Historically, U.S. magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Details, TV Guide, New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar and The National Review have been staffed with British editors—often in preference to African-American journalists. Yet institutional racism in the British media world apparently was, historically, quite extensive. As Daily Racism: The press and black people in Britain by Paul Gordon and David Rosenberg observed during the 1980s:
“Black people are under-represented in the media industry as a whole and in print journalism in particular. A survey conducted by the Black Media Workers Association (BMWA) in 1983 found that black workers comprised only 0.7 percent of the total media workforce and the proportion of black workers working full-time on newspapers and magazines stood at less than 0.2 percent (Black people make up 4.5 percent of the total labour force in Britain.) It also found that there are several large cities with substantial black populations which had no black workers on local newspapers. From these statistics the BMWA argued that the predominantly white character of the media industry reinforced a white perspective in newspapers and they questioned whether the media in general could reflect the concerns of all sectors of society and black minorities in particular…”
The same book also stated:
“…Press racism is found not only in its printed product but at the level of recruitment and employment in the industry. There is a need for the media industry as a whole to eliminate and confront its own institutionalized racism and become, in its composition, more reflective of the society in which it operates, particularly in relation to racial minorities…”
(Downtown 1/5/94)
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