A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
The problem is, however, that diversity is
about skin colour, gender, sexual orientation,
class and other characteristics, and therefore
about how specific marginalised groups
have not been sufficiently well integrated
into the television workforce and television
programming. So, for example, when Idris
Elba stood up in front of parliamentarians
in 2016 to insist – quite rightly we believe –
that diversity is “more than just skin colour”
and is mainly about “diversity of thought”, 326
the fact remains that he was asked to
deliver the speech precisely because of
a growing concern that opportunities for
BAME participation in the TV industry remain
very limited. Race, as well as other forms of
‘difference’, cannot be so easily ‘erased’ from
diversity talk.
Indeed, Sara Ahmed, who has written widely
on diversity and public policy, argues that
there remains a “sticky” association between
race and diversity. While, in reality, it is not
so easy to move ‘beyond’ race, the language
of diversity is “often used as a shorthand for
inclusion” 327 – a way of recognising difference
but freeing it from negative associations
concerning actual forms of discrimination.
Diversity, she insists, can then be used to
avoid confrontation and simply to highlight
the contributions and achievements of
different groups without asking more
fundamental questions of why these
achievements were marginalised in first place.
Television historians like Sarita Malik remind
us that diversity policy was not always like
this. When Channel 4 first started, it operated
as a “multicultural public sphere” with a
series of programmes that engaged directly
with “questions of representation and racial
stereotyping”. 328 Malik identifies a change
in programme strategy after the closure of
its Multicultural Programmes Department
in 2002 as part of a more general shift in
broadcasting from a ‘politicised’ policy of
multiculturalism to a more consumerist
emphasis on cultural, and now creative,
diversity. What we are now left with is
the possibility of a “depoliticized, raceless
‘diversity’ consensus”. 329
The implication here is that broadcasters
are using justified complaints about a lack
of representation to pursue commercial
strategies to appeal to diverse audiences
without fundamentally changing
commissioning and funding structures. The
cultural theorist Anamik Saha describes this
as the “mainstreaming” of cultural diversity
which “while no doubt increasing the visibility
of blacks and Asians on prime-time television,
had actually has little impact on the quality
of representations.” 330 So while BAME
individuals may be increasingly visible on TV,
the quality of their representations has not
have fundamentally changed and we are still
stuck, all too often, with a repertoire limited
to “terrorism, violence, conflict and carnival”
or, in terms of how Muslims are portrayed, to
“beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced
marriage”. 331
This connects to the second potential
problem with broadcasters’ diversity
strategies, especially with regard to
employment: the reliance on targets, the
provision of small pockets of funding
and training and what the Campaign for
Broadcasting Equality described to us
326
Idris Elba, speech to parliament on ‘Diversity in the Media’, January 18, 2016.
327
Sara Ahmed, On being included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, London: Duke University Press, p. 14.
328
Sarita Malik, ‘“Creative Diversity”: UK Public Service Broadcasting After Multiculturalism’, Popular Communication 11(3), p. 10
329
Malik, ‘Creative Diversity’, p. 17.
330
Anamik Saha, ‘“Beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage”: television industries and the produce of “race”,
Media, Culture and Society 34(4), 2012, p. 430.
331
Cited in Saha, ‘Beards’, p. 425, p. 435.
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