Britain's First Black Prime Minister?

A few months ago, one of my production team called me excitedly: “I’ve just spoken to Britain’s first black Prime Minster!”. He had just interviewed Chuka Umunna MP for the Panorama film “Carry On Banking”.  Of course, political predictions by journalists are notoriously unreliable. If the majority of journalists had been right in 2009 Hilary Clinton would be President now. However, it demonstrates that even for hardened Panorama journalists, the young black MP did make an impression.

I was reminded of that Panorama and the Umunna interview today, with the bankers’ bonuses back in the news, and the charismatic young MP seeming to be on every TV and radio news outlet.  They reminded why that one interview encapsulated all the reasons why it‘s crucial to have people from diverse backgrounds working behind the camera.

The Panorama was, as the title suggests, an investigation into bankers’ bonuses. During the  production meetings, we would think through all the relevant people that we could interview – including banking experts, small businesses, banking insiders and of course politicians. It was at one of these production meetings that I suggested we interview Chuka Umunna for the programme. At the time, he had been sitting on the Treasury Select Committee in charge of examining banking practices, and prior to that had worked in the city as a lawyer.  I also knew he was very eloquent. In short he was perfect for our programme.

Despite all of these qualities, no-one else on the production team had heard of him. To be honest, it wasn’t that surprising. He had only been an MP for 6 months, so was still relatively unknown to the majority of people.  At the same time however, I don’t think there was a single black British person interested in politics who did not know of Umunna. So I pushed my team to interview him for the Panorama, and as I anticipated, he proved to be a valuable contribution to the programme.  And obviously, he improved the programme’s on screen diversity.

What this experience proved to me was just how important it was to have people from diverse backgrounds  on production teams if we want to get the very best contributors. The fact of the matter is that while all journalists try to have as large a black book of contacts as possible, we all have different strengths and weaknesses. If all our journalists come from the same background, we will invariably have the same weaknesses and strengths in our knowledge of contributors. It is crucial to draw our journalists from as wide a pool as possible in order to make sure our strengths and knowledge on a team are as  broad and strong.

Working in Scotland news and current affairs I regularly see the benefits of this diversified strategy. Scottish journalists regularly know of contributors that might escape our London based colleagues. For example, the majority of Scots are very aware of Margo MacDonald’s campaign to change the laws on assisted suicide. She is a politician, an MS sufferer and in most Scottish circles considered a “national treasure”. When my Scottish team were pulling together an excellent Panorama – shown in the whole of the UK – on assisted suicide called “I’ll Die When I Choose”, Margo MacDonald was the obvious choice for presenter. But I think it would be fair to say that not many London colleagues would have thought of working with Margo MacDonald on the film. I don’t think it is controversial to say my Scottish colleagues are more aware of potential Scottish contributors and issues than journalists who do not live in Scotland.

But it’s not just important to have people from diverse backgrounds in the production team.  They also need to be in positions of power and influence. Trying to persuade my team that they should interview Chuka Ummuna,a contributor they had never heard of, was certainly difficult. But as the executive producer, ultimately they did as I said. If I had been a researcher with the same suggestion and knowledge, I’m not sure my suggestion would have gone that far.

Following his interview in our Panorama programme – his first on a network current affairs programme – Ummuna is now on our screens and on the radio pretty consistently. You definitely no longer need to be from a diverse background and take a special interest in BME politicians to know of him. However, every time I think of that interview, I wonder how many other great “next Prime Minsters” as my colleague put it, be they black, Asian, disabled or come from any manner of diverse background, aren’t making it to the screen.  And whether that’s simply because the production teams aren’t as diverse the population we make programmes for.

One Is Never Enough

I was recently invited to attend the launch of Powerlist 2011 – an event recognising powerful and influential black people in the UK (I crept on to the list in the “40 and under category”). A lot of the black people at the launch event were truly inspiring having broken glass ceiling after glass ceiling. As I was making small talk over finger food afterwards the one feature that lay behind a lot of their achievements is that they were often the only black person in their field, their office or even their company. From my own experience of often being the only black person in a production team or TV department, I wondered about what effect this has been having on achieving true diversity. Let me give you an example.

Working in current affairs, I regularly come across weird and wonderful crime stories. A few months ago a black man in a car was pulled over by the police. The police discovered that he was driving without insurance, hand-cuffed him and arrested him. However, after he had been arrested the driver got into a dispute with the police officer. It just so happened that the arresting police officer also happened to be black.  The black driver then proceeded to call the black police officer a number of names including “black c---” and “black bastard”.

In England and Wales, under the Crime And Disorder Act 1998, if someone commits a crime and it is proven to have a racial element they are subject to a harsher sentence (similar laws apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland). Hence, when this case came to court the black driver was found guilty of a far more serious racially aggravated offence than he would have been otherwise.

It was a minor case, and as it happened in England we definitely weren’t going to cover it up here in BBC Scotland. However, it nevertheless came up in discussion over lunch one day with my white colleagues and friends.  Nearly all of them thought that the black driver was guilty of racism and deserved to have a stiffer sentence than if he hadn’t called the officer racist names.  Obviously, so did the jury in the case.  On the other hand, nearly all BME colleagues and friends I also raised the story with later thought charging a black man with a racially aggravated crime against a black police officer made a mockery of the very good reasons the additional legislation of racial aggravation was introduced in the first place.

I’m not sure which group of friends and colleagues are right (and I hope everyone noticed the “nearly all” in both group – not all white people and not all BME people think the same).  But what it does highlight is that people from different racial groups with different life experiences can often view the same events differently.

The problem is that as I talked the story through with my white colleagues over lunch I was acutely aware that I was the only questioning voice.  I was worried that I would either be seen as having bad judgement (an extremely important quality in television and journalism in particular) or worse still thought to have a racial chip on my shoulder. I felt insecure in voicing a dissenting opinion – despite the fact I was the most senior person sitting at the BBC canteen table talking.

If there had been just one other person putting forward an alternative view, or one other BME person sitting at the table, I would have been a lot bolder. I see this all the time with both Scottish issues and with women’s issues. I often see the single Scot in London not voicing a particular view on “English prejudice” as they are worried they will be typecast as the “Angry Scot”.  Yet when he or she is back in Glasgow amongst fellow Scots they are quite the opposite. I know many women who keep their opinions to themselves concerned they will be viewed as “man-hating-feminists”.

Ironically enough, having the odd woman, disabled person or BME member of staff working by themselves can fail to increase diversity.  The sole diverse member of staff striving to fit in will worry about sticking out or being known only by their differences. Far from increasing plurality of views having only one member of staff from a diverse background can sometimes cause even more consensus.

The answer to this problem of course is simple. We need to employ even more diverse staff (easier said than done). Breaking glass ceilings and being the only BME (or woman or disabled person) at a particular level is important, and it is brilliant that there are events like the Powerlist 2011 to recognise these achievements. But until these trailblazers have company I’m not convinced that we will achieve true diversity.

TV Audiences & The Secrets Of Twitter

When I was 12, I met my first “girlfriend” – Angela. I met her at a basketball camp. She had Gerri-Curl and a better jump shot than I and, crucially, she was the only girl that would talk to me.  I thought she was amazing.  I say she was a “girlfriend” but in reality the totality of the “relationship” consisted of watching the American Sci-Fi television series V about an alien invasion in our respective homes and talking about it on the phone as we watched it “together”.

But while young men and the occasional 12 year-old boys might have been the target audience for the Sci-Fi series, I doubt the programme makers were thinking that young black British girls might be interested in watching their alien invasion saga. As a programme maker, discovering who your audience really are can be a surprise.

I have started to discover some surprises about my audience recently through the power of the Twitter hash-tag. Hash-tags allow you to pull together people who are tweeting about the same subject to see what other people are saying about the same issue.  Increasingly, programmes are using twitter hash-tags to enable online / twitter group conversations about a programme as it is being broadcast. Want to know whether other people are thinking the same thing as you when you hear that awful / great intervention on BBC Question Time? Then follow the Twitter hash-tag #BBCQT and you’ll find out.

Broadcasters are turning to hash-tags for a number of reasons:

1. It means that people watch the programmes as they go out (great for advertisers).

2. Hash-tags turn a simple television into a social event.

3.Over 40% of people do other things like play with their phones while watching TV. This keeps their attention on your film even if they are doing something else.

4. Hash-tags help to generate a buzz about a programme.

For people interested in diversity issues on television, what the hash-tags also do is give a great insight into who is watching your programmes and what they think about them. It also causes you to confront your own prejudices as to whom you think is watching your output.

Like Angela, my black “ex-girlfriend” obsessed with Sci-Fi, I’ve found that my audiences rarely fit my target expectations and are a lot more diverse than I expect. For example, earlier this year I exec’ed a 60 minute film called “Portillo On Salmond”. It featured Michael Portillo following Alec Salmond on the election trail as he won an historic second term. With a hash-tag of #PortilloOnSalmond, I was able to see who was watching and what interested the audience. What amazed me was the level of tweeting that occurred when the film showed Alec Salmond campaigning in an Asian neighbourhood.  Knowing what I know now, if we were to cut the film again, I would definitely want the director to feature more of how Alec Salmond won the Asian vote.  It has also made me think about whether to commission a radio programme looking at the rise of the importance of the BME vote in Scotland.

It goes without saying that one has to be careful when looking at your audiences through Twitter hash-tags. There is no doubt that Twitter is not completely representative of the general viewing public – it skews towards the young and web savvy. But the hash-tags are still useful to execs and producers because when a programme goes out no longer is our audience an amorphous blob represented by large ratings figures the next day. We can now see the modern equivalent of the 12 year old Angela’s and myself in the audience and “eavesdrop” on what they are saying about our programmes.  Once other execs and producers realise the diversity of their audiences, I’m hoping, like me, they will be more willing to reflect the audience’s own diversity and cast diverse talent on screen, as well as cover issues that reflect their diverse interests.  Now that will make TV far more personal, interesting and something worth tweeting about.

Are You Paid What You're Worth?

One of the worse jobs I ever had was working in a factory in the East End of London that made plastic mouldings for shop displays – the type of thing that holds chocolate bars or lipsticks in a shop. My job was to go around all the different parts of the factory, collect all the industrial waste bins and empty them into a compactor. By the time I had emptied the last bin the first one would be full and so my job would continue all day. The one and only saving grace of the job came at 5pm every Friday when I would receive a brown envelop with my weeks wages in cash.

At the factory there was a very clear hierarchy. The foremen got paid the most, followed by the forklift drivers, then the warehouse workers.  The actual factory line workers were next on the pay-scale and I was very close to the bottom. I was only 19 at the time so I was happy to receive any money at all. But what the money indicated was how much the company valued you. The more important you were to the factory owners, the more you were paid. The person who collected the rubbish was instantly replaceable – so I got the lowest wage.

As a BBC executive producer I now get paid monthly and receive a lot more money than I did as a factory bin man.  Who gets paid what in television is big news. It’s a political hot potato at the BBC, and celebrity pay at other broadcasters is frequent tabloid fodder (just google “Simon Cowell salary” and the first three hits are all Daily Mail headlines). At ITV and Channel 4 there are several primetime presenters who are rumoured to receive seven figure salaries. At the BBC there are currently over 19 actors, presenters and journalists who are paid over £500,000 a year (down from 21 the previous year). The BBC has even published how much it pays its staff broken down into pay brackets.

Now, I’m not going to enter into the debate as to whether BBC staff are paid too much or too little.  That’s not my point. My point is that in all the newspaper columns that followed the BBC’s publication of its staff pay brackets and in all the tabloid gossip of who gets paid what, one obvious fact remains constantly overlooked. And that’s the fact that the vast majority of British TV millionaires – from Jonathan Ross to Chris Evans – are white and male.

Of course, most of us cannot hope to be millionaires nor do most of us seriously hope to be. If money was our main motivator to get out of bed I think we would have gone into other lines of business – not making documentaries, reporting the news or writing screenplays. Nevertheless, pay does often tell us something wider. Like my East End factory, it’s an indication as to who the most valued people are.  As Jonathan Ross said in an off key joke in 2007: “I am worth one thousand BBC journalists”.   

If people from diverse backgrounds in the media want to know how well we are valued and progressing we must look at issues of pay. Pay gaps between different groups persist in different industries in the UK, for various complex reasons.  But the bottom line is that these gaps should be as small as possible. Women should be paid as much as men, black people the same as white people, disabled people the same as able-bodied people, and so on.  The fact that there are persistent – and often under-looked – pay gaps at the top, suggests that there might well be persistent pay gaps at other levels.  The problem is, we just don’t know.

So far, much of the debate surrounding increasing diversity in television has centred around how many of us are being employed.  Yet as a nineteen-year-old collecting rubbish in an East London factory I realised how important pay was.  Is it not about time that those of us interested in diversity started to ask for the figures about our pay packets instead of always counting how many of us are in the office or at the shoot?  I think so.

News International Hacking - It will be all white on the night

Working in news and current affairs you quickly realise that the more interesting story is normally the one behind the headlines that require a little bit of digging. To be honest it is the digging and finding the story that no one else has that makes working in current affairs fun.

Watching the recent events on the News of the World and News International hacking story unfold I did a little digging and in many ways it highlights how small the media world is and its lack of diversity.

In a lot of the pictures of Rupert Murdoch recently you will see him with one of his most trusted advisers, William Lewis. Will Lewis is the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and was appointed general manager of News International last year after leaving the Telegraph.

While Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch have had their pictures on the front pages it is Will Lewis and NI’s global director of communications who are thought to be the two most important people behind the scenes for News International.

Now this is where the story becomes interesting for those of us concerned with diversity in the media. The global director of communications is Simon Greenberg. Simon Greenberg grew up five streets away from Will Lewis and both of them went to the same primary school. Not the best advert for diversity in the media.

But if you thought high powered media jobs in Britain go to the same small group of people then you won’t be surprised by the next part of the story.

Earlier this year there were strong rumours that Will Lewis was going to be Cameron’s director of communications, after the Prime Minister’s then director of communications, Andy Coulson, (the former editor of the News of the World) resigned.

Will Lewis didn’t get that job.

If he had, he would have been the SECOND member of his family to be director of communications for a prime minister. Will Lewis’s older brother, Simon Lewis, was director of communications for Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009.

It’s important to remember that whatever you may think of the News International hacking story Simon Greenberg and Will Lewis only joined NI after the hacking had taken place. It was Will who went to the police with evidence that there may have been payments by News International to police officers.

However once you look behind the headlines, as any good journalist should do, what this story points to is a complete lack of diversity in the media. I do not know who or what is to blame for the News International scandal but a lack of diversity frequently leads to a lack of questioning of the status quo and challenging of accepted practices and thinking. Could a few more disabled, BME and people from diverse backgrounds in positions of power have stopped the NI scandal occurring? We will never know. But I guess the only way to really find out in the future is by breaking the industry glass ceilings and appointing more diversity into positions of authority.

Who knows something good might come out of this hacking scandal after all.

Are Black People In Need Of Charity?

Two of my best journalists are currently working on an investigation into a possible miscarriage of justice. It is still in production so I can’t write too much about it but we are investigating whether an innocent man could be serving time for a number of murders that he didn’t do. In plain English: An innocent man may have been wrongly convicted as a serial killer.

You can imagine it is a big story.

Behind the headlines I hope will follow the programme’s broadcast however is another story. A story that may serve as a lesson for people interested in increasing diversity in the media.

The “miscarriage of justice” story was first brought to our attention through the work of a UK charity working with prisoners. Charities obviously have their own agendas and so as journalists we can not take their work on face value. A lot of my team’s work has been to make sure we report the story as objectively as possible and subject it to the same level of journalistic scrutiny we would to any other investigation.

However investigative journalists using charities and NGO’s seem to be a growing trend. In October 2010, two Guardian front-page investigations originated from NGO’s, BBC’s Panorama investigation into e-waste being dumped in Africa relied heavily on the charity Environmental Investigations Agency and when I watch documentaries on Al Jazeera I regularly play “spot the charity” they rely on NGO’s so much.

I believe that when it comes to increasing diversity in the media we could learn from this charity model. In the last six months the one investigative story covering BME issues that really caught my eye was how British teachers are failing black middle-class pupils. (It was reported in both the Daily Mail and The Guardian). However this investigation did not come out of any work journalists did but arose out of the hard work of academics and researchers working at the Institute of Education. You’ve guessed it the Institute of Education is a registered charity.

With shrinking budgets in newsrooms and across conventional media generally the question is; Are we looking in the wrong direction when it comes to increasing diversity? Instead of always looking at directly changing large media companies should we be trying to influence charities or even setting up charities of our own? Instead of smaller media budgets always being seen as an obstacle to increasing diversity could it be an opportunity?

According to Paul Lashmar, the Acting Head of Journalism at Brunel University, “NGOs have started hiring investigative journalists to provide the media with material that they are no longer willing to fund”. He wasn’t talking about increasing coverage of diversity issues but if other charities can see this as an opportunity should people interested in diversity be setting up charities with the agenda of uncovering great stories around disability, race, ethnicity, sexuality or class?

In the next few weeks my current affairs team should have a great programme based on the initial research by a charity into a possible miscarriage of justice. If another NGO can give me a great story that increases my diversity on screen it won’t be out of charity that I will be taking it on board.

How TV Saved My Life

Sometimes I wonder if increasing diversity in the media is really that important. In the grand scheme of things how important is it for a few more people from diverse backgrounds to get jobs in television? Who cares if there are more black, brown and yellow faces on our screens?

It was when I was having one of these “what’s the point of all” moments that I read the new Queens Honours list for 2011. Most of the newspapers covering the Honours list focused on Bruce Forsyth's knighthood. But what caught my attention was the OBE that was awarded to Beverley De Gale.

Beverley De Gale is the founder of the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust and has campaigned for years to increase the number of people of African decent to enlist on the national bone marrow register.  When she started campaigning, less than 0.2% of people on the bone marrow register were from African or Caribbean backgrounds. Now it’s roughly 10%.  An amazing achievement. Her work not only helped people needing bone marrow donations it also served to highlight that not enough BME people donate any kind of body parts from blood to organs after death.

But, crucially, Beverley De Gale’s  achievements and OBE may not have happened – or may have been significantly less – without diversity in the media.

The African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust first came to prominence back in 1996 when her campaign and the plight of her late son Daniel were the lead story in a brand new BBC current affairs programme called “Black Britain”. “Black Britain” had a predominantly black production team and a remit to bring stories that affect the black British community directly into our front rooms.

If I'm ever asked for an example of why we need more diversity in the media I need look no further than Beverley De Gale. I believe the issue of the low donor registration amongst the black community made it to TV precisely because there were black people working in the production office and the BBC had made a commitment to tell their stories.

Now I am not arguing for the return of “Black Britain”, or culturally-specific programmes, nor am I arguing that only black production staff should work on black issues (I’m sure I can write about that in a future post).

But what I am arguing is that at its most basic, increased diversity in the media literally saves lives. Just ask all the black British people who have received bone marrow transplants in the last 15 years.

I have no doubt that there are other amazing BME people like Beverley De Gale across Britain. If we are serious about diversity in the media our job is to identify them and tell their stories. A few more black people receiving OBE’s would be nice, saving the lives of hundreds of BME people would be even better.

Learning From The Ladies

Working in news and current affairs can be slightly obsessive. You constantly think that somewhere in the world there is a breaking story that you are missing or an investigation that you should be undertaking.

In my paranoia of missing the next big story I have been known to surreptitiously check the news on my iphone at dinner when I think no one is looking. My four favourite iphone apps for doing this are: the BBC (of course), Al Jazeera (it’s good to get a different international perspective), The Economist (for its concise analysis) and the New York Times (it is the most widely read newspaper in the world).

It was actually while checking the news on my iphone Guardian app over a recent meal that I learnt about one of the biggest diversity stories of the year: The New York Times has just appointed Jill Abramson, its first female executive editor in its 160 year history.

With Helen Boaden (Director of BBC News) at the helm of the largest broadcast news organisation in the world and now another woman appointed the head of the world’s most read online newspaper, this is a great achievement in increasing diversity.

As I read the article about Jill Abramson’s appointment, her extraordinary background and the massive challenges she will face, a little story at the end of the piece caught my eye.

Anne Marie Lipinski was the first female editor of another major American newspaper – The Chicago Tribune. During her 7 years as editor there, she set up the “Large Ladies” dinner – a place where influential women in the world of newspapers could meet once a year and share their experiences. She describes it as “a small, but very hearty group”. During a chat with Helen Boaden, I remember her mentioning that years ago she too helped set up a group where woman in BBC news could meet informally.

As far as I am aware, neither of these two groups were overtly campaigning or had any specific goals and aims. Their purpose was simply to allow people – who were working in environments where they were massively outnumbered –  to meet and not feel so alone. The feeling that you are not alone is vital if you are going to achieve in life and have any sense of perspective. The women didn’t just meet to do short term networking to land their next jobs – they met to nourish their souls. In the end, of course, as Helen, Anne Marie and Jill can testify, it clearly did help some of them at least to achieve a wonderful career as well.

I often write blog posts for sites like the TVCollective and they clearly help forge that sense of community online between non-white people working in TV, and that’s great – it’s crucial. But I believe there is no substitute for creating that sense of community in the real, non-virtual world. You can make stronger bonds over a glass of wine than over a hundred emails.

So if we are going to replicate the recent successes of female news editors and want to see the first black Head of BBC News or the first non-white editor of any of my favorite iphone news outlets, maybe I’d better put the iphone down and just sit down for dinner with my black colleagues in news…

Anybody hungry?