet at other times they stumble all over them. Especially outmoded is the claim that ‘if there is a continuum from the serious to the popular, then documentaries and sport definitely occupy opposing ends, with movies in the middle’. This fails to acknowledge those in the SBS audience who move comfortably from one end of this imagined spectrum to the other. It does not clarify what it is that apparently makes a documentary inherently taxing viewing, nor explain why there are so many crudely substandard ones (though it screens some excellent examples, SBS provides its fair share of clunkers as well). I also lost count of how many times the chestnut ‘dumbing down’ was trotted out, thus giving that favourite of conservative commentators a primacy in the discussion that it does not deserve.

On the whole, though, Ang, Hawkins and Dabboussy have fashioned a book that is essential reading for anyone interested in media industries and media policy, or in the history of migration and multiculturalism in this country. It concludes by speculating on the future of a broadcaster that has largely been denied the government funding necessary for it to move forward in the twenty-first century. The importance of diversification is emphasised, one example being SBS Independent, which has been associated with many admirable Australian films including The Boys (1998), Look Both Ways (2005), Jewboy (2005) and Ten Canoes (2006).

The debate as to whether SBS has drifted too far from its original charter by incorporating mainstream values, most visibly expressed in the public squabble concerning former newsreader Mary Kostakidis, is a complicated one. Certainly, there are many worrying signs so far as television programing goes. Mike Field is again correct in his emphasis of the word ‘special’ in the SBS title. Its ultimate role must be to provide all Australians with access to worlds, both geographical and cultural, that other media organisations cannot, or simply will not, recognise.

For now, how can one gauge the value of SBS in the present local media environment? Taking advantage of those irksome advertisements, try switching over from the nightly World News Australia in order to see what passes for news and current affairs on commercial television these days. In comparative terms, I would argue SBS is still doing a reasonably good job.