Former star of SBS program The Movie Show (and personal foe of Zach Braff) Margaret Pomeranz has written an article for today's Crikey mailout in which she displays both support for newsreader Mary Kostakidis, as well as contempt for the current management of SBS.

Here's a brief excerpt to whet your tastebuds.

The recent acrimonious departure of Mary Kostakidis is the last in the long line of defections and ejections from SBS under the current management. The organization has been stripped of just about anyone who had any connection to an SBS where an ethos of commitment pervaded the organization. There has been a cultural genocide at the place.

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Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, that dollar will ultimately shape programming. The antics of Paris Hilton are well-covered on the commercial broadcasters, what is the justification for including a story about her at the top end of the SBS news? Did anyone mention dumbing-down?

You could perhaps justify the changes if they proved more relevant to more Australians. But the reverse has been the case. SBS news was respected, valued and watched. In its new, more commercial incarnation it is actually less watched. It's sad to see the demise of this flagship of SBS as the ratings plummeted with the new format. A format very much like Channel 9. Or 7. Or 10.

Touche.

Meanwhile, smh.com.au has Paul Sheehan declaring that SBS is "an indulgence we don't need", stating, amongst other things -

the problems facing SBS, in particular, are bigger than any personality or any management policy. The problem is structural. The real question facing the Federal Government, and the overwhelming majority of taxpayers who pay for SBS but rarely watch it, is whether SBS should continue to exist at all.

I think it should go. Because SBS is more valuable dead than alive.

The Special Broadcasting Service Act should be repealed, the corporation dismantled and sold and its valuable broadcasting spectrum auctioned off. SBS has outlived its charter, and the charter has always been of dubious social utility. (I quote, in part: "As far as practicable, inform, educate and entertain Australians in their preferred languages.")

Australia has moved on. The term "ethnic" is now laughably outdated. Technology has been transformed.

Ooer. Personally, this has been the most interesting SBS has ever been in our eyes, excluding the period when it had the show Life Support, and the night we stumbled across Inspector Rex for the first time.

Avid SBS viewers will have noticed that figurehead news presenter Mary Kostakidis has been missing from the news desk for the past week or so, but it was only a few days ago that word emerged that was not merely taking a break and she had in fact left in protest:

She is understood to have stormed out of the newsroom a week and a half ago and hasn't turned up for work since.

She is said to be furious at changes to the news bulletin, which she believes undermine SBS standards.

However, continuing on a theme noted by the SMH, last night Australia's favourite televisual tabloid, A Current Affair, speculated that the changes to SBS's modus operandi were only one cause of Kostakidis' upset.

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