In 2021, in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, Women in Journalism, (WIJ) the UK’s leading networking, training and campaigning organisation for journalists in the UK, undertook research into the representation of Black people and ethnic minorities in national newspapers and on the main TV and radio news bulletins (measured by audience).
Five years earlier, WIJ had undertaken a similar project, analysing the representation of women on the front pages of the national press. The title was – The Tycoon and the Escort. As the introduction stated:
It refers to the descriptions used in the coverage of the murder by a businessman of his lover, for which he received a life sentence in 2016. The Tycoon and the Escort exemplifies the kind of loaded language which often reveals the bias of the male media lens where men are millionaires and business tycoons while women – even powerful ones – are judged by a hotness quotient or ‘would-ya?’ yardstick on their arm-candy factor.
The research analysed the front pages of newspapers – “shaping the ‘hard news’ which we see on coffee tables and garage forecourts across Britain” over a week in July.
The Daily Mirror had the lowest count of female front page bylines in June-July 2017, with only 10% of stories written by women. This was followed by the Evening Standard and The Sun, both with 15% of front page stories written by women, and the Daily Express with 16%. Across the print press, the average percentage of front page stories written by women in June-July 2017 was 25%, just 2 percentage points above the average in 2012.
In 2022 WIJ asked the same questions again, this time broadening the scope to analyse how the UK media represents women both in terms of bylines, as quoted experts, and also collecting information on the topics covered by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) expert guests featured across all three mediums. To determine the nuance of the BAME experience it additionally monitored Black as a discrete category. (The use of BAME was contentious throughout, and Black with a capital B was used at the insistence of Vivienne Francis, a senior colleague at LCC and on the WIJ committee, which I also sit on.
The findings were shocking and showed little progress since 2017. 
An example of sexist portrayal of leading government members as reported in the Guardian online
Jen Reid was the only black woman quoted on the front page of a national newspaper in the week following the pulling down of the statue of Edward Colsonas part of the BLM protests – a major news story. His statue was replaced by one of Reid by the artist Marc Quinn
On the PG Cert course, combining 30 years of industry experience, 10 years leading WIJ’s professional-development events programme and seven teaching at LCC, I would like to investigate how these gaps could be narrowed, given that so many of the students on all five degrees in the Journalism and Publishing department are from such diverse backgrounds, and the majority are women.
As a result of research by WIJ and other organisations such as the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism the industry is well aware of the need to recruit from a far wider social and ethnic base, and there is anecdotal evidence that this is happening at entry level, although data is not in the public domain.
At the time of WIJ’s 2017 report, there was one woman editor of a national newspaper – Katharine Viner at the Guardian. Now there are seven, ie 36 per cent (Press Gazette, 2020). In another five years time, could we see a similar shift, so that newsrooms reflect far more social and ethnic diversity? And what is the role of university journalism departments in helping make that happen?
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