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!