Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2017 – Diane Abbott MP, shadow home secretary

Описание: Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott gave the NUJ Claudia Jones Memorial lecture, during Black History Month 2017.


Video by Jason Parkinson.

The Labour MP and former broadcast journalist said that even today, in 2017, the sad reality is that many media stories misrepresent people of colour and peddle discriminatory story lines, such as the series of newspaper and broadcasting articles highlighting the grooming and raping of white young vulnerable girls by Asian men.

“In London a range of men are grooming and abusing girls from all backgrounds, but all we hear is that it is a crime perpetrated by Asian men against white girls,” she said. “It is the steady drumbeat of such stories in the media that inform how people view black and brown people and how black and brown people see themselves portrayed.”

She recalled that in her career as a researcher and journalist in broadcasting, she was about the only black face in the newsroom. Thirty years later, as a high-profile politician invited to be interviewed in numerous television and radio studios, not much had changed, in particular with the people in positions of influence – those who choose the stories and running order -- being overwhelmingly white.

She said: “There may be more black and brown faces on the screen these days, but those with power, the people who make all the decisions on which stories are chosen and how they are framed, are white journalists from privileged backgrounds.”

Diane, famous for her appearances squashed up on the tiny This Week sofa with former Tory minister Michael Portillo, said while she shared few opinions with the political show’s presenter, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, they agreed that if they were starting out today in the media their modest family backgrounds would have precluded the successful careers they now enjoyed.


She said the proliferation of unpaid internships in the media world made it almost impossible for working-class young people to break into the profession.


“Most media jobs are in London and if you come from a poor background you can’t live on thin air while working for free for media organisations while trying to get a break,” she said.

She said that throughout her life she had fought for social justice and if gains were to be made for a fairer and representative media:
• Companies needed to recruit not only from Oxbridge, but from higher education institutions colleges with a diverse range of journalism students.
• Journalists needed to organise within unions to fight for fair employment and use their networks and collective action to effect change.
• People of colour need to complain to broadcasting organisations and make their views heard if they are unhappy about the way they were portrayed.
• People should use social media to put forward an alternative view to the mainstream press.