On Tuesday 1st September a seasoned journalist argued that people should be employed on their merit as opposed to merely filling up diversity quotas.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Sir Trevor McDonald said, “I understand why people do it and why people think about quotas... but there is a philosophical downside about that. It’s awful if you walk into a place and they say “Oh I know why she got that job because they are looking for women. I think that is so unfair on the people. Maybe you were the best person for that job and so I am more interested in meritocracy... where someone is employed because they can do the job.”
The 81-year-old who had been the presenter of ITV’s News at Ten since 1992-2005, also admitted in another talk show previously that he had struggled with the fame of being such a prominent black journalist in the UK, saying he handled it with “difficulty”.
According to him, he had joined ITN and did not want to be labelled as “the black reporter” and was not going to be “relegated” to doing stories about Bradford or Brixton or the “problems of immigration” and instead wanted to work on international politics.
Sir Trevor revealed he had always found reading the news to be ‘terrifying’ and said, “I don’t think you ever lose the terror of doing it. I was overawed by the responsibility. I have a very strong almost philosophical sense of news.”
In the last few years several other journalists from BAME backgrounds have raised similar concerns about being boxed into reporting “ethnic or cultural” issues. Some of these names include The Guardian journalist Anushka Asthana and veteran BBC correspondent Anita Bhalla among others.
A few weeks ago, British Journalism Awards launched a new category aimed at recognising up and coming ethnic minority journalists, named in honour of the UK’s first black on-screen TV news reporter.Barbara Blake Hannah had given her name to this new award in the hope that it will help inspire other journalists to break through barriers in the way that she did. Now, the prize is slated to be named after her.
