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.

Black Criminals On TV

I recently had my first viewing of a Panorama rough cut on the issue of fuel crime. With petrol and diesel prices at an all time high and the UK having the highest taxed fuel in the E.U. it is a multi-million pound issue involving the Treasury, organised crime and even former terrorists.

At the bottom end of the crime scale are basic forecourt drive-offs: people who fill up their car and simply drive off without paying. But even this can be big business, with some criminals not only filling up their tanks but jerry-cans in the boot and driving off with hundreds of pounds worth of fuel at a time and selling it on. A few weeks ago, my team told me that they had secured an interview with one of these drive-off criminals. Thought to be a “one-man-crime-wave”, this person was responsible for stealing thousands of litres of petrol and is currently serving time in Strangeways prison (now officially HM Prison Manchester).

Being allowed into Strangeways and securing the interview took a lot of hard work and was a bit of a journalistic coup. All the time the producer and reporter were briefing me about the film and the interview I never gave the ethnicity of the criminal a second thought. We were all too busy focusing on the journalism to worry about his skin colour.

However after watching the first rough cut and discovering that the Strangeways’ convict is black I would be lying if I said my heart didn’t sink and my completely emotional and non-professional reaction was: “why does he have to be black?”

When people talk about improving on screen diversity they usually discuss as if it is a simple issue. But the longer I have worked in television the more complicated it seems to become.

I remember giving a lecture to film students in Johannesburg, when the subject of television’s representation of HIV and AIDS came up. HIV is a massive issue in South Africa with one in four people between the ages of 15 – 49 being HIV positive. The predominantly black students complained that South African TV nearly always portrayed HIV as a black issue. “AIDS affects everybody” one of them told me, “but 9 times out of 10, when you see someone with HIV or AIDS on TV they are black”.

The sad reality is that 13.6% of all black South Africans are HIV positive, while only 0.3% of white people are. That means that if there were an even number of blacks and whites for every 1 white person with HIV there would be 45 black people with HIV. However as black people make up approximately 80% of the South African population and whites 10%, the more accurate figure is for every 1 white person with HIV, there are 360 HIV positive black people. All of a sudden 9 times out of 10 sounds like South African TV is actually underestimating the “black problem” and inaccurately reflecting the reality. What the film students were asking for was favourable portrayal.

On the other hand, a few years ago when rising knife crime statistics had gripped the imagination of the UK press, a BBC Panorama programme was broadcast, which showed journalists going into a youth offenders unit and interviewing 5 or 6 perpetrators of knife crime. All but one of the interviewees was black. In London, it is thought that 46% of people arrested of a knife crime are black. So that’s just 1 out of 2, rather than 5 or 6 out of 7. I hasten to add that this is arrests rather than people convicted, so may well reflect more on policing practice than the reality of knife crime. But even if you accept the London figures as being a fair indication of the racial breakdown of knife criminals, the Panorama programme certainly seemed to over-represent the proportion of black people engaged in this particular crime.

And it did. That Panorama programme was made by a London-based production team. Back in 2009, there is no doubt that knife crime was perceived by a lot of Londoners as a “black issue”. But to those of us outside of London, we found it rather strange. Glasgow actually has the highest rate of violent crime in the UK, and knife crime levels are more than 3 times higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK. Having visited several Scottish penal institutions, I am pretty sure almost all those convicted of knife crime are white. If knife crime has a “racial profile” in Scotland, it is most definitely a “white issue”.

On-screen representation of race in current affairs programmes is difficult at the best of times. Good news rarely makes headlines and who wants to be the subject of bad news? I do not believe it should be the role of factual television producers to make programmes that show favourable representations of one diverse group or another. What any factual programme-maker should strive for is accuracy – and on certain sensitive issues that means doing your homework really well.

If there are 360 more HIV positive black South Africans to every white South African, it would be wrong to show a white person with HIV every time you showed a black case study (which is what one of the film students was arguing for). But it is equally wrong for British television to paint a picture that the majority of knife criminals are black when they clearly aren’t (not in London which has the largest black community let alone the rest of the UK). Accuracy and honesty in film-making must be our guiding principle in on-screen representation of diversity and that involves research of knowing what the true figures are.

Unfortunately, there appear to be no figures for the racial breakdown of fuel crime. But taking the rough cut Panorama programme on fuel crime that I saw, as a whole the film identifies over a dozen people breaking the law. The fact that one of the most prolific happens to be black might irritate me emotionally, but journalistically I think my team have probably represented the reality accurately and honestly enough.

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.