IN A meritocracy, working-class people should be able to avail themselves of the same opportunities as anyone else: to study what they want and get any job. All political parties claim to be meritocratic, yet access to many professions is still based almost entirely on where you studied and who you know, which is almost entirely based on where you live, which, in turn, is based on class.
Labour governments should be about changing that and opening up opportunities for all, regardless of race or class. It may have taken 10 years, but the recently established Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, chaired by Alan Milburn, may be one small, hopeful step along the way to smashing down the segregation that exists.
Admittedly, it hasn’t got off to the most auspicious of starts – it is packed full of the knighted and honoured and lots of people whose backgrounds ensured they became senior in their chosen professions. But let us, for just a moment – and I know it’s hard with this Government – set our cynicism aside and hope that the panel will strike a blow against those bastions of privilege and class.
Journalism is one of the professions the panel will consider. It’s hardly going to shock anyone to hear that journalism is overwhelmingly a white, middle-class profession.
Less than 10 per cent of new entrants come from a working-class background, with just 3 per cent coming from homes headed by semi or unskilled workers. Just 4 per cent of journalists in mainstream media come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ninety-eight per cent of new entrants are graduates. And with the costs of education soaring, it is little wonder that favours those from wealthier families.
The causes of this sorry state of affairs are numerous, but chief among them are the recruitment policies of media companies and the fact that people are expected to work for free for long periods just to break into the profession.
Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has first-hand knowledge of this exploitation of young, wannabe hacks, having started out doing unpaid work experience at the Middleton Guardian.
He isn’t alone. Our recent survey of new entrants to the industry showed many had worked for three, six or even up to 12 months unpaid for major national magazine, newspaper and broadcasting organisations. It’s often said that The Independent on Sunday would be unable to publish each week without its army of work experience youngsters manning parts of the paper.
More than three-quarters of those who had material broadcast or published received no payment for it. Working-class kids simply can’t afford to do long periods of unpaid work experience – and so the industry becomes increasingly dominated by middle-class and upper-class young people.
Our desire to see change isn’t just the politics of class envy (although, to be fair, there is a bit of that, too), but it actually has a more serious impact. All journalists write to one extent or another about what they know, their contacts are derived from the environment in which they move and their views are shaped by their upbringing and social networks. It’s not deliberate bias, but the effect of nurture. Being determines consciousness, if you want to get all Marxist about it.
That means the media fail to give an adequate voice to sections of the community, that stories are written without a real understanding of the social forces at work and that issues are missed because they do not cross the journalists’ radar. And with an increasingly disengaged audience, the media themselves becomes more marginalised and the democratic process suffers.
We’ve tried to get the Revenue and Customs to tackle this through better enforcement of the national minimum wage rules and the Low Pay Commission to address it through a stricter definition of “volunteers”. Now we’re left relying on Lord So-and-so and Sir What’s-his-name to strike a blow for the working class. Oh…and Alan Milburn, of course.
Jeremy Dear is general secretary of the National Union of Journalists
