Don't feel represented in the media? Here's why
New figures show 80% of journalists are upper class and 92% are white. But we can't tell the stories that matter if we don't represent the societies we serve...
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I can still recall the nerves I felt, waiting to be introduced to the glamorous, statuesque, terribly intimidating newsreader whose work I idolised.
I was 19, on my first work experience placement, and the presenter – let’s call her Rebecca – was one of only a handful of women fronting any of the prime-time news shows I devoured nightly. What’s more, she was Scottish. I studied her work like it was my religion. I remember my palms sweating as I was introduced to her.
Rebecca smiled, asked where I was from – and then, having established we were both Edinburgh girls, what school I went to. I swear, I saw her recoil at my answer. Did she take a step back? Did I imagine it?
“I went to [insert private all-girls school here],” she replied, turning to go. “Enjoy your work experience.”
I’d been there less than an hour and, already, I felt dismissed. Rebecca didn’t speak to me again for the remainder of my two-week placement. Twenty years later, I’ve rarely felt smaller.
I was thinking of that rough introduction to my industry this week, as the National Council for the Training of Journalism (NCTJ) published its 2022 Diversity in Journalism report, highlighting the absolute and appalling lack of working-class representation in British news today.
Over the last year, a staggering 80% of journalists working in Britain came from the top social classes – up from 75% in 2020. By contrast, only 2% had a parent in the lowest two occupational groups. Two.
While class has always been an issue in British journalism, an industry buoyed up by unpaid internships and nepotism, this latest report found the proportion of staff coming from upper class backgrounds has now reached record levels. Journalists today are twice as likely as the general population to come from privileged backgrounds – a statistic the (brilliant) working-class reporter Robyn Vinter this week branded “absolutely atrocious.”
Vinter, who recently gave a presentation at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute entitled ‘Britain’s class problem and how it dominates journalism’, revealed how her research into the issue left her feeling emotional and angry about the fact our newsrooms are no longer representative of the communities they serve.
“The figures and the stories are so absolutely depressing and really caused me to re-examine things that I'd experienced even relatively recently,” she wrote on Twitter this week. “Especially things that I'd internalised as a personal failing – not being a polished public speaker, having an ‘annoying voice’, not being articulate, not being able to voice my achievements. These are not *real failings*. They're not even important for my actual job!”
That particular Tweet made me stop short too, floored by a memory of when my own accent influenced my career track – again, during an unpaid work experience placement. Smarting from my introduction to the Scottish scene, I’d travelled next to London to do an internship with a BBC documentary team. I saved for weeks to afford the trip, begging cash from my folks for the ticket – but just three days in, I was shipped back to Scotland to join the location unit where my “regional accent” could be “more useful”.
Instead of hanging out in Television Centre, learning the ropes and obsessively trying to spot Kate Adie in the canteen, I spent the next two weeks immersed in gang violence on Glasgow’s roughest estates, trying to set up interviews but mostly getting doors slammed in my face. I spent much of my time terrified but, convinced I was being given a chance to shine, stayed quiet and swallowed my nerves.
By the time my placement ended, my fellow intern, a lovely girl with a double-barrelled surname who had remained in London on desk duties, had already accepted an entry level position to be taken up just as soon as she graduated Oxford that summer. I’d yet to meet the director or news editor, having spent my entire placement off-site. Would I have been considered for the job if I’d been there? I’ll never know. By then, I’d missed my chance.
“The distance from a story to a newsroom is not the issue. It’s the distance between the people in the story and the people reporting it that is key…”
Highlighting these issues isn’t sour grapes, or an easy gripe from jobbing journalists like me, bitter about their lack of an Oxbridge education. This stuff truly matters. The loss of apprenticeships and on-the-job training in journalism has had a serious impact on the make-up of the country’s newsrooms – and that deeply influences the stories we hear.
Speaking at the NCTJ report’s launch, Mike Hill, director of the MA News programme at Cardiff University, said it’s become increasingly difficult for young people from working class backgrounds to get into journalism. “My local library is shut, my old school is in special measures, there isn’t the funding from employers to send people on training courses, people are spooked by the £10,000 figure to pay for postgraduate journalism training,” he said. “Then there’s the lack of cash, there being no network – I didn’t know anyone who went to university, let alone who was a journalist. And then there’s the imposter syndrome...”
It’s an issue that abounds across the creative industries, and the solution has long been presented as geographical – move the newsrooms and the accents will follow. But what’s particularly concerning about these figures is how recent the regression they show is. The drop-off of working-class representation detailed in the report came AFTER the BBC moved a huge swathe of its operation out of London in a bid to improve its record on diversity and battle accusations of South East bias.
But we shouldn’t be surprised that simply shifting teams to a new office hasn’t changed their approach. We only need to look at what happened at Grenfell Tower – situated a stone’s throw from BBC HQ – to know that the distance from a story to a newsroom is not the issue. It’s the distance between the people in the story and the people reporting it that is key.
Grenfell residents were shouting about fire safety for months before 72 lives were claimed in an entirely avoidable blaze, yet their voices weren’t heard. Why?
Before the total erosion of local newspapers, that story would have been picked up by a reporter who’d established connections within the local community. Today, with newsgathering being less about boots on the ground than characters on Twitter, these stories are missed. In the case of Grenfell, that shift was catastrophic.
We all live in social media echo chambers. But when 98% of journalists are degree-educated, those echo chambers are distinctly lacking in class diversity – and thus, so are the stories they tell and the people they feature. Would Brexit have happened had our news media spent time answering the concerns of voters in Red Wall seats, for example? Who knows – our largely pro-European newsrooms didn’t think to ask their views.
The NCTJ report highlights that some progress is being made – but 92% of journalists being white down from 94% doesn’t really feel like progress worth celebrating to me. There are now more women than men in the profession, but not in the editor’s chair. Disabled journalists now make up 16% of employees, up from 15%. The changes are tiny – and while incremental progress is still progress, it’s simply not enough.
Some organisations are trying – but having spent two years on The Flock trying to self-fund a platform that amplified marginalised voices, I know how hard it is. Ultimately, the income just wasn’t there for me. Other organisations with better connections and funding than I had talk a good game but are disappointing in the execution – Tortoise, for example, says its mission is to open up journalism and close “the gap between the powerful and the powerless” – yet its latest trumpeted hire is Andrew Neil. Yes, that Andrew Neil. The messaging and the method simply don’t add up. It’s almost as though those at the top of the industry don’t want to leave the boy’s club after all.
When I was studying journalism, I remember attending a heated debate on how the industry could best perform its role as a societal watchdog. Today, 20 years of supposed progress later, it’s hard to see how a masthead stuffed full of upper-class chums could ever be more than a governmental lapdog…
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