On Wednesday the 19th February I attended the Royal Television
Society Journalism Awards. It is the annual festival to celebrate the best
in TV news and current affairs. A place where BBC’s Panorama goes head to head
with Channel 4’s Dispatches and the big news channels from CNN to Sky fight for
bragging rights for the rest of the year. (For those who are interested it was
a very good night for C4’s Dispatches, and the people at ITN went home very
happy).
Looking around award ceremonies is an opportunity for a snap shot of
not only what the make-up of an industry is but more importantly what the
diversity of the leaders of that industry really looks like. By definition all
the scrubbed up journalists, wearing their glad-rags and dining at the event
were either senior management or programme makers at the forefront of British
TV News and Current Affairs.
As I tucked into my filet of sea bass on a potato base something just
didn’t add up.
We are often given statistics that the TV industry might be as much
as 12% BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic), 5% disabled and even as much
as 48% female but award ceremonies demonstrate that often these numbers don’t
give us the full picture.
The first problem with the large headline figures is which grade people
are at. Some broadcasters, like the BBC, split their diversity figures into
grades to avoid the diversity stats being disproportionately represented by
junior staff. However this can lead to a second problem.
In the large headline statistics non-editorial staff are always
included. These are people who are not directly involved in the editorial
content of programme making (HR staff, accountants, legal support). Some of
these people can hold very important positions within a company/broadcaster and
so will swell the diversity figures at senior levels. However these people have
little influence on the subject matter of the programmes produced and what you
and I see on our TV screens.
None of the broadcasters when they count their diversity figures
distinguish between editorial and non-editorial staff. The suspicion has always
been that the diversity for editorial staff is a lot lower than the headline
figures for the total television workforce. We gets hints this may be the case
when the BBC publishes the fact that their total BAME workforce rate is above
12% but those working in television is closer to 9%.
The 9% still includes the very important roles of production
managers, talent managers, production executives and production coordinators
who are not directly involved in editorial decisions.
For this reason the snap shot of the people I was dining with in
their black ties and ball gowns at the RTS journalism awards is an rare
opportunity to get a measure of what the important editorial decision makers
look like.
In an incredibly non-scientific assessment of just walking around
the award ceremony I estimated that of the several hundred journalists that
that were there I could count the number of BAME people on less than ten
fingers, the number of disabled people on less than one hand and women
definitely did not make up 48%.
Of the people who won awards on the night Krishnan Guru-Murthy was
part of the C4 News team that picked up the best News Programme of the year and
my team won best current affairs programmes in the Nations & Regions (so at
least one black executive producer went home happy). But the two of us were the
rare exception and I didn’t see any gongs going to disabled journalists.
Six months ago Lenny Henry made headlines at the BAFTA’s award
ceremony by asking where all the black people were. While I echo his sentiments
I have a slightly more modest request:
Where are the statistics that accurately reflect the diversity in
the television industry?
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