Trust in the editorial judgement of mainstream news organisations is at a crossroads.
Trump’s racist tweets telling four US Congresswomen to “go back” home have brought this into focus and at the crux of the problem is diversity.
I recently gave a talk to a group of journalists on trust and how to build trust in news organisations.
The BBC publicly started tracking trust in 2004 following the Hutton Report which looked into a news report that the Government had “sexed up” claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
The tracking of the public’s trust in the BBC is conducted by an independent organisation (Kantar Media) and takes the form of an on-going monthly survey of around 1,000 UK adults per month.
Trust is possibly the most important element of any news organisations. If the public do not trust you, it literally doesn’t matter if you have the biggest scoops, best reporters or most insightful journalism.
The BBC knows the importance of trust and works incredibly hard to build on its reputation of being the most trusted news source in the UK.
A year and a half ago they published a short piece online titled: “Learn how the BBC is working to strengthen trust and transparency in online news”. I know, hardly a clickbait headline, but nestled in it is something fascinating.
Within the piece it pastes a number of links on how the BBC is trying to increase the diversity of its workforce. The piece offers minimal explanation of the connection the BBC sees between workforce diversity and trust and yet it has posted four links to diversity in the piece as evidence of how it is trying to increase trust.
So let me offer one explanation of the link between diversity and trust based on my own personal experience:
If the public sees a news organisation which is predominantly run by white middle-class men living in the South East of England its ability to be impartial and objective on issues that affect women, people of colour, and parts of the UK outside of the South East is brought into question.
I saw this firsthand working in Scotland. Trust in the BBC declines the further north you go in the country as it is perceived to be an “English” organisation as opposed to a “British” one. Increasing programmes made outside of London is one way the corporation tries to address this issue.
Having a diverse workforce actively increases trust in the editorial decisions a news organisations makes, this is not just true of the BBC but of all news organisations.
Which brings me to the current controversy of the moment; whether news organisations should describe tweets and other utterances by President Trump as racist or “racist” or “racially controversial” or even leave it up to individual reporters to decide. The BBC seems to be taking all four approaches while other news broadcasters and news organisations are taking other approaches.
These are not easy editorial decisions. Focusing on the BBC I personally think the corporation has made a mistake and news organisations should call Trump’s recent tweets racist. But that is not the point of this piece and there are a number of good articles already written on this subject.
This blog is dedicated to the subject of diversity in the media.
The problem that the BBC and other news organisations have when they have to make these difficult editorial decisions is whether the public trusts them to make the right decision.
Within BBC news’ senior leadership there are only two people of colour at the top level, Kamal Ahmed and Rozina Breen. The editors of all the major news programmes: Breakfast, One O’clock, Six O’clock, News at Ten, Newsnight, Today Programme, Panorama (I could go on) are all white. And just for the record the two people of colour I cited only achieved their higher positions in the last year, and I think it would be hard for any two recent appointees to be seen as a critical mass and push back against an organisations cultural norms and practices.
(I am haven't got time to go into the racial makeup of all of Britain's news organisations but needless to say the BBC is not an outlier)
The problem is, even if the BBC has come to the right decision on how to report Trump’s tweets, the public perceive that the final editorial decision was made by an overwhelmingly white editorial senior board. It is this lack of diversity that undermines the trust in any decision which has been made.
We all want trust in our news media, and the ability for the British public to trust the national broadcaster is vitally important. In order to achieve this we need more diversity in the most senior editorial positions.
As a lawyer friend of mine loves to say; “Justice should not only be done, but also seen to be done”. Without adequate diversity we are falling down in the second part of this statement, irrespective of how good the final editorial decisions are.
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