Why Doreen Lawrence Is My Hero

I love Doreen Lawrence. In a world of few heroes and role models (especially for a hardened cynical journalist such as myself) Doreen is a real inspiration.  Her son Stephen was stabbed and killed in Eltham, south east London, in April 1993 by a gang of racists.  After a long, 18 year struggle for justice, this week two of those racists were finally jailed for that act. But over that same period, I’ve also noticed that despite her heroism, for many working in the world of TV and newspapers Doreen is also a real “problem”.

Over the past 18 years, there have been numerous documentaries and News specials produced and aired, focused on the murder of Stephen Lawrence and Doreen’s fight to bring his killers to justice. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a couple of these, and for the others I’ve usually known most of the people working on the productions. But in nearly all of these documentaries and news programmes, at some stage, I have heard the director or producer say “Doreen is a problem”, or use other words to that effect.

This “problem” is always the same. But before I explain what the problem is exactly, let me give you some background.

If you really study them, most documentaries and news and current affairs are quite formulaic. Possibly the easiest and most common formula is the “Goodie - Baddie – Victim” formula. For example, the baddie might be racist police, the victim the black person on the receiving end of the racism, and the goodie the outsider that comes to denounce the racism and solve the problem (sometimes the reporter themselves). This formula is played out time and time again, from elderly people falling victim to consumer scams, to victims of war crimes in the Congo or other countries.

However, for this formula to work well, the baddies need to be really bad and the goodies need to be really good. And crucially, the victims need to be sympathetic people clearly in need of rescuing. They might be resilient and able to take on incredible hardship, but at the same time they also need to be “downtrodden”, “beaten up”, and emotionally “destroyed”.  The formula works even better when a victim goes so far as to cry on camera, showing just how helpless they are and feel.

When it comes to reporting racism, black people are invariably portrayed in the role of downtrodden, passive victims. The underlying journalism to uncover the story might be excellent, but to best attract and engage TV viewers, the characterization often ends up being more like pantomime.

And this is why Doreen Lawrence is a “problem” for many TV producers. She single-handedly destroys this neat journalistic formula. Here is a “victim” who is not beaten. Here is a woman who has lost her son but refuses to cry on television. Here is a woman who will not let us see her broken. When the Lawrence’s lost their private prosecution in 1996, Doreen refused to attend the press conference and locked herself away. It was only when the jury finally found Gary Dobson and David Norris guilty a few days ago that she allowed herself to softly cry in the public court room, before composing herself to then face the media outside.

But, most importantly, Doreen is both the goodie and the victim at the same time. She doesn’t need saving by a benign goodie outsider – who has been, in many other past circumstances, often white.  She made clear that she can save herself. She took on the police, the judicial system and wider British society - and this week her labour finally bore fruit.

While Doreen’s fight to achieve justice for her son Stephen has been incredibly remarkable in so many ways, just as amazing is how she has been able to take on the media and beat them at their own game.  She has confounded the simple stereotype of a long-suffering, passive victim and the easy narratives in which journalists and TV producers try and fit stories of racism into. She has constructed a new paradigm in which journalists must view her and other “victims” of racism.  Having worked in the media for almost twenty years, and knowing how difficult it is to change the industry and innovate, I’m not sure which fight was harder.

Whatever the case, as a journalist, this new paradigm that Doreen has created is the key reason she is my hero.  And I hope that in the coming years we will begin to see her new, more difficult but also more subtle and grown-up paradigm better reflected in programmes that aim to deal with racism and its effects.

Stephen Lawrence And What Every Journalist Needs To Know

Yesterday evening, nine of my friends choked back tears as they watched the moving Panorama Special on the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence over 18 years ago. It was an incredibly moving piece of journalism as it followed Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, over the past year as the case against the two murderers was reopened and their eventual conviction on 3rd January 2012.

The Panorama special also charted the larger story of how the Lawrence’s have fought for justice for over 18 years – and how that fight has changed British society forever. Their struggle was marked by numerous different events – from Nelson Mandela taking up the cause in 1993 a few weeks after Stephen’s death, to the failed private prosecution in 1996, and the Macpherson Inquiry that ushered in the phrase “Institutional Racism” into everyday parlance.

But as someone interested in diversity, television and journalism the part of the story I paid closest attention to happened on 14th February 1997. On that day, the Daily Mail’s front page showed pictures of the five white men thought to have killed Stephen, accompanied with the headline: “Murderers: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us”.

It is possibly the Daily Mail’s most famous front page, and marked a major event in itself by increasing the general public’s awareness of the case. The Daily Mail’s Editor Paul Dacre has said that some people even argue that it was this front page that prompted the Labour Party – who were then in opposition – to promise to hold a Public Inquiry when they came into power later that year. It is a headline that every journalist and anyone interested in diversity in the media should be aware of.

However, the story behind the headline is even more intriguing. According to the renowned journalist Nick Davies in his book “Flat Earth News” one of the reasons the Daily Mail took its strong stance was because – purely by chance – Neville Lawrence (Stephen’s father) had done some plastering in Dacre’s house. Davis argues that it was this personal connection that made the Editor look at the case favourably and publish the historic headline.

History often hangs on these kinds of chance meetings. If Neville had accepted another plastering job would the Daily Mail have run the same headline? And if there had been no headline, would Tony Blair and the Labour Party, who were always acutely aware of the Daily Mail’s opinion, have ordered the judicial inquiry? And if that inquiry hadn’t happened, would the legal and policing reforms have taken place to enable the two convictions to finally take place, 18 years later? The truth is, we will never know.

But what the story behind the historic headline does reveal is the importance of personal contact with people in positions of editorial responsibility. The reality is that more diverse the people with editorial control are the more likely it is that they will have social and professional contact with others from diverse backgrounds and hear their stories.

The Daily Mail headline may have changed history, but I don’t want us to have to wait for another editor’s house to need plastering before more historic headlines that fight racism and challenge the status quo are printed. And the only way that will be achieved is if more people from diverse backgrounds work in the media.

Once Upon A Time A Black Man Was Working In TV....

If we want more people from diverse backgrounds working in television we need to start telling better stories.

My earliest memory is being picked up from nursery by someone who was not my mother, being very upset about this and being unsure of this woman (I still don’t know who it was). The woman then took me to a canteen and gave me chips which made me happy. I must have been about three or four at the time.

Cognitive science struggles with why we don’t remember very much before the age of about four. Children younger than four definitely have memories. They can tell you what happened to them a few days previously and they don’t act shocked every time they see their parents, they remember who they are. Also under a brain scan the brain synapsis that seems to form memories for a young child seem to be the same as an adult’s. Therefore the mystery is; why do we really only remember things from four years onwards?

The latest scientific theory is that it is at the age of about four that we learn how to construct stories (or “narratives” to give it the correct term). The fact of the matter is that we find it very hard to retain information unless we can put it into a simple narrative. Even as adults we are twenty times more likely to remember a fact if it’s wrapped up in a story than if we are just told the fact by itself.

It seems as if our brains are hardwired to like stories. We dream in narrative, we make sense of our lives in narrative and we make nearly all important decisions through narrative. Politicians understand the importance of storytelling. More often than not, it is not the best politician that wins the election but the one with the best story. It is thought by most people that Bill Clinton won the first Presidential election due to his “story” of “Coming From A Place Called Hope (Arkansas)” over coming tremendous odds where anything was possible with hope. Sixteen years later Hillary Clinton almost beat Barack Obama through a strong story about an important phone call coming into the White House at 3am asking the electorate who they would rather trust. Just stating the fact that Barack Obama had only been a Senator for less than four years was not enough Hillary knew she had to put that fact into a story.

Over the years, working in television, I have been genuinely puzzled at the lack of progress of achieving better employment figures of people from diverse back grounds working in the industry. I recognise that there are some amazing successes, we have several female channel controllers, the head of BBC News is a woman and every time I see Pat Younge he gives me hope that there isn’t a glass ceiling that can’t be broken eventually. However the facts remain that women, people with disability and BME’s are all underrepresented in TV and become increasingly scarce the higher up the pay scale you go (despite some notable and hopefully growing exceptions). 

At least every couple of months I go to a BBC management meeting where we are presented with the facts about diversity yet little seems to change. The facts don’t seem to translate into effective action. The response by a lot of us interested in increasing diversity when we see this lack of progress is to present even more facts. Instead of realising that this approach is clearly not working.  

If we really want to change the minds and policy of people in power we have to learn what every politician worth their salt already knows and every four year old knows instinctively: Narrative is everything.   

Considering so many of us work in the media it is surprising that we have been so slow to construct a compelling narrative of how and why more people from diverse backgrounds should be employed in television. So let’s stop trying to uncover more and more facts about diversity and spend a little more time in practicing our storytelling.

Who's Afraid Of The "R" Word?

Large sections of British society want to portray much of the discussion around racism, sexism and other diversity issues as “Political Correctness gone mad” but is that just another way to shut us up?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last weeks (or are living on a diet of X-Factor and the Apprentice) you will know that racism is once again in the headlines. First there was Tiger Woods’ former caddy wanting to put things inside the golfer’s orifices, then there was England captain John Terry insulting Anton Ferdinand and finally last week Fifa President Sepp Blatter saying racism could be solved with a friendly handshake.

These events have caused some people not to ask if society is becoming more racist but whether we have all become too sensitive about racism and name calling and once again to ask is this all “Political Correctness gone mad”? The BBC topical discussion and phone-in programme “Sunday Morning Live” joined in with the debate with three panellists – Gerry Robinson, Carole Malone and John Amaechi – trying to answer these very questions. The two white panellists Gerry Robinson and Carole Malone both thought society had become too sensitive and ordinary white people now live in fear of saying the wrong thing and being accused of being racist. Carole Malone described an incident where she was too scared to even describe a shop assistant as black just in case this was misconstrued as being racist.

I’m not doubting Carole Malone and Gerry Robinson’s experience in shops but when it comes to working in TV the truth is normally the reverse. Accusing anyone of racism (or much worse of being a racist) takes tremendous guts. Accusing anyone of the ‘R’ word can jeopardise your job, your career, social standing and risk being alienated by your colleagues.

Being accused of being racist almost has the same social opprobrium as being a called a paedophile or wife-beater. While it is a sign of progress that racism is now seen as completely unacceptable in a way it wasn’t thirty years ago the stigma attached to the label can scare people from raising the issue let alone pointing fingers.

Take the simple act of blogging for example. I often have discussions with black colleagues about the issues of prejudice and racism in the television industry but when I suggest they blog about it as I do (or talk to other people in power about it) they regularly tell me that they don’t want to “rock the boat”. They tell me that I have a “safe” staff job at the BBC and I’m senior enough to say the things I say without fear of receiving my P45. They feel that raising any of the points they regularly talk about when amongst colleagues and friends from diverse backgrounds could mark them out as troublemakers. They worry that talking about racism in the television industry is the equivalent of calling people in very powerful positions in the industry (their current and future bosses) “paedophiles”.

We have got to find a way in which colleagues can raise issues of race without fearing that they are committing career suicide. Similarly we need find a way to look at inequality and race related problems in the television industry without those in power becoming overly defensive, fearing that they are being labelled “racist” and pushed in the same corner as wife-beaters, rapists and paedophiles.

The recent incidents involving Sepp Blatter, John Terry and Steve Williams show that racism is still an important problem that needs to be addressed. But just as everyone from David Cameron to David Beckham realise a friendly handshake won’t solve racism neither will being afraid of using the ‘R’ word.

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.

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.

Lessons From A Serial Killer

Could a convicted serial killer teach us all a lesson in diversity?

On the 4^th October, possibly the most important programme I have ever overseen was broadcast. But I suspect very few of the people reading this blog will have seen it. It was a programme aired only in Scotland. And it was about a possible miscarriage of justice.

Colin Norris is a convicted serial killer currently serving 30 years. He was a nurse who supposedly poisoned at least five elderly patients with insulin – killing four of them in 2002.

The programme was staffed by a lot of journalists who used to work on the series “Rough Justice” - which specialised in bringing miscarriage of justices to light. Our film on Colin Norris (BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer), revealed new scientific evidence that casts doubt on the insulin poisoning that he was convicted for. As well as the new scientific evidence my team also discovered other people that had died of similar low blood sugar symptoms as the 5 “victims”, but these other people died when Colin Norris was not on duty. This meant that either there was someone else murdering these people or, more likely as the new scientific evidence points to, they all died of natural causes. If our investigation is right an innocent man could be serving time for four murders and an attempted murder he did not do.

The programme was covered extensively in the Tartan press (The Herald, Scotsman, Daily Record and Scottish versions of the UK papers) and received an above average audience. The new evidence has now been submitted to the criminal case review commission to decide if a miscarriage of justice has in fact taken place.

For the purpose of this blog post, however, the key fact is that Colin is Scottish. This potential miscarriage of justice was not picked up by network television. In fact, it was only commissioned by me because I have a pot of money to highlight issues that are either of interest to a Scottish audience and / or are about something specific to Scotland.

If Colin Norris had been English, I would have been very unlikely to have been able to commission a programme looking at his case. The implications for people interested in diversity in television is obvious. How many important stories are falling through the cracks because there is not specific ring-fenced money for looking at a specific group of people? Is there a similar miscarriage of justice film about a disabled person that hasn’t had a top BBC team of journalists looking at it because there isn’t ring-fenced disability money or TV programmes? What important black issues are we failing to cover because there isn’t ring-fenced money to make black specific programmes? By their very definition, we will never know the answer to those types of questions.

The truth is all broadcasters and all genre commissioners are far better at commissioning diverse programmes in the mainstream than they were twenty years ago, both in terms of on-screen talent and issues. One only has to look at the recent mixed race season on the BBC as an example. And no one wants to go back to the days when different diverse groups were given their own programmes and ring-fenced money but the films were nearly all broadcast at obscure times when no-one was watching.

However what “BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer” did reveal is that ring-fenced money for specific communities, regions or nations can sometimes uncover important stories that would otherwise be overlooked. Ring-fenced programme money is not appropriate for all diversity issues and communities but there is no doubt that it does have a role to play in television. Just ask all the Scottish people who watched the programme.