‘I felt dirty and humiliated, suicidal’: Kodie Bedford details treatment at SBS

Bedford, who now writes for the hit ABC show Mystery Road, left journalism after her time at SBS, admitting her two years at the public broadcaster led to her losing faith in media.

In two Twitter threads titled “My First Career”, Bedford said she was mocked for her accent, was the subject of jokes about alcoholism and was always introduced as the “Indigenous cadet journalist”.

Bedford said despite still carrying trauma and feeling sick about her time there, she was adding her voice in the hopes it might help to “change the system”.

Bedford, who goes by Aunty Kodie on Twitter, said she only called out TV station “because it’s touted as a champion of diverse voices”.

“It wasn’t a champion for me,” she added.

Bedford said it was mainly one SBS employee who targeted her – and her other Aboriginal colleagues.

“My Aboriginal colleagues and I were sent an email to improve our grammar. We were told to do this course for school students. We felt dumb straight away,” she wrote.

“I was the newest to the team, but the other Aboriginal journalists had been there for years – they were confused. Why just us?

“We’d (the Aboriginal journalists) then had to suffer the humiliation of sitting next to the person like a school child and going through our story line by line, told why it was bad writing and why the script wasn’t good enough. Everything had to be re-written.”

Bedford said white journalists were often given precedent over her and her team despite her Aboriginal colleagues offering to pick up shifts during the holiday period when the news team was “crying out for staff”.

“I know it was because news bosses were told we were not up to standard. We felt like the dopey blackfellas in the corner, ticking boxes,” she wrote.

“My colleague would continually pitch to Dateline – again denied. The story pitches were good. They ended up giving them to the white journos.”

Bedford said she was faced with continuous microagressions from the same colleague.

“I was told I was one of the good ones. Comments were made about my looks; apparently I looked more Aboriginal on certain days. There were jokes made about alcohol. I was shame,” she said.

Bedford said the treatment became so bad that the morale in her team “hit rock bottom” – so she decided to complain to a higher up.

“But nothing was done. And that’s when sh*t really hit the fan. The person did the classic white fragility thing and made themselves the victim; us Aboriginal journalists were the ones being horrible to the non-Indigenous staff. They threatened to sue me,” she said.

Bedford’s “last humiliation” was when that same staff member complained about her desk.

Bedford said “one by one” she and her Aboriginal colleagues left SBS.

“Most of us didn’t stay in media,” she said.

While Bedford’s experience was in 2008, she said she was telling her story because the “system is still broken”.

“I’ve been told nothing’s changed,” she added.

Bedford ended her thread on a positive and proof that they were “good, solid journalists”.

“One of my colleagues went to work for a different media organisation and won a Walkley (they supported them entering). It was proof we were good,” she wrote.

In a statement, an SBS spokesperson said the broadcaster was “deeply saddened to read Kodie’s account of her experiences at SBS in 2008”.

“Racism is abhorrent and we are committed to ensuring it has no place in SBS,” the spokesperson added.

Originally published as ‘Racist’ workplace left journo ‘suicidal’