On disinformation, multicultural media, and the people who are the only real defence against it.
Growing up in a Greek household, the news didn’t arrive for us the way it did for everyone else. It didn’t come from the six o’clock bulletin. It was delivered in the Greek-language paper my father read cover to cover every day, on Greek radio, and, if you had access, on the handful of Greek-language programs on television. For my parents’ generation, that was the primary source of news. When I think back on it now, the lesson is clear to me: the most powerful media in this country is very often the media that never shows up in the ratings.
As a broadcast journalist, I spent more than two decades inside mainstream newsrooms, including every commercial network and both public broadcasters. The most valuable currency connecting journalism to its audience was never reach, or speed, or production budget. It was trust. Trust is the engine of deeper, more authentic connection. But it has to be earned, or it’s invariably lost.
It’s worth pausing on how much that currency is worth right now.
The 2026 Reuters Digital News Report, released this month, found audience trust in SBS sitting at 66 per cent, up seven points year-on-year, and equal first among Australian news organisations alongside the ABC. Our public broadcasters remain the most trusted news sources in the country, and engagement is climbing with them. That is a genuinely encouraging result. But it also tells only part of the story, because the trust that decides what a community believes often lives in places no survey measures at all, in the in-language outlet, the community newsletter, or the voice of a respected local leader.
That is the superpower of ethnic media and community leadership. These are not distribution channels. They are trusted voices, and when a trusted voice speaks, people don’t simply hear it. They believe it.
Which is exactly why that trust, the most precious thing these outlets hold, is precisely what misinformation and disinformation are built to exploit.
The distortion comes from two directions
When most people picture misinformation reaching multicultural communities, they imagine a flood of mistruths pouring in from outside, with ethnic media as the pipe it flows through. However, the distortion of the truth comes from two completely different directions.
The first is misrepresentation: the way communities see themselves reflected back in mainstream, English-language media. Flattened. Reduced to a single dimension, viewed through one stereotyped lens. It’s often that newsrooms don’t have the resources; people, the languages or the contacts to see a community in any real depth, so they reach for the shorthand. But on the receiving end, the cumulative effect is a slow distortion of the truth, and it quietly corrodes trust.
Here is the surprising part. You’d assume many of these communities had given up on mainstream media altogether. They haven’t. Asked to rate their trust in the ABC, in SBS, in the major papers, they sit in the middle, cautious, neither rejecting it nor swallowing it whole. They read everything, mainstream and social, cross-checking one source against another, because experience has taught them they must. That isn’t disengagement. That is a community practising exactly the careful media literacy the rest of us could learn from.
The second direction is the dangerous one. It’s targeted disinformation, in language, moving through closed channels; WeChat, WhatsApp, the private family group chat. Often that material falls completely outside the reach of our public agencies, our national media, even the platforms’ own algorithms. Nobody official ever sees it. To the rest of Australia, it is invisible.
Which is exactly why multicultural communities are hit hardest at the moments that matter most, during an election, during a referendum, during a pandemic. We lived it through COVID. While the rest of the country argued about lockdowns, in-language health misinformation moved through these communities largely unseen, and the consequences were real, measured in rising vaccine hesitancy, with our newest arrivals among the most exposed.
Why translation isn’t the answer
Here is the finding I most want to leave people with, because it overturns the way almost every government and organisation in this country approaches the problem.
The instinct, the moment we realise a community is being hit by misinformation, is to take our message and translate it. Get it into the languages. Push it out. Tick the box. Done.
It doesn’t work. Generic campaigns fail even when they are perfectly translated into a dozen languages, and the reason matters. The disinformation reaching these communities is not generic. It is exquisitely targeted: tailored scaremongering about geopolitics, the economy, immigration, pitched precisely to a particular community’s particular fears and particular history.
You cannot meet a tailored lie with a translated press release.
The best practitioners already understand this. The team at Ethnolink, who have generously let me quote them, put it simply: there is a world of difference between translating into a language and actually reaching a community. Language is the easy part. Community is the hard part. So they do something they call community validation. They don’t assume a message has landed; they take it back to the community and test it before it ever goes out.
Sit with that, because it’s the whole answer to disinformation in miniature. Don’t assume. Verify with the community. Build the relationship before the crisis, not during it.
So who is actually fighting it?
If the agencies can’t see this material and translation can’t counter it, who is doing the work? Too often the burden falls on families. On individuals. Disproportionately on women and on younger people, the ones with the language and the digital fluency to spot it — who find themselves correcting their own parents, aunts and uncles in the family group chat, over and over. It’s exhausting, and it breeds conflict. But telling someone they’re wrong rarely works. You don’t change your father’s mind by telling him he’s a fool. What changes his mind is that he trusts you. It is the relationship that does the work, not the correction. The only thing that ever gets through is a voice you already trust.
So what actually works?
Not the law alone. It can’t reach these spaces, and we watched the federal misinformation bill collapse in late 2024 in any case. Not the platforms — Meta has walked back its fact-checking entirely. What works, every time, is something else: responses that are community-based, culturally resonant, carried by trusted people in trusted settings, in language. It only works when it comes from inside the community, from people already part of it, not from outside.
That is the point. Multicultural media and community leaders are the single most effective defence we have against disinformation, because they are the trusted, in-language, community-embedded voices no agency and no algorithm will ever replicate. The messenger matters more than the message. And in these communities, they are the messenger.
What I saw at the Commission
I saw this up close during my four years chairing the Victorian Multicultural Commission. Whenever we needed to reach communities that mainstream campaigns never touched, the answer was never a cleverer translation. It was a relationship with the people inside those communities who were already trusted. One of the things I’m proudest of from that time was helping start an Australian-first cadetship with the ABC, bringing young people from diverse backgrounds into mainstream newsrooms, because the only long-term cure for that first distortion, the flattening, is newsrooms that can finally see the country they report on. We also began a multicultural film festival, so communities could tell their own stories in their own voices. It’s still running, because the hunger of a community to see itself told truthfully never fades.
The single most common kind of misinformation Australians now encounter is false and misleading information about particular groups of people. About communities. About one another. So let me be clear about the stakes: this is not a niche concern at the edge of the media. The distortion of the truth about who we are to each other has become the main event.
And the defence against it will not be built in Canberra. It will be built in rooms, in the relationships between the organisations that need to reach communities and the trusted media that actually can.
There’s a writer on community who has guided my approach to engagement, the wonderful Peter Block, and his idea is a simple one: real change never starts with the whole system. It starts in a room. A small group of people choosing to have a different conversation; that’s the unit of change. You shift one room, then the next, then the one after that, and that is how a country actually moves.
Misinformation is fast. It’s clever. It speaks every language we do. But it will always come up second best against trust. And trust is the thing our community voices already hold. So the task is simple, if not easy: take it out, and go change the next room. And the one after that.
Helen Kapalos is a strategic communications, governance and media professional and a former Chairperson of the Victorian Multicultural Commission. This piece is adapted from her keynote address, “Trusted Voices,” delivered at The LOTE Agency Multicultural Media Event.