You will see very few black faces in the newsrooms of our national papers, and only someone who has had his head in the ground for 20 years would think that wasn't a problem
Jonathan Ross raised an important question the other day. (Now there's a sentence you probably never expected to read.) Speaking after visiting a Radio 1 studio, he asked: "How many black people have they got working on proper shows there?" Most of the black people he saw were cleaners or doormen, he said, and the BBC had not "really made the effort yet" when it came to getting the race balance right among presenters.
It's hard not to feel sorry for the corporation, given that it is among the few media institutions that actually have policies on this matter and try to put them into practice, though no doubt there is still plenty to be done. If Ross had visited a national newspaper office instead of the Radio 1 studios, he would almost certainly have found the company even whiter - and the management more complacent.
It is nine years since the journalist and author Beulah Ainley published a study showing that only 20 black or Asian journalists had jobs on national newspapers, which by her count was less than 1 per cent of the total employed, and if things have improved since then it has not been by much - research by the Society of Editors in 2004 still painted a sorry picture.
This means that whether your paper is reporting on a shooting in Peckham, a controversy over the wearing of veils in a school, or the results of Celebrity Big Brother - not to mention the activities of the BNP, the government's asylum policy or for that matter the iniquities of private equity firms - the information is reaching you through a white filter.
The reporters in the field are probably white and the senior newsroom staff who put their stories on to the pages are almost certainly white; ditto the columnists and leader writers who follow up with their opinions, while we know that the editors conducting these orchestras are all white. No doubt they try to do their jobs in an unprejudiced manner, but only somebody who has had their head in the ground for 20 years could think that makes everything fine.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was firmly slapped down a year ago when he suggested that the media coverage of murders sometimes reflected institutional racism. Distinguished journalists queued up to suggest reasons unconnected with race to explain why the murder of a man called Tom ap Rhys Price deserved 6,000 words of press coverage over 14 days, while the murder of someone called Balbir Matharu was worth 1,400 words in the same period. (The figures were calculated by the Guardian.)
But Sir Ian knew what he was talking about. Institutional racism is mostly a matter of structures and collective habits, which is one reason why his organisation is under pressure to recruit more officers from ethnic minorities. By ancient tradition, however, the national press recruits largely by word of mouth, and you don't need much imagination to see the effect: like hires like.
The 2001 census showed that 9 per cent of the population of England were from ethnic minorities; if the national press is half way to reflecting that in its staff profile I will be surprised. And remember, all these papers are produced in London, where 29 per cent of the population are from the ethnic minorities.
The price of freedom
Consultation on the government's plan to change the rules for handling Freedom of Information requests is closing, and this magazine, like almost every other news organisation, has made clear its opposition. The proposals are as ingenious as they are cynical: officials and ministers will be able to block an unwelcome request simply by saying they would need costly meetings to discuss it, and (get this) once the request has been turned down, the meetings don't even have to take place.
When this shabby idea was debated in the Commons last month MPs expressed sympathy for Vera Baird, the parliamentary undersecretary to whom fell the task of defending it. In civilian life, you see, Baird was a barrister in Michael Mansfield's chambers and a human-rights specialist.
She showed no gratitude, however, blustering on about frivolous requests (which can already be excluded) and how her constituents in Redcar shouldn't have to subsidise the BBC's research budget (while it's OK for them to subsidise, say, Trident and war in Iraq).
Among her more intriguing points was that the regime for costing requests was "ludicrous" because it didn't price ministers' time at a premium above the bog-standard £25 an hour. Well you can see how, for a QC, that would be an almost unbearable indignity.
Diet danger
A cautionary tale from among the cover lines of Take It Easy, the colour supplement of the People: "I lost eight stone - then my pants fell down at Asda."
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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