“…we took pride in knowing we were BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” text message.
I received that text on Thursday 21st April while on a train going from Glasgow to London. It was one of the proudest and saddest moments of my career in television.
First of all let me give you a little background to the text. It was sent by one of my best Broadcast Journalists after he had just finished filming a piece on sectarian violence in Scotland (not traditionally seen as a “black subject”). It was filmed in the wake of three parcel bombs being sent to prominent public figures associated with Celtic football club. Celtic is a club which, along with Rangers, symbolises the sectarian tensions in the west of Scotland.
I was proud because in many ways this was the culmination of what I think I’ve been striving towards for years: A truly colour-blind employment policy. The sectarian story was not a side story or an “…and finally”, nor was it what TV bosses euphemistically call an “urban” or “community” story (really meaning “black”). This was a big story with national and international significance. The footage the crew filmed was used on various BBC news outlets and even the odd sports programmes. It was a moment that proved the point that BBC Scotland News & Current Affairs had a diverse enough workforce that when a big story breaks and we put our best people on it they could be all white, all non-white or a mixture. It is the story that comes first.
Now “BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” isn’t exactly on par with Jackie Robinson breaking the Major League Baseball colour barrier in 1947 or Nelson Mandela walking free from Robben Island in 1990 but it was the ordinariness of the event that made it so special to me. We sent out a crew and they happened to be black. The truth is I hadn’t actually realised we had sent out an all-black crew until I received the text. I had just sent out the best people available to cover the story.
(Incidentally between them the crew have around ten Dispatches and Panorama credits to their names so a simple news and current affairs piece on sectarianism was not the biggest stretch of their abilities)
But while “BBC Scotland’s first all-black news crew” made me proud it was also tinged with sadness.
It was tinged with sadness because it was so easy to achieve. There was no affirmative action, we haven’t had a non-white training programme, none of the crew were part of a special BBC mentor scheme (I think one of them used to be part of a Channel 4 mentor scheme) and there was definitely no positive discrimination. Instead since being made Editor of Scotland Current Affairs all I have done is try and identify and employ the best people – three years later we are sending out all black news crews.
Scotland has a far smaller BME population than London and other places in the UK and yet we’ve been able to increase the diversity of our staff. With it being this easy my sadness comes from the fact it seems so difficult to achieve similar results elsewhere in television.
I have lost count of how many meetings I have gone to about increasing diversity in television. I have seen numerous diversity programmes developed, implemented and then ended with limited results. From my own experience I can’t help but feel that diversity in the media could be solved incredibly easily; people in positions of responsibility simply need to employ the best people regardless of their backgrounds. This might sound naive but I do believe the talent is already out there and it can be done.
The fact the problem continues to exist when it seems so deceptively easy to solve makes me sad.
The fact we are making incremental progress though does make me happy and when it has something to do with Scotland Current Affairs it actually fills me with a little pride.
(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 3rd May 2011)
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