UK Media Cannot Report on the US Properly Without More Journalists of Colour

In 2008 my mum was angry and she wanted me to personally take a message to the head of BBC news.

She was upset by the way the BBC was covering the US Democratic primaries of Barack Obama versus Hilary Clinton. She felt the BBC was framing its coverage more as a coronation for Clinton to become the next Democratic presidential candidate combined with a slightly amusing story that a black man had got so far.

Working out story framing and unconscious bias is notoriously difficult to do and best left to academics, but anecdotally her perception chimed with the views of the various BBC colleagues I spoke to about it at the time. None of them really took Obama’s candidacy seriously at first.

The rest, as they say, is history. The BBC, and much of UK media, was wrong footed and Barack Obama went on to become not only the first Democratic Party presidential nominee but the first black President of the United States of America. 

The BBC and the majority of UK mainstream media was wrong footed again in 2016 when Donald Trump won the US presidential election.

Both times British media failed to fully appreciate the racial nature of US politics and US society in general. 

The vast majority of correspondents covering the US for the main British broadcasters and newspapers are white. The few times journalists of colour are sent to cover US stories is usually only when a white editor or executive has decided it is an overtly “racial” story.

The problem with this approach is it fails to recognise that race is an element that runs through every part of US society. If you only recognise race when it is overt you will often miss important elements of the story. This was commented on by a brilliant piece by Jelani Cobb, an associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, in a piece for the Guardian two years ago. 

This is not to say that only journalists of colour can report on issues of race but it is generally acknowledged that a diversity in the background of journalists will be able to give different perspectives to a story and provide richer content.

The importance of having journalists of colour reporting on events in the US was made very clearly by the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kevin Riley, when he spoke to the Nieman Reports in 2015, “As a white man, I can avoid race if I want. I live with that white male privilege. Unless you are exposed to the idea that people of color do not have that option, and race is in front of them all of the time, you don’t have that awareness.”

To illustrate his point Riley pointed to the example of a column by Gracie Bonds Staples, a black journalist, about comments made by Michelle Obama at her Tuskegee University commencement speech and at the dedication of an art museum in New York. “I’m not prepared to say a white reporter couldn’t do that [story],” Riley told the Niemen Reports “but I just think that when you can comfortably get into a topic like that with some perspective and voice, you’re better off.”

Previously British media news outlets have recognised the importance of race in covering some international stories. For example the BBC regularly sent black journalists, including Clive Myrie and David Dunkley Gyimah, to South Africa both before and after the country held its first post apartheid elections, as they recognised how understanding race was central to its journalism.

It would be naive to suggest that the US is the same as apartheid South Africa but what we have seen time and again is understanding of race is central to understanding America, however British news organisations have often been slow to acknowledge this.

If we are to see one good thing come out of the current events in the US I hope we see an increase in the racial diversity in the journalists British media use to cover all stories coming out of the country not just ones it perceives as having a “racial component”.

One last thing, in case you were wondering…

I always try and do what my mother tells me to do and in a meeting with the head of news at the BBC in 2008 I raised my mother’s concerns. The head of news listened and said she would think about it. The BBC can be a difficult organisation to change and so I do not know what happened after I left the meeting but I hope 12 years later we see real substantive action, and not just at the BBC.