"Write-on, Dr. Ainley"

Black Journalist Seeks Positive Action in UK Media Training and Hiring Practices

Beulah Ainley

Beulah Ainley, pioneering journalist who led The Chronicle's seminar "Is UK Journalism Colour-blind?", has called on the media industry to support positive training and employment programmes for black journalists.

Arguing her case in the journal of the National Union of Journalists, she says, "The media need to implement positive equal opportunity policies and hire more than just the token one or two on each paper. This means monitoring applicants for training and jobs. Managers are against this because it might show they discriminate against black people."

British journalism schools are equally at fault, says the Caribbean-born Ainley, whose media racism study earned her a PhD degree from the London School of Economics. "Until there is a fair representation of black people in mainstream journalism courses black-only courses should be established", she says.

Modest sucesses
Ainley develops this view in a hard-hitting article "Wanted: More Blacks in the Media", in the British Journalism Review. It was the special training programmes of the 1980s that first catapulted black journalists into British newsrooms over barriers of racial discrimination. But cutbacks in programme funding and declining political support in the 1990s, fuelled by prejudice and fear of change, are responsible for the current restricted entry of blacks into the profession, she says.

Modest successes have occurred, but overall trends are unambiguously negative, according to Ainley. "Although the number of black journalists has increased since the 1970s, the media - especially newspapers - are not training or employing enough," she concludes.

Positive actions
"These are shocking findings....It is absolutely appalling so few blacks are in the newspaper staffs," said Geoffrey Goodman, editor of the distinguished Review, when interviewed by The Chronicle. "Certainly British journalists need to take this on board," says Goodman, whose 10-year old quarterly journal reaches 1200 media academics and professionals in print, radio and television.

Positive action training programmes for aspiring black journalists is the answer, certainly in the short-term, says Ainley, a journalist for 15 years and guiding light of the NUJ George Viner scholarship fund for needy minority students. Further pressure to overcome existing barriers is also necessary - if not "there will be even fewer black journalists in mainstream media in the next millennium than there are today," says Ainley.

(Publications by Dr. Beulah Ainley include: Black Journalists, White Media. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. 1998; "Harder path for blacks to follow," The Journalist. London: National Union of Journalists December 1998, p.21; and "Wanted: more blacks in the media," British Journalism Review, Vol.9 No.4 1998, p.60-64).