Broadcasters ignored the warning signs that led to the Naga Munchetty crisis

Mistakes happen every day, a crisis is usually years in the making.

One of my best friends is a pilot for British Airways and when I sometimes complain about the work  pressure I am under not to make mistakes he often slyly responds by telling me that when pilots make mistakes, terrible things can happen - literally hundreds of people can die. 

the fact is airlines simply cannot afford for pilots to make mistakes. 

But simply telling pilots “Do not mess up!” doesn’t work. 

Airlines need to examine all the reasons a pilot could possibly make a mistake; from tiredness to confusing panel displays to over-complicated controls and address them. Even then the airline needs to factor in that pilots are human and will still make mistakes so they need to create fail-safes and backups so the mistakes are caught (by the co-pilot, air-traffic control, etc), stopping the mistake becoming a crisis.

And now here is the important point: According to my pilot friend because of all the fail-safes mistakes happen but usually they only become a crisis if and when the airline has allowed the problems that led up to the mistake to go unchecked and fester for years.

PLANES DIDN'T CRASH BUT THERE IS A CRISIS AT THE BBC

Which brings me neatly to the current crisis that the BBC is facing over the finding that their news presenter, Naga Munchetty, broke their editorial guidelines when she commented on President Trump’s racist tweet telling four congresswomen of colour “go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.

Many BBC execs are in open defiance of the corporation and are tweeting why the corporation was wrong in its decision against Naga. An open letter was signed by prominent broadcasters and journalists of colour demanding that the decision be reviewed, an online petition about it has gathered thousands of signatories. And in a rare example of cross party consensus BAME politicians from both left and right have condemned the BBC for the decision.

The BBC made a mistake in their finding against Naga, almost everyone except the BBC now accepts that, but what the corporation is facing now is a crisis and it has been years in the making.

The bigger problem is once you look at the factors that led up to this current crisis nearly all UK broadcasters suffer from the same problems. It might have hit the BBC now, but it is a crisis that could just as easily happen at ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5. 

So let’s unpick the makings of this crisis and what ALL broadcasters could learn from it:

LESSON NUMBER ONE - It is not just about the BIG number

The BBC, and other media organisations, often set impressive diversity targets for themselves. For example the BBC wants 15 percent of its workforce to come from a BAME background by 2020  and have set a target of 15 percent for management as well. At the same time Channel 4 have a target that 20% of its employees should be BAME by 2020. Most broadcasters have similarly set targets for gender, disability and other protected characteristics.

What many people have been saying for years though is that while the overall BIG number is important in many ways the more important numbers are the detailed statistics of where the "diverse" people are in the organisation.

Are they in programme making positions, able to shape the programmes we watch? If they are in management positions are they in powerful commissioning positions deciding which programmes are grren lit or are they in management positions in sales, (which is important for bringing revenue into an organisation but does not shape the editorial direction of the organisation).   

This over-emphasis on the BIG number has meant broadcasters have failed to address the fact that not one editor of a major news and current affairs strand (BBC Breakfast, ITV News at Ten, Dispatches, Panorama, Newsnight etc) is a person of colour. 

Importantly, given the current BBC crisis, it would appear that BAME people are massively underrepresented in the department, the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU), responsible for judging whether Naga Munchetty had broken the guidelines. By some accounts the ECU is 100% white, although this is impossible to confirm because the BBC has not revealed these details.

Similarly if one looks at the BBC’s Executive Committee who ultimately oversees the ECU and have been responding to the crisis they only have one person of colour who has limited experience in news and current affairs.

Again I must stress this is not just a BBC problem. The number of people of colour on the executive boards of ALL the broadcasters can be counted on one hand.

By looking at the BIG number the BBC failed to address diversity in the very parts of the organisation which are most vulnerable to crisis and public scrutiny. Today it might be the BBC but the problems run across the industry.

LESSON NUMBER TWO - Chief Diversity Officers Matter.

In February of this year the BBC’s Director of Diversity announced he was resigning. For people who knew anything about diversity in the corporation it did not come as a massive surprise. To date the BBC has still not replaced him.

The BBC has had someone acting up in a caretaker capacity overseeing the HR aspect of the role, but for over 8 months (now going into the ninth month) the BBC has had no one with the specific task of thinking strategically about diversity.

Speaking to senior HR figures in the UK, and experienced recruitment consultants, I am told that it should normally take three months to fill this kind of role. And given that his departure was highly expected it is strange that no succession planning had taken place before his resignation.

Most objective onlookers would hardly think it is a coincidence that the BBC is now in the middle of a crisis in the very area, diversity, that it has failed to fill the director position.

Again this might just seem like a BBC problem, after all the other broadcasters have heads of diversity and inclusion in place, but there is a bigger problem that all the broadcasters are vulnerable to.

None of the Heads of Diversity positions sit on their respective Executive Committees. And so in times of crisis s/he would only be able to advise the committee but would ultimately have no power in the final decisions that are made.

If the current BBC crisis teaches us anything it is that diversity should be at the very heart of their decision making with the person overseeing it having real power and sitting at the top table. 

I hope that the current crisis will cause all the broadcasters to rethink where the Director of Diversity ultimately sits in the organisation and I specifically hope the BBC appoints someone quickly.

LESSON NUMBER THREE - Diverse audiences matter

In 2007 the BBC set up “audience councils” to report directly to the BBC Trust. The members of these audience councils were appointed to represent the audiences in different nations and regions in the UK so the corporation could have an informed panel of members to give them direct feedback on their performance. 

The fact they were appointed was crucial, as this was not just doing market research on what the audience felt, but enabled critical informed feedback on sensitive issues.

However the problem with the audience councils is that while they represented the different geographic areas there wasn’t one tasked with specifically looking at the issue of diversity.

The audience councils were disbanded in 2017 when Ofcom took over the regulatory role previously overseen by the Trust but worryingly Ofcom has repeated the same pattern of having panels set up along geographic lines with none charged with directly focusing on diversity. 

To be fair the BBC has recently created a new advisory group to monitor diversity at the BBC, but many of its members are entertainers and producers who directly rely on the BBC for contracts, while very useful this group is not the same as an independent audience council and there are issues of conflicts of interest when speaking truth to power.

Again this is not a problem exclusive to the BBC. While all the broadcasters are far more sensitive and vocal about diversity than ever before, their traditional structures set up decades ago, are often set up along geographic lines.

IGNORING THE WARNING SIGNS

Setting out just these three points it becomes clear that while the BBC made a mistake over Naga it became a crisis because it has not adequately addressed other structural issues over the preceeding months and years.

It has unduly focused on the wrong diversity figures to ensure diversity is at the crunch points where a crisis could happen - in this particular case the ECU and the Executive Board.

It has been slow to appoint a Director of Diversity who would have overseen the very area where the crisis happened, and worryingly when the person is finally appointed they will not sit at the top table.

The BBC is still predominantly structured along geographic lines and diversity is not prioritised in the structures in the same way that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions are.

All the broadcasters suffer from these same structural issues to a greater or lesser degree.

The depressing thing is that all of these issues have been flagged up to the broadcasters before. Sir Lenny Henry has given speeches in the Houses Parliament on the diversity figures. I have personally written about the issue of where the position of the Director of Diversity should sit and spoken to senior BBC executives about it. And politicians such as; Nicola Sturgeon, Sadiq Khan and Dawn Butler have all written about ensuring diversity is structurally prioritized, along similar lines to geographic diversity.

Broadcasters all make mistakes - after all they are run by humans - but unless they fix these fundamental flaws just one mistake can all too easily become the next crisis.

And when that happens I won’t be telling the broadcasters “I told you so”, I think I will just call up my pilot friend and see if I can catch the next flight to Jamaica for a nice holiday and avoid the drama.

Brief important sidenote:

On a side note there is also talk that the BBC is thinking of effectively demoting their head of HR. With the current head of HR about to leave there are rumours the position should no longer sit on the executive board. To my knowledge the only major media organisation that has a similar structure where the Head of HR does not sit at the top table is PBS in the US, which has a far smaller workforce. If true this would seem a strange restructure for the BBC, especially at a time when we see mass dissatisfaction amongst large parts of their staff openly criticising the corporation's decision over Naga Munchetty. These kind of public displays by employees criticising their workplace are usually a symptom of an unhappy workforce. This might not be the best time to give HR less power. But hopefully my sources are wrong and the rumours are false.