Leah Cowan examines the lack of diversity in British political journalism, why it matters, and the multiple challenges faced by ‘outsiders’ looking to get a foothold.
The stories we devote column inches to make significant contributions to the collective imagination. As feminist academic Donna Haraway writes: ‘It matters what stories we tell to tell stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with.’ The way we present information can never be unbiased; within the copy we file we make decisions about protagonists and antagonists, beginnings and endings, and rights and wrongs. Knowing that the media, often, inevitably, dances to the beat of political agendas and public appetite, and the topics which receive scrutiny and platform in the media feed into political agendas which spin votes and shape state policies, it feels important that we are cognisant of how our fingerprints leave impressions on the clay of our journalistic work. From this viewpoint, the fact that the UK media is 94% white and incredibly monocultural is of deep concern. The 94% of journalists who are white, then, set the standard for what is deemed worth reporting on, and in political journalism, for what counts as ‘political’.
In a bid to prove that the outlet is ‘impartial’, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie introduced new rules for staff which, it was understood, would effectively ban them from attending Black Lives Matter demonstrations and Pride marches in support of LGBT rights and justice. In response to backlash, this announcement was further clarified as only affecting senior reporters, who are expected to ‘take care when making decisions about participating in events’ and ‘not to take a personal public position ... on public policy issues’. Either way, this milquetoast clutch at ‘impartiality’ marks a huge betrayal for workers across the BBC at all levels who are themselves queer, trans and people of colour, and whose lives as people living at the intersection of oppressions based on race, sexuality and gender identity are neither ‘impartial’ nor remotely up for debate.
There is a tacit assumption in Davie’s edict that black and trans journalists, for example, do not have personal stakes in their own lives, but can somehow split the self, holding their identity at arm's length as ‘policy issues’ while the journalistic mind observes and comments. This framing tells journalists who are not white, straight, and cis that the burning issue of their very existence must be packed away and put on the shelf in order for them to do the work of objective reporting. The impact of this adherence to narrow-perspective journalism is keenly felt. The slow decline of traditional reporting and print media – national newspaper sales have fallen by nearly two-thirds over the last two decades – runs congruent to the narrow spectrum of perspectives which the industry welcomes. Less money for specialist, careful, time-consuming reporting means that stories that are already marginalised get pushed out of the main picture.
As Malcolm Dean wrote for the Guardian in 2011: ‘Papers have shrunk, specialist reporters have been slashed and profits have disappeared. As a result there will be fewer well-informed journalists to analyse and present the increasing amount of data. Fewer specialists also means fewer awkward questions asked in ministerial briefings. Less grit in the democratic oyster means fewer policy pearls.’
Migrants - a confected crisis
A key example of this is the broad brushstroke and sensationalised media reporting around the ‘migrant crisis’ which peaked in 2015. High numbers of people fled conflicts that Britain had performed a key role in catalysing, which resulted in increased fatalities in the Mediterranean Sea and directly led to the hardening of Britain’s borders. Governments seemingly dodged accountability for the 2,500-5,000 people a year who were reported dead or missing after attempting to make the crossing, alongside a 100% spike in racist attacks on people of colour in the UK in the run-up to Brexit. Despite pockets of sensitive reporting, a media industry which is largely monocultural, homogenous, and slashing reporters and budgets to stay afloat struggled to bring humanity to the public conversation emerging around this issue.
Research conducted by journalist Liz Gerard revealed that between 2010 and 2016, the Daily Express made immigration its leading story 179 times, or approximately twice a month for six years straight. The Daily Mail came a close second, splashing with a story about immigration 122 times in the same time period. The frequent repetition of these messages gave the wholly unfounded impression that Britain was under threat. A fallout of this approach, it could be inferred, was the referendum on Britain’s membership to the EU in 2016 which in reality became a battle for the heart and soul of Britain, and a fight to the death to pull up the drawbridge and curb migration. In this context, based on frequency of Google searches and polls of the key issues informing voters’ decision-making, immigration became a lightning rod issue which swayed the referendum vote. It’s worth considering how these events might have played out differently with sensitive, nuanced reporting delivered by people with a lived experience or informed perspective on migration.
We can draw a connecting line between media reports, and the decision (albeit marginal) to push forward with Brexit, because the more the media talks about borders and migration, whatever the message (and in tabloid newspapers, often the message is sensational and incredibly hostile to migrant communities), the public is left with a sense that the borders are vulnerable. In an article exploring the paradox of border security, social sciences professor Bastian Vollmer explains: ‘Borders are open but secure – a difficult message to bring across an audience that is struggling with an environment increasingly dictated by confusion and ambiguity’. This message is especially difficult to convey if the media industry doing the conveying is so far removed from the realities of its intricacies.
Barriers to entry
The dearth of accurate, humanising reporting on these complex issues can be in part attributed to the fact that the people who are best-placed to speak on them are for the most part unable to break into the media industry. At entry level in particular, the industry relies on unpaid and low-paid labour, and often requires workers to check their own lived experiences at the door. My own experiences of trying to enter the media industry are not uncommon among my peers: in my early 20s I was offered an internship at the Guardian as part of their positive action scheme, and upon discovering that the placement was unpaid, I turned it down. The email thread which followed (an exchange between two editors, who were older men) reads like satire. One wrote, of my rejection of the offer, ‘that’s young people for you’. The other replied: ‘I think it wd [sic] be extremely shortsighted of Leah to turn down the chance to spend time at the Guardian ... Does she know what the positive action scheme is? Has she seen our brochure? But it’s her call.’
I had seen the brochure, and it was indeed my call. The existence of an unpaid positive action scheme for people of colour pointed to a glaring misunderstanding – that the lack of ‘diversity’ in newsrooms was about black people needing to just be in the room by any means necessary. My first encounter with the media industry left a bitter taste; I felt that a positive action scheme which seemingly lacked understanding of the barriers and structures that prevents us from being there in the first place was ticking boxes and filling quotas, not doing the work of radical reconfiguration. The reality is that in the UK, communities of colour lag behind white people when it comes to wealth accumulation. This means that we are simply less likely to have the funds available to us to do a week’s unpaid internship, with no concrete prospect of employment at the end.
It appears that the situation doesn’t improve as journalists rise up the pecking order, unless they toe the line and absorb and imitate the dominant white culture of newsrooms, or become impartial on their own lives. In July 2019, presenter Naga Munchetty was reprimanded for breaching BBC guidelines for commenting on racist tweets sent by Donald Trump. In response to his online vitriol suggesting that four US congresswomen should ‘go back’ to where they came from, Munchetty noted that ‘Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism’. The BBC responded to Munchetty’s comments, stating that her words had gone ‘beyond what the guidelines allow for’.
Backlash against the BBC’s reprimand resulted in then director general Tony Hall reversing the decision to uphold the complaint against Munchetty’s comments, reiterating that the presenter is an ‘exceptional’ journalist. In an interview with Vogue in February 2020, when questioned on whether the BBC was institutionally racist, Munchetty dryly remarked: ‘Find me a large organisation, and find me an employee from a minority group who feels they are able to bring their true self to work today. I don’t think you’ll be able to.’
The impartiality fallacy
The idea of a presenter being able to make only impartial observations on an incident is comparable to the anthropological practice of (mostly wealthy white men) making distanced observations on situations ‘in the field’. This framing within anthropology has been critiqued in-depth by a host of researchers, including feminist anthropologist Tomomi Yamaguchi, whose 2007 study argued that the binary places of ‘home’ and being ‘in the field’ were increasingly fluid categories. It might be more useful to accept, with transparency, that the ability for a journalist to step back and interpret an unfolding news story with an impartial eye is a fallacy.
However, the other danger faced by people of colour and other marginalised groups entering the media industry is the imperative that we only talk about race. As former gal-dem editor Heather Barrett said in an interview in 2017, ‘Women of colour basically get commissioned to write about race, to write about their experiences of oppression and things like that, and it’s a very limited box’. In step with being forced to chameleon ourselves into the white, monocultural, elite landscape of mainstream media, we can also be expected to mine our own lives for content; we are ‘experts by experience’ rather than skilled enough to report on any topic. Award-winning essayist and writer Roxane Gay explains on the Another Round podcast that black women are often expected to cannibalise our experiences, and to lay bare our trauma in exchange for being permitted to write or speak at all.
The issues undergirding the glaring whiteness and same-ness of newsrooms are those which are faced across industries. It is essential that routes into journalism are made accessible and desirable. Entry level jobs must be secure, contracted, and paid at a living wage, and union organising must be recognised and encouraged. More critical and more difficult to enact, is for some in well-paid positions to give up power. Only top-to-bottom reconfiguration of mainstream outlets can ensure that a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences are informing journalistic work at all levels – from agenda-setting and commissioning, to writing, editing, presenting and beyond. Without this, any ‘diversity’ or positive action scheme is merely window dressing; time and time again the affect gets a rebrand but the substance stays the same. It remains to be seen whether outlets can be courageous enough to centre our voices through meaningful structural change.
Leah Cowan is a former politics editor for gal-dem, an online magazine run by women and non-binary people of colour. Her first book, Border Nation: A Story of Migration, will be published in spring 2021.