The media needs to do more than talk about diversity

Everyone's a little bit racist, the Avenue Q song goes, though after the last week in the news – and the last month, the last year, the last forever – suspicion abounds that some people may be more racist than others.

White media gatekeepers sometimes call out prejudices and discriminations, when they see them, but that doesn't compensate for the times they dismiss or downplay them, or the grim occasions they perpetuate them. When the media is monocultural – when it is visibly whiter than the general population – it skews the context in which conversations about racism are held. So it is welcome that RTÉ, the national public-service media organisation, as it calls itself, is preparing a new strategy on diversity, in which it hopes to address gaps it admits currently exist "in this critical area".

RTÉ is hardly the only media organisation that should be trying harder to make itself more diverse. But its receipt of some €182 million in public money bestows special obligations upon it, as does the Broadcasting Act 2009, which requires it to “reflect the cultural diversity of the whole island of Ireland”.

Human dignity

Admittedly, the legislation also demands that RTÉ make programmes that “in every case, respect human dignity” – a tough ask in an entertainment industry where entire genres of programming have flourished precisely because they dispatch the concept of human dignity by the first ad break.

On diversity, RTÉ must at least look like it is doing something. The contents of the new strategy remain a mystery for now, but it seems safe to assume it will include efforts to improve the representation of ethnic and other minorities in both its programming output and the corridors of what Ryan Tubridy calls "Montrosia".

The BBC, once dubbed "hideously white" by former director general Greg Dyke, has just published an update to its own diversity policy, which it duly illustrated with a picture of The Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.

The treatment of Hussain by certain parts of the media – let's call it the wrong part – was dismal. The judges rated her the best baker, but Daily Mail commenters were apoplectic, and columnist Amanda Platell, sensing a "PC" conspiracy, reckoned a white contestant who had come fourth would have fared better if only she had baked "a chocolate mosque".

Inside the BBC’s strategy document were numbers. Lots of numbers. It has set 2020 targets for the on-air, cross-genre portrayal of women (who it said would have half of all on-air roles), people with disabilities (8 per cent), LGBT people (8 per cent) and black, Asian and ethnic minorities (15 per cent, reflecting the demographic make-up of the UK).

Lead roles were specified as part of this diversity promise to avoid a situation whereby under-drawn characters from minority groups only ever pop up in the background to advance the story of the white lead. That was only the beginning. To encourage applications, “potential staff” from under-represented groups would receive CV and interview coaching.

Removing names

Then, in a bid to level up the socioeconomic playing field, the BBC plans to anonymise the CVs submitted for “all core roles”, removing the names and background details of candidates so that they were judged purely on experience. There goes your white, middle-class privilege.

Some people love nothing more than to rage against positive discrimination, invoking the word “merit” as if it is decades of dedication to the principle of “merit” that has gifted us the current status quo. But “blind CVs” do not, in any case, fall into the category of positive discrimination. They are simply the removal of prejudice, subconscious or otherwise, from the first part of the recruitment process.

That the whole concept feels like the polar opposite of how many media gigs are divvied up today renders it even more beautiful. Sadly, it feels unlikely ever to be replicated in an Irish industry where one’s surname still counts for so much. And given that gender balance remains so bizarrely elusive, it’s hard to hold out hope that the media will locate its other missing faces and voices.

In the past, RTÉ’s official literature on diversity has name-checked everything from the Irish language (which should, and now does, have a strategy all to itself) to comedy stereotypes, which it noted “were not funny for the stereotyped”. Quite.

This time around, some ambition, some concrete measures against which its strategy can be judged a success or a failure, would send out the right signal, both to its licence fee-paying audience and to the other institutions in Ireland that operate under the white, middle- class, male default and are offensively happy to carry on doing so.