Welcome to the Media Society Substack. In this edition, Jaldeep Katwala, the Director of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, asks has anything changed?
Where did everybody go?
In the summer of 2020, you could not move in British media for statements of intent. Broadcasters, publishers, streamers and studios queued up to pledge, to ring-fence, to convene a task force. Money was announced. Targets were set. Sir Lenny Henry had spent the better part of a decade arguing, patiently, that this could not go on – and for a few months it looked as though the industry finally agreed.
Six years on, I have a simple question: where did everybody go?
It is worth asking, and the honest answer is not “nowhere”. Some of the 2020 commitments were real and some of them held. I don’t want to be the person who insists nothing ever changes, but if you ask me whether the position of diversity in the UK media is stronger now than it was when the Sir Lenny Henry Centre was founded, I’d have to say: in some places yes, in most places it has quietly stalled, and in a worrying number, it is going backwards.
Forty years, roughly the same conversation
I should say who’s talking. I’ve spent close to forty years in and around journalism: BBC radio and television, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, ITN, Channel 4 News, then a long spell in international media development, reimagining newsrooms and media houses in conflict and post-conflict places where even getting a bulletin to air was challenging and a genuine, unsung achievement. Latterly, I’ve worked in community and public-interest news – including building the Public Interest News Foundation’s network of independent publishers, and working at The Bristol Cable. In January, I became Director of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University.
I mention the forty years for one reason. The conversation I am now paid to have is, in its essentials, the same conversation I first heard as a young reporter and producer. The faces round the table have changed less than you’d hope, and the arguments against change have simply learned new vocabulary. What was once “we can’t find the talent” is now, in some quarters, “diversity has gone too far” – a remarkable claim to make about most newsrooms that still, in 2026, do not resemble the country they report on.
All Sir Lenny wants to do is to give talented people the opportunity to rise and shine. That is what I have spent my own career trying to do, and it is why I am here.
A colder climate
What’s changed most is the media weather. In 2020 the wind was, briefly, behind this work. Today it is in our faces.
Two forces are doing the damage. The first is money. Public service broadcasting is in a period of hard retrenchment: the BBC alone is scrambling to find hundreds of millions in savings, and where cuts fall, they fall first on the newest, the most junior and the most precarious. Since a great deal of recent diversity progress lives precisely in those categories - early-career hires, freelancers, fixed-term contracts - a round of “efficiencies” can undo years of careful recruitment without anyone ever writing “reduce diversity” in an email directing it to be so. Our own research at the Centre keeps finding this pattern: stunted careers and stalled progress landing hardest on exactly the people the industry spent 2020 promising to bring in.
The second force is political, and it is transatlantic. The backlash against “DEI” that has swept through American corporate life has given cover to people here who were never very comfortable with the whole project. It has become sayable again, in rooms where it had gone quiet, that this has all been a distraction. It has not been a distraction. It has been unfinished.
In his second annual lecture for the Centre earlier this summer, Sir Lenny put it plainly:
“The problem isn’t DEI. The problem is racism. The problem is sexism. The problem is ableism. The problem is homophobia. The problem is power. We are in a fight for the heart and soul of our society. We are in a fight for who tells our stories, who gets heard, and who gets to shape the story of this country.”
Why counting isn’t enough
Here is the part that most exercises me, because it is fixable. The most damning number about the BBC’s audience is one the BBC itself publishes - and then does nothing with.
On page 219 of its Annual Report and Accounts for 2025/26, in a data table almost nobody reads, sits this: in an average week, 85% of white adults use the BBC, against 61% of Black, Asian and minority ethnic adults – a reach gap of 24 percentage points. The BBC sets itself targets for the nations and regions, tracked and trumpeted year on year, and reports its workforce diversity in detail. But this number, arguably the starkest of the lot, sits there with no target beside it, no commitment attached, and not a line of narrative to acknowledge it. Counting, it turns out, is not the same as caring. I’m bothered by that. I think we all should be.
The field has moved - the conversation hasn’t
There’s a further problem, and it’s mine as much as anyone’s. The diversity conversation in this country is still overwhelmingly a broadcasting one. That made sense when broadcasting was where the cultural power sat. It is no longer only there.
The power has been migrating for a decade – to the streamers who now commission a large share of what we watch; to a global games industry bigger by revenue than film and music combined; to a national press whose print sales have collapsed but whose agenda-setting reach, online and through social media, is much as it ever was; and now, fastest of all, to the AI systems increasingly deciding what any of us is shown and told. If those of us who care about representation spend the next five years perfecting our arguments about broadcast television, we may win them and lose everything that matters. Whose data trains the model is a diversity question. We should be asking it.
Which brings me to the Centre
The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity was founded in 2020 at Birmingham City University by Sir Lenny Henry, Marcus Ryder, Professor Diane Kemp and Marverine Cole. It is a research centre with a campaigning temperament. We produce evidence - workforce analysis across years of published data, audience reach studies, close reading of what the industry’s own reports do and don’t say – and then we refuse to let that evidence sit politely on a shelf. With Cardiff University, we publish Representology, a journal we describe as a magazine with rigour, precisely so the arguments reach practitioners and not only academics. We want to be in the rooms - or Zooms - where the decisions are made.
My shorthand for all this is a theory of change in three beats: shed light, generate heat, and try to make change happen. The light is the evidence; advocacy without it is just noise, and the sector has noise to spare. The heat is putting that evidence in front of the people writing the White Papers, running the newsrooms and holding the budgets, and keeping it there. The hope for change is the only part that counts for me. The other two are means to the end.
Why now?
The honest state of play, then: real gains in a few places, a quiet stall or reverse gear in many, a colder climate everywhere, a measurement system that reveals plenty but rarely leads to systemic and structural change, and a whole new landscape - streaming, gaming, press, AI - where the work has barely begun. It is a job description for me. It should be one for all of us.
Six years ago, the industry made itself a set of promises. Somebody has to keep asking whether they were kept – loudly, early, and with the evidence to back it. That is what the Sir Lenny Henry Centre exists to do, and it is what I hope to keep on doing. Is there anybody out there?