Minority Report

Today Media Guardian publish an Ethnic Power List in an attempt to redress the balance against the initially all white Media Guardian 100.

Though I agree this is an important issue and the act of publishing the ethnic list is an important step toward placing some relatively unrepresented individuals within the public sphere. Isn't the point that we have to have two seperate lists the problem. Shouldn't there just be one integrated list that is chosen by a panel with individuals from both white and other ethnic groups?

Link to the full article below.

Monday April 2, 2007The Guardian

It is six years since Greg Dyke, then BBC director general, made his famous "hideously white" comments about the BBC. Since then, the corporation has made significant strides in getting people from ethnic minority backgrounds on screen. Yet at the BBC, and across the British media, the higher reaches of management are almost universally white. Indeed, it is rare to find a black or Asian face in MediaGuardian's annual list of the most 100 powerful people in the British media.

Ethnic minorities make up only 10% of the UK population so it is perfectly understandable that any power list would be dominated by white people. But statistics do not tell the whole story; the British media industry is concentrated on London, where the population is much more diverse. Yet last year's Media 100 had no black or Asian faces. Were we seriously suggesting that no one from any ethnic minority fulfilled the list's criteria - that they should have some kind of "cultural, economic or political influence" in the British media? Where was Sir Trevor McDonald, Meera Syal, Ash Atalla?
With that in mind, and prompted by a suggestion from Lawrence Lartey of Touch magazine, we decided to convene a panel of media observers and practitioners exclusively from ethnic minorities to see if they could come up with names that the Media 100 panel have missed.
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