The Media Class Doesn't Represent Us
What a new study reveals about the people who shape our national conversation
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Here's a story you probably missed last week. Writing in Broadcast, a monthly magazine for Britain's television and radio industry, a man named Andy Worboys explained why, after 24 years in media, he’s decided to leave the industry.
“From a very personal perspective, but also anecdotally through others, I know that my working-class background has played a major part in blocking any possible growth beyond being at the coalface of the edit. My forays into writing and directing have always been kept limited to firefighting or have gone uncredited.”
After spending much of his working life alongside the people who shape the films, the television programmes, the radio shows and the adverts we consume, and which in turn shape how we think about the country and ourselves, Worboys went on:
Looking back through my CV, only two directors I’ve worked with in the past twenty years were not privately educated. Class just isn’t discussed as an issue, and that’s largely because it isn’t seen as an issue by the people who run the show. I don’t believe there’s been any real progress made in my time as an editor. So much talent is being lost or ignored.”
He’s not wrong to think this way.
At the same time as he was writing his farewell to an industry he feels has become insular, socially homogenous and dangerously detached from the country that surrounds it, a major new study has thrown light on the 100,000 or so editors, journalists and reporters who work in it.
What did it find?
It found a media class that’s now filled with people who come from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds —who simply do not come close to reflecting and representing the country they are reporting on and shaping— and where in recent years representation for workers has slumped to a record low.
More than four in five people in the media class —82%— now have the highest educational qualifications, compared to only 38% of all workers. And nearly three-quarters —72%— have parents in the highest, most financially secure professional and managerial occupations, compared to only 44% of all workers.
In other words, the people who work in print and broadcast media are now twice as likely as the average person to belong to the elite graduate class, are far more likely to have been raised by financially secure if not affluent parents in the professional classes, and to have no real connection to, or experience with, ordinary workers.
And, today, crucially, it’s the youngest journalists who are more likely than their older editors to have the highest qualifications, to come from privileged families, which three-quarters of them do, and hence to be the most disconnected from the values, voice, and experiences of the average worker, as the study notes:
“Journalism employers (mainly) recruit graduates as new entrants but entrants to higher education are themselves not representative of the wider population. To the extent that journalism continues to recruit mainly from a pool which itself is under-representative of individuals from lower social groups, it’s likely that this under-representation will continue”
The media class, in other words, is becoming more not less elitist over time, drifting further and further away from the everyday experiences that are shaping the lives of ordinary people ‘out there’, in the surrounding nation.
While many members of this increasingly insular, interconnected, homogeneous, and nepotistic class remain obsessed with the holy trinity of race, sex, and gender, social class is now the only factor where the gap between people who are actively shaping the national conversation about who we are as a country and the people who have to listen to it is widening over time —leaving many of the latter with a palpable and growing sense they do not really feature in this ‘conversation’ at all.
Even many of the women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds who are held up as evidence of ‘diversity’ are, at least when it comes to their education and values, not diverse at all. Meanwhile, many of the most prominent editors, journalists, and writers who berated much of the rest of the country for exercising their democratic right by voting for populism, Brexit, or Boris Johnson have themselves lived lives of extraordinary privilege. There’s a reason many voters still feel the system is rigged and biased against them —because it is.
Whereas once-upon-a-time a thriving local and regional media helped to ensure that relatively ‘normal’ people also had a pathway into the industry, today Britain’s newsrooms, production teams, and editorial meetings are increasingly filled with elite young graduates who move direct from a remarkably privileged upbringing to an elite university and then straight into the newsroom with little life experience or exposure to people from different backgrounds in between. The rise of social media has also clearly contributed, encouraging them to spend their days on Twitter rather than getting out into the field and immersing themsleves in non-London England.
As one disgruntled and very famous senior journalist once said to me: ‘The problem is not just that younger journalists are remarkably privileged, coming from affluent families that either already live in London or can afford to set them up in London. It’s also that they increasingly see themselves as political activists who are in media to ‘change the world’ rather than search for truth in an objective and neutral way”.
And so as the members of the elite graduate class have moved sharply leftwards on cultural issues —embracing socially liberal if not radically ‘woke’ progressive views on immigration, race, sex, gender, climate change, minority rights, and more— and have come of age amid a new culture of victimhood which prioritises grievance and subjective experience over objective truth, they’re now increasingly reshaping print and broadcast media around their values, stoking the ‘Great Awokening’ of media.
None of this is unique to the media, of course. As I’ve written before, the fact is that almost all of Britain’s most important and influential institutions are dominated by people who come from the same backgrounds, who share the same values, and who routinely, as Melvyn Bragg pointed out this week, reveal their unfamiliarity with the rest of Britain by portraying the lives of ordinary working people as a “grim parody”.
But given that the media still wield enormous influence over the national debate, over what is considered socially acceptable and what is not, over which voices are prioritised and which are not, over how we think of ourselves, our identity, and our history, and over the direction of the prevailing culture, the glaring absence of working-class and relatively ‘normal’ voices more than seven years after the vote for Brexit is, in my view at least, deeply problematic.
An obvious response to the revolts of the last decade should have been to make the institutions more representative of wider society and especially the workers, non-graduates and pensioners who supported them, not to make them even more elitist and removed from the lives of ordinary people.
I also thought about this while watching a visibly bitter and unpleasant media class boo and jeer Nigel Farage and GB News today after they won a key industry award, confirming their arrival as serious players on the media landscape.
Had the media class been more representative of the country it claims to reflect, had it made more room after Brexit for a wide range of voices, and had it been more respectful of the millions of people who live outside the M25 and hold a different vision of who we are as a country then, today, the media might not be fragmenting.
It might not be witnessing strong demand for the likes of GB News, flagship BBC shows like Radio 4 Today might not have lost nearly two million listeners since Brexit, there might not be a growing army of Substackers and YouTubers building an alternative media ecosystem, and the likes of Andy Worboys, and many more like him, might still be in the industry, ensuring that ordinary working people feel they belong and are respected in the national conversation.
However, the working class have their role in the media as a source of entertainment such as Channel 4's "Sixty days on the estates". They are useful for poverty porn, and of course the licence fee!
Of course Farage got baracked because the luvvies know the working class voted for his Brexit and admire the man (witness Farage at Large, on GB News). His treatment and so many other instances such as Jacob RM and his 12 year old son being mobbed by Remainers, is one of the most repulsive facets of the left today, political violence. Tory scum and even worse, Tory (unts being acceptable language and behaviour. Proud of yourself, Rayner?
The growth of the alternative media brings some relief from the iron grip of progressive orthodoxy. Unfortunately other than GB News many if not most depend on individual subscription as the only realistic funding mechanism. I myself am limited to only the most informative and entertaining writers - Matt being top of my list - because such subscriptions rapidly mount up. The poor and the working class (even IF avid current event readers) cannot afford the luxury of becoming too well informed, certainly not to the extent required to push back against the wall of propaganda coming our way. Writers must earn their crust in order to publish and I take no issue with this, many can find no outlet in the wider media without curtailing their freedom to challenge the zeitgeist after all. However I see no way the alternative media can grow significantly beyond where it is at present unless advertisers have an epiphany and stop trying to convince the public of their ‘moral stance’ on everything from widgets to toothpaste. After all some see advertising on GB News as beneficial it seems.