Advertisement

BBC Newsnight accused over failure to interview any BAME guests for a week

<span>Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA</span>
Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

BBC Newsnight went an entire week without featuring a single live interview with a guest from a minority ethnic background, according to an analysis of national media output.

All 17 individuals interviewed live on the flagship current affairs programme during one week in mid-July were white, according to a survey conducted by the Women in Journalism group amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd.

The organisation’s researchers watched prominent television news programmes, listened to certain primetime current affairs radio shows and surveyed every print newspaper front page between 13 and 19 July. They concluded that there was a “shocking” lack of racial diversity and representation of women in journalism.

The group’s other findings included that just one in four front-page newspaper stories were written by women, that 16% of people quoted in front-page news stories were women, and that out of 111 people quoted on national newspaper front pages, only one was a black woman. This was Jen Reid, who appeared on the Guardian’s front page after a statue of her was erected in place of one of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.

Some media groups, reluctant to comment publicly, acknowledged failings but pushed back on the report’s methodology, saying the survey only took into account print newspaper front pages rather than websites, and was selective in its analysis of the television and radio schedules. Women in Journalism said it was restricted in its media monitoring ability due to the limited funding available for such projects.

Sources at Newsnight accepted that they had work to do but insisted they had been unlucky with the week chosen for monitoring. They said the figures were distorted by the stories that happened to be covered by the programme that week, while it happened that political parties only offered white MPs as guests. They also said the decision to only survey contributions from live guests overlooked the contributions from black and minority ethnic guests in footage that preceded live discussions, as well as a report from Yemen that aired that week.

According to the survey, television news broadly outperformed print news outlets for diversity. The survey found that 30% of primetime television news presenters on the programmes surveyed were from BAME backgrounds, a much higher proportion than the general British population. There were also more female TV news presenters than men.

However, despite efforts to improve gender equality, such as the BBC’s successful 50:50 project, across the industry, the expert guests invited on television remain overwhelmingly male.

The report found that people of colour were more likely to be asked on to discuss issues of race, rather than for their knowledge of other areas: “Out of all BAME expert guests’ appearances on TV, more than half were in the context of coverage either directly related to race, such as for topics involving colonialism and Black Lives Matter, or during coverage of black and BAME communities.”