LONDON – In the wake of Harry and Meghan’s explosive interview, an influential professional society speaking through the British media issued a defiant response, rejecting the idea of racism and intolerance in the couple’s British coverage.
On Wednesday, the group, the Society of Editors, was forced into an embarrassing turnaround after objections from more than 160 black journalists, as well as editors from The Guardian and The Financial Times.
On Monday, the society categorically declared that “the UK media is not intolerant” and accused Meghan and Harry of an unfounded attack on the profession.
On Wednesday, it issued what it called clarification, recognizing that its initial statement “did not reflect what we all know: there is a lot of work to be done in the media to improve diversity and inclusion”.
Hours later, the group’s executive director, Ian Murray, resigned. Taking responsibility for the original statement, he said he was leaving “so that the organization could start rebuilding its reputation”.
The aftermath of Harry and Meghan’s interview not only divided the British and shook the foundations of the royal family. It also created schisms in the British news media, an industry that rarely breaks the ranks externally and raised broader questions about racism in British society.
But that unit is under increasing pressure, as more questions are asked about the treatment of racial and mental health issues, as well as coverage of the royal family.
“Normally you would see the print media defending themselves, but here they were unable to make a common cause,” said James Rodgers, associate professor of journalism at City University of London.
“Many of the divisions in British society about Harry and Meghan’s conduct are reflected in the media,” he added.
The sensationalist newspapers, which Harry and Meghan blamed for driving them out of the country with their relentless attacks on her, were visibly contained about the interview, media critics said, apparently avoiding anything that could be interpreted as racist. Instead, they focused primarily on the defense of Queen Elizabeth II and the monarchy.
This containment measure may be the result of the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline website having lost a recent lawsuit involving the couple.
And few analysts were confident that this would mark a significant change in the British media’s complex and symbiotic relationship with the monarchy or in its approach to the racial issue.
“In terms of how racism fits into the national debate, Britain is very different from the United States,” said David Yelland, former editor of the country’s most successful tabloid, The Sun, and founder of Kitchen Table Partners, a communications company.
Although he does not agree that the race directly motivated the tabloid criticism of Meghan, Yelland admits that there is a huge unconscious prejudice in British newsrooms.
“In this country, we are way behind the US when it comes to being an issue that is on people’s lips all the time,” he said. “There is a great deal of ignorance about what racism is in this country.”
For Yelland, the interview shed relentless light on the relationship between the media and a monarchy with a long tradition of not commenting on news articles.
The tacit agreement, he said, was “that the monarchy never complains and in return the press is basically favorable, but it invents a lot of things – some of which are very painful for the palace”.
Meghan, he added, “put a bomb under all of this and everyone is in a panic.”
Other experts say the media’s prejudices largely reflect the deepest tensions in society. The furor over Meghan and Harry’s claim that a member of the royal family cared about their son Archie’s skin tone was motivated by “a very deep denial in Britain as in many other societies about the existence of racism” , said Gavan Titley, a senior lecturer at Maynooth University and author of “Racism and Media”.
While the media and other institutions recognize that open racism is unacceptable, many have a limited understanding of its nuances, he said, with people of color who must provide “a burden of proof”, along with any accusations of racism. Conversations around racism, he said, quickly shifted from “the substantive discussion of racism to whether it is racist or not and who is offended.”
“They make it very, very difficult for people to talk about the experience of racism in British society.”
For Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, editor-in-chief of gal-dem magazine, the Society of Editors’ initial statement was “extremely disappointing”. Ms. Brinkhurst-Cuff said she started to engage with the Society of Editors in 2019 as part of a diversity working group of Black journalists.
“I remember telling them that we could not just talk about more people of color at the door, it is also about the content that is being released,” she said.
“Certainly, within the tabloids there is a total lack of care and lack of ethics when it comes to the stories of marginalized people, and this aligns with the broader political beliefs of newspapers.”
A 2019 report from the University of Leeds found that while ethnic minorities received very little overall news coverage, they featured prominently in stories about “specific news agendas, notably immigration, terrorism and crime”.
Research compiled by Women in Journalism, an advocacy group, paints a clear picture of the British media industry: one that is white and predominantly male.
Over the course of a week in the summer of 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, not a single Black reporter was featured on the front page of any major publication, the report found.
And of the 111 people mentioned in the first pages, only one was a black woman: Jen Reid, who participated in a protest in Bristol, England, in which people dropped the statue of a slave trader, Edward Colston. Mrs. Reid was quoted by The Guardian after a statue of her was erected in its place.
The report validates previous data suggesting that the British media industry had a stark racial imbalance. In 2016, City, University of London, interviewed 700 British journalists and found that only 0.4 percent of the professionals were Muslim and only 0.2 percent were black, compared to 5 percent and 3 percent of the British population , respectively.
According to Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University London, the accusations of biased coverage come at a time of some vulnerability for the dreaded British tabloids.
Like traditional print media worldwide, the British popular press is experiencing a decline in circulation and advertising. It has suffered a proportional decline in influence, analysts say, although it retains significant power to set the agenda for the broadcast media.
Analysts downplay the prospect of new media laws, saying Prime Minister Boris Johnson has abandoned the idea of new regulation.
However, the buccaneer arrogance with which the tabloids operated seems to have been greatly reduced.
“They are very upset about losing the legal case to Meghan and Harry, they were very upset because they were humiliated,” said Cathcart. “They are also concerned that Harry and Meghan have said that Buckingham Palace is in the pocket of the tabloids.”
Their response, he said, was to play the story relatively directly and to focus on elements of it that don’t focus on the media’s coverage of the royal family.
“They are not sorry, they are not ashamed and they will get in the way of that,” he said. “They are going to hope this will end.”
Anna Joyce contributed reporting.