Biden's Cabinet is the Most Racially Diverse in History, the Political Journalists However are Still Overwhelmingly White - That's a Problem

The United States has a new president and there is no denying the fact that for many people of colour even in the depths of winter the sun seems to be shining a little brighter.

The weight of the last four years living with the world’s superpower being overseen by a person who retweeted known white nationalists, and who frequently found moral equivalence between racists and anti-racists, has been lifted.

The new administration is arguably the most racially diverse in history. According to CNN 50% of President Joe Biden’s cabinet appointments so far are people of colour. This compares to 16% under President Trump, and even beats the previous record of 42% under Barack Obama.

While I believe this level of diversity should be celebrated there is one massive problem that people are not talking about...

The lack of diversity of the media and journalists that are meant to be a check and balance on the government.

According to NiemenLab about three-quarters of US newsroom employees are non-Hispanic white, and white men make up roughly half of all newsroom staff.

Statistics around the diversity of the specific journalists who make up the White House press corps are thin on the ground, but in 2018 the Washington Post ran a piece titled “The White House pre4ss room is overwhelmingly white. Does it matter?”

The piece was prompted by rival newspaper, the New York Times, appointing its seventh reporter to cover the White House and all seven of them being white.

The piece also pointed out that while the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) “doesn’t take a census of its 600 regular and associate members… in its 104-year history, the WHCA has had only two nonwhite presidents, and only five nonwhite correspondents have served on its board”.

And in case you were wondering, the Washington Post piece answered its own question by concluding that the lack of racial diversity in journalists at the White House definitely does matter.

It matters because politicians irrespective of their best intentions and racial backgrounds are only human. What they focus on and the issues they prioritise are invariably determined by the public discourse around them.

They will pay closer attention to the issues which are getting more public scrutiny, and seek to address problems that could affect them negatively in the court of public opinion.

All of those things are shaped, or at the very least influenced, by the media in general and the journalists covering politics in particular. It is hard for a politician to address an issue such as higher rates of mental health problems in the black community, and to justify committing real resources to it, if the press are not even going to talk about it or see it as a problem.

It is equally difficult for politicians to ignore even minor issues that may only affect a small privileged part of society if it is making headline news every day.

If we want the increased racial diversity in President Biden’s new cabinet to make a real difference then we must concentrate our efforts on where the diversity is really lacking, and that is among the journalists that cover what that cabinet is going to do.

Je Ne Regrette Rien - The Secret to Increasing Diversity

Senior executives in the media industry often talk about employing more people from under-represented backgrounds as a “risk”.

We have all heard it before:

“Employing the black director I haven’t worked with before is a risk.”

“Commissioning a new script from a disabled writer is a risk.”

“I am not against diversity, I just want a safe pair of hands, I just can’t afford to take the risk”

Advocates of increasing diversity try and counter these types of sentiments by saying that many of these diverse candidates are in fact highly qualified and are not risky at all, in fact “diversity is a strength”.

The media executive, duly accepts the arguments and how they too believe in diversity, explains how they are not racist, sexist, and do not have a prejudiced bone in their body, but this time the risk is still too great and they will stick with the status quo.

The reason the diversity advocates never win this argument is by talking about risk - even if its to argue that diversity is not risky - they have already accepted a framing of the argument that not only works against diversity but some important economic theory.

To win the argument we need to understand what really motivates senior business leaders - sometimes even better than they understand themselves and that involves understanding some simple game theory economics.

The fact of the matter is senior media execs are taking risks every day. Greenlighting TV and film projects is some of the riskiest business decisions one can make and they make them every day.

When senior media execs say diversity is too risky they are in fact confusing risk with regret.

Let me explain the difference.

Buying a lottery ticket is risky.

Not buying it and finding out that it could have been the winning ticket leads to regret.

Economic game theory explains that a lot of the time what people are doing is not trying to minimise risk. But minimise regret.

So how do economists define regret?

Regret is the difference between the real outcome and the alternative better outcome that didn't happen. In other words it is the difference between the happiness you derived from reality versus the happiness you think you could have derived from an imagined counterfactual.

The greater the difference the bigger the regret.

That is why people buy lottery tickets. They are not trying to minimise the risk of losing money - if they were the easiest course of action is to not buy a ticket - they are trying to minimise regret. The regret of potentially not buying the winning ticket.

So what has this got to do with diversity?

In the regret model, if a media executive commissions a programme to be directed by a white director they have never worked with before this carries far less potential regret than working with a black director they have never worked with before.

If the programme by the white director does terribly the exec has no regrets about employing the director on the basis of their race because in the alternative scenario the status quo also involves a white director.

There is no regret based on race.

However if they employ a Black director and it does badly then the alternative status quo scenario involves a white director. Therefore there is regret based on the race.

Both scenarios might be equally risky.

But one has far more potential regret than the other.

The economics theory around regret also says that the higher the public profile of your decisions the more regret can be associated with them. To put is simply it is what we commonly call “shame”. Shame is higher the more people are able to judge your actions.

It is therefore not surprising that this is a massive issue in the media industry where commissioning decisions are very public.

Once you understand the theory of regret then you can address it, rather than have ad infinitum arguments about risk which diversity champions appear to win but fail to change people’s actions.

And it is possibly the best argument for why we need an industry wide solution to diversity as opposed to thinking that individual media execs, or even individual channels, can solve these problems by themselves.

One's level of regret is heavily influenced by the actions of those around us.

Going back to the lottery ticket example.

If all our friends and peers are buying lottery tickets we will be more likely to buy one. This is because the potential regret of not buying one is greater if we think someone we know is going to win. The counterfactual feels more real.

Knowing this if authorities stipulated that we all had to buy 4 lottery tickets we would do so and win or lose there would be no regrets as the decision had been removed from our hands. The counterfactual has been removed.

(Please notice the amount of risk associated with buying a lottery ticket has not been reduced).

Similarly if media executives and broadcasters were all told by a media regulator that they had to commission a set amount of programmes directed by people from under-represented groups this would remove the idea of regret. It would remove the counterfactual.

Media regulators like Ofcom are not just there to “police” the industry but also to create the economic environment to make sure the best decisions are made. Simple game theory suggests they should set minimum standards to reduce “regret”. 

Newsrooms need to look less like the people who stormed the Capitol and more like the countries they're based

If we want better reporting of political events in the US it might be better if the makeup of the newsrooms looked less like the racial demographics of the people who stormed the Capitol and more like the nation’s they are based in both in the US and UK.

Last week “Access All Areas - The Diversity Manifest for TV and Beyond” was published. Written by Lenny Henry and me it was commissioned in November 2019. Before Covid-19, before the death of George Floyd, and before the global Black Lives Matter protests.

In other words in a different time and world.

But last Wednesday in the middle of promoting the book something big happened which reiterated the need for our book and the policies we’ve been banging on about for seven years.

Lenny and I were being interviewed on Channel 4 News about the need for more diversity and representation of non-white people working in television, when at almost exactly the same time the US Capitol was being stormed by pro-Trump supporters.

The juxtaposition of the global event and our small interview to promote our book brought into sharp focus the point we have been trying to make time and time again. The dramatic events in the US were being seen literally through a "white gaze".

According to the Reuters Institute, only about 0.2% of British journalists are Black, and when it comes to the ethnic backgrounds of UK foreign correspondents - while figures are scant - the picture appears to be even worse.

So on the one hand we have a possible attempted coup d’etat in the most powerful country in the world with a strong racial element, and on the other the vast majority of the reporting is by default (due to the lack of diversity of the profession) done by white journalists.

Now, we all know that the way the news covers a story impacts not just how the general public views events but how politicians and authorities approach issues. I believe that if there had been more black journalists reporting on the build up to the demonstration - which led to the violence - the police might have taken the threat more seriously.

Moreover, if four years ago there had been more journalists from ethnic minority backgrounds reporting on the US election, which first elected Donald Trump, newsrooms might have realised how dangerous his presidency could potentially be and not treated him as the fun guy from the Apprentice and a good way to sell newspapers or get viewers. A point the BBC made in their report “How the media created the president” back in 2016.

Now there is no denying that there has been some excellent reporting of the attack on democracy last Wednesday and this is not an argument that only black people can report on this or other important “black stories”. Any more than I believe that only women can report on issues affecting women or only disabled journalists can report on stories about disability.

But it is an argument that if we are going to understand these stories fully the perspectives of these different groups is crucial to be enabling and opening up on our i-pads, televisions, and radios.

It is also important that we don’t just look at the diversity of reporters but go up the food chain and look at the executive producers, programme editors and gatekeepers who decide what stories need to be covered.

In the UK not one major news programme on any of the major TV broadcasters, such as Newsnight, Ten O’Clock News, Channel 4 News has a person of colour in charge. The same applies for the major current affairs series such as BBC’s Panorama and Channel 4’s Dispatches.

In the last few days there has been much hand-wringing of how the media has covered Donald Trump’s entire Presidency, and whether the reporting could have been better. And whether journalists both enabled and emboldened the far right and populism in the US by not challenging it properly.

The best place to start would be to look at the makeup of the newsrooms themselves and ensure they look more like the people that make up the country and less like the people who stormed the Capitol.

Oh, and read our book, of course!

“Rioters”, “Protestors” or “Terrorists”? What’s in a Name?

 

How should journalists be describing the events which took place in Washington DC on Wednesday 6^th January, and why does it matter?

A short blog post.

How you label someone often ascribe motive to their actions, whether we mean to or not.

It is for this reason that President-elect Joe Biden has hit out against calling the people who stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday 6^th  January “protestors” and instead they should be labelled “domestic terrorists”.

To call them “protestors”, intentionally or not, immediately assigns a motive to their actions - they were there to “protest” a basic right protected by law. What Biden is saying, in objecting to the term, is they were not there to protest but to intentionally break the law and undermine democracy. They were trying to achieve political aims through violence – one of the definitions of terrorism.

After originally calling them protestors most news media outlets have stopped calling them “protestors” although they have stopped short of adopting Biden’s terminology of calling them “domestic terrorists”. Instead they have fallen for the, what they perceive to be the more neutral term “rioters” and describing the events of last week as a “riot”.

In many ways this is equally problematic.

There is considerable evidence that the violence was not a random spontaneous act of violence – which the term “riot” implies – but an attempted coup d’etat. And some political commentators have described it as such.

The term “riot” undermines the political narrative that there was a concerted plan of action, for example one theory is people forced their way into the Capitol not simply to “disrupt” proceedings, but to destroy the boxes containing the physical electoral votes. The destruction of the boxes may have cast permanent doubt over the result of the Presidential election, and paved the way for continued justification to paint the incoming administration as illegitimate.

On top of this if the term “riot” takes hold in the public consciousness it may be harder for Democrats to successfully charge President Trump with inciting "violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts" as riots are often viewed as being more random and spontaneous.

So, what should journalists do if they want to report on the events and still maintain some level of impartiality and objectivity?

There is no doubt that describing people as “domestic terrorists” would appear to be siding with Biden. But as I have sought to argue describing them as “rioters” could undermine Biden’s charge and in so doing help Trump.

After, more than 25 years in journalism when faced with these dilemmas I normally find that "boring old accuracy" is the best course of action.

The fact that these people were Pro-Trump supporters is not in question.

The fact they stormed the Capitol is equally agreed upon.

Therefore let’s start calling them what they are, “Pro-Trump supporters” who “stormed the Capitol”. And hopefully history will decide the rest.

Is Diverse Talent Hiding in Plain Sight?

I became a series producer in 2002 due to the intervention of a Black woman, while being literally passed over by White executives.

I was sitting in the open plan office of BBC’s Documentary department when unbeknown to me management had a problem. An executive producer had tentatively pitched an observational documentary series for BBC One and had quite unexpectedly been successful.

After they had popped the Cava to celebrate (we are talking the BBC here) they realised they had a problem. They did not have a series producer available to make the series. And so they were arguing whether they should try and and ask for a delay in the transmission date which might mean they lose the commission completely, or whether to try and bring in a freelancer which could worsen an already difficult relationship with the trade unions as they were in the middle of negotiating a round of redundancies.

I sat literally meters away from the glass panel office where the argument was unfolding, and most importantly I was in full view of the execs and members of the management team trying to decide the best course of action.

Luckily for me one of the people in the glass panel office was a Black production manager and she came up with the idea of making me the series producer. She argued that I was already a successful producer and had co-series produced my last series albeit with a more experienced producer.

After her advocacy I was called into the office and the rest, as they say, is history… :)

This one experience has shaped a lot of my views on how staffing and promotions occur in the media industry and how increases in diversity can happen.

I was not an unknown to the executives - I spoke with them every day .

I was literally in full view of them as they were looking for a series producer.

It was the intervention of a third party advocating for me that made all the difference.

I write about this because recently both Ofcom and the BBC have posited the idea that one should create a “diversity databases” to enable executives, talent managers, and series producers to find diverse talent when staffing up productions.

There is no question that fully functioning employment data bases are needed for the media industry to function properly but if my personal experience is anything to go by it is not a lack of knowledge of diverse personnel by hiring managers that hinders diversity.

It is the lack of willingness by hiring managers to hire diverse talent they already know that hinders diversity.

The argument for diversity databases almost seems to be predicated on the idea that diverse talent is literally hiding from hiring managers. It seems to run contrary to the facts that diverse talent needs to apply to more jobs to be hired and once hired their retention rates are lower than their non-diverse counterparts.

I suspect it is the reason Angela Chan, the former Head of Creative Diversity at Channel 4, tweeted on the idea of a new pan-industry database:

“It won’t solve it at all. Databases are only as good as the people who use & manage them. Too often a repository for good intentions. @marcusryder and @LennyHenry are correct. Build networks of affinity between gatekeepers and diverse talent & then make them the gatekeepers.”

Or to put it another way - let’s make sure more people like the Black production manager who advocated for me are in the room when the hiring happens.

One final point - I always advise against people basing policy on personal experience and in many ways this is exactly what I might be guilty of now. But that is precisely why I helped to establish the Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity to make sure there is academic rigour to any policy decisions made by UK broadcasters and major stakeholders. To date there is very little academic work that has been done in this area which is why I welcome the recent report by Dr Peter Block but more work definitely needs to be done.