White papers

The defining characteristic of the press in this country must be the polarised spectrum that sees most newspapers adopt either a distinctly left or right-wing stance on nearly everything.

The current debate over multiculturalism/immigration/integration in one that highlights this more than ever. The anti-immigration rhetoric coming from the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun is predictable enough, but there is something disingenuous about the coverage by the left-wing papers.

These are the reporters who subtly but confidently paint racism and xenophobia as primarily working-class characteristics, which they, as members of a middle-class intelligentsia, are obliged to combat.

Strangely enough though, when I go to see Tottenham Hotspur, I can look around and immediately see 10 or 15 non-white faces within a few metres of me. Yet in the newsrooms of the Telegraph and Guardian, I see not a single black face and very few that are anything other than pasty, pallid or pink.

Could it be that those who are most vocal about welcoming immigration suffer themselves from an innate, even subconscious racism? Is there, perhaps, a tiny part of the brain that thinks, “We could do with some Polish plumbers, but god help us if they start coming for my job”?

You’d never get anyone to admit it of course, but the one-tone nature of the staff at national newspapers is as much an indictment of journalism industry as it is of a wider social problem. They are aware that their readership is primarily white and middle-class, but have been slow to hire representatives of other backgrounds in order to widen that readership.

Until the conveyor belt of university graduates stops rolling into Fleet Street, this will never change, and the guilty secret of those oh-so righteous but oh-so exclusive press circles will remain under wraps.