LONDON – In the wake of the explosive interview of Harry and Meghan, an influential professional association that spoke to the British news media, issued a provocative response rejecting the idea of racism and intolerance in the British coverage of the couple.
The group, the Editors’ Association, was embarrassed on Wednesday after objections from more than 160 colored journalists as well as the editors of The Guardian and The Financial Times.
On Monday, the association said outright that “the British media is not very interested”, and accused Meghan and Harry of an unfounded attack on the profession.
On Wednesday, it issued a statement acknowledging that the initial statement “does not reflect what we all know: there is a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion.”
Hours later, the group’s executive director, Ian Murray, resigned. He accepted responsibility for the original statement, saying he was going “so that the organization can begin to build its reputation.”
The fallout from Harry and Meghan’s interview not only divided the British and shook the foundations of the royal family. It also created rifts in the British news media, an industry that rarely breaks the external appearance, raising broader questions about racism in British society.
But the unit came under increasing pressure as more questions were asked about dealing with racial and mental health issues, as well as the coverage of the royal family.
“Normally you would see the print press stand up for each other, but here they did not make a general case,” said James Rodgers, associate professor of journalism at City University of London.
“Much of the divisions in British society over the behavior of Harry and Meghan are reflected in the media,” he added.
The critics of the tabloids, who blamed Harry and Meghan for driving them out of the country with their relentless attacks on her, were remarkably restricted about the interview, media critics said, apparently avoiding anything that could be considered racist. Instead, they focus mostly on the defense of Queen Elizabeth II and the monarchy.
The degree of self-control may be due to the website Mail on Sunday and MailOnline which recently lost a court case over the couple.
And few analysts were confident that this would indicate a significant shift in the complex, symbiotic, relationship of the British media with the monarchy or in the approach to race.
“In terms of the way racism sits in the national debate, Britain is very different from the US,” said David Yelland, a former editor of the country’s best-selling tabloid, The Sun, and founder of Kitchen Table Partners, a communications company, said. .
Although he does not agree that race directly motivated the tabloid criticism of Meghan, Yelland admits that there is tremendous unconscious prejudice in British newsrooms.
“In this country, we are far behind the US in the sense that it is a subject that is through people’s lips all the time,” he said. “There is a great deal of ignorance about what racism is in this country.”
For mr. Yelland gave the interview an unforgivable light on the relationship between the media and a monarchy with a long tradition of not commenting on news articles.
According to him, the unspoken agreement was “that the monarchy never complains and in return the press is basically supportive, but makes up a lot of things – some of which are very painful for the palace.”
Meghan, he added, “put a bomb under all this and everyone’s panicking.”
Other experts believe that the media’s prejudice largely reflects deeper tensions in society. The anger over Meghan and Harry’s claim that a member of the royal family is concerned about the skin color of her son Archie was driven by a very deep denial in Britain as in many other societies about the existence of racism ”, said Gavan Titley, a senior lecturer at Maynooth University and author of “Racism and Media.”
Although the media and other institutions acknowledge that overt racism is unacceptable, many people have a limited understanding of the nuances, and people of color are expected to carry a burden of proof, along with any accusations of racism. Conversations around racism, he said, are moving quickly away from “the substantive discussion of racism whether it is racist or not and who is offended.”
“It makes it very difficult for people to talk about the experience of racism in British society.”
For Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, editor-in-chief of the magazine gal-dem, the initial statement of the Editors’ Association was’ extremely disappointing ‘. Me. Brinkhurst-Cuff said she began working with the Editors’ Association in 2019 as part of a diversity working group of black journalists.
“I remember telling them that we could not only talk about more coloreds in the door, but also about the content being put out,” she said.
“There is definitely a lack of care and a lack of ethics in the tabloids when it comes to the stories of marginalized people, and that is in line with the broader political beliefs of the newspapers.”
A 2019 Leeds University report found that although ethnic minorities received very little general news coverage, they featured prominently in stories about ‘specific news agendas, particularly immigration, terrorism and crime’.
Research compiled by Women in Journalism, an advocacy group, paints a clear picture of the British media industry: one that is white and predominantly male.
Over the course of a week in the summer of 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, not a single black reporter appeared on the cover of any major publications.
And of the 111 people quoted on the front pages, only one was a black woman: Jen Reid, who took part in a rally in Bristol, England, where people threw down a statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston. . Mrs. Reid was quoted by The Guardian after a statue of her was erected in its place.
The report validates earlier data indicating that the British media industry had a serious race imbalance. In 2016, City, University of London surveyed 700 British journalists and found that only 0.4 per cent of the profession was Muslim and only 0.2 per cent black, compared to 5 per cent and 3 per cent of the British population respectively.
According to Brian Cathcart, professor of journalism at Kingston University in London, the accusations of great coverage come at a moment of vulnerability for Britain’s dreaded pony newspapers.
Like the traditional print news media worldwide, Britain’s popular press is experiencing a decline in circulation and advertising. According to analysts, this is a proportional decrease in influence, although it has an important power to determine the agenda for the broadcast media.
Analysts reject the prospect of new media laws and say Prime Minister Boris Johnson has abandoned the idea of new regulations.
Yet it seems that the turbulent swing with which the pony newspapers used to work has been greatly reduced.
“They are very upset because they lost the lawsuit to Meghan and Harry. They were very upset because they were humiliated,” he said. Cathcart said. “They are also concerned that Harry and Meghan said Buckingham Palace is in the pocket of the tabloids.”
Their answer, according to him, was to play the story relatively straightforward and to concentrate on its elements that do not focus on the media’s coverage of the royal family.
“They are not sorry, they are not ashamed, and they are going to extinguish it,” he said. “They’re going to hope it dies out.”
Anna Joyce reported.