Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Want to Become a Lobby Journalist (Only BME's Need Apply)

Anna Raccoon is in fulminating mode. The Parliamentary Press Gallery has launched a scheme by which they will admit non political journalists to the press gallery... but only if they happen to be from a black or minority ethnic background.

It has to be said that the lobby and press gallery are not exactly overflowing with journalists whose skin is anything other than pinkish white and it is to their credit that they are trying to do something about it. But is this the way to go forward? There's something deeply tokenistic about it. What about other minorities? Would TalkSport's Sean Dilley, for example, think it a good thing to encourage more blind people to become political journalists, and if so, shouldn't there be a scheme for blind people?

I won't suggest there should be a scheme for gay journalists, as they are already disproportionately represented...

7 comments:

Sean said...

Discrimination which is based on anything other than talent is vile.

The Purpleline said...

I thought we had =got rid of this silly nonsense. It is surely time to stop these idiotic engineering exercises and close down Trevor Phillips and his quango.

To keep these laws on race relations always inhibits the emulsification process of harmonising races within one common society.

Time to stop spotting the differences and become one nation, we are all individuals and should all have the same chances in life and we can only get that from taking politics out of everything especially education.

Next step we need to abandon the minimum wage, which keeps people down at the lower end of pay scales, it is a soviet communist policy. We need to unleash people by aspiration, which is why I favour Camerons fantastic social housing policy.

James Bloodworth said...

Surely this again swindles the white working class who have in the past missed the opportunities gifted to the middle classes, and are now again locked out by the fetishisation of ethnic minorities.

Nic said...

would Scots be considered a minority

jailhouselawyer said...

"There's something deeply tokenistic about it".

Unlike Baroness Warsi, for example...

Pugh said...

The day Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's bodyguards are black lesbian dwarfs I will accept this type of discrimination.

Gareth said...

"It has to be said that the lobby and press gallery are not exactly overflowing with journalists whose skin is anything other than pinkish white and it is to their credit that they are trying to do something about it."

No, it isn't.

All a lobby journalist needs to be is good. The colour of their skin is immaterial. Too many lobby journalists are not good - craven to the Government and sheep-like in their reporting. Fix what is wrong not something that is irrelevant.

If lobby journalists won't sort themselves out into a form that is more transparent and more resistant to spin merchant malevolence changing the ethnic makeup won't make a blind bit of difference.