By Elena Siniscalco
A few weeks ago, many of us were woken up by a curious occurrence: the presenters of BBC Radio 4 Today discussing their fellow presenter – Amol Rajan’s – challenge to the BBC Director General on accent bias among BBC News presenters. Whilst the conversation was all quite meta – with a small “m”- it reinforced again the need for an ongoing discussion about representation across the media.
Many viewers believe media brands in the UK have work to do in terms of improving on-screen representation. New research commissioned by YouTube from MTM shows that, on average, only 39 per cent of people say media in the UK represent different audiences well. Most starkly, fewer than a third of respondents said people with disabilities and older adults are well represented.
My own story has cemented my belief in the importance of media representation. At school, I was relentlessly bullied. The reason? Because I was different. I may have been quiet, but my otherness attracted a lot of attention and it wasn’t the good kind. I became a master of disguise and retreated very firmly into the closet. I didn’t come out for over a decade.
Thankfully, life looks very different for me now. I’m happily married to my husband and the father of two beautiful children. I’ve channelled my early experiences to raise up others living life at the margins, something that I’m incredibly proud of. But, I can’t help wondering: what if I hadn’t spent those decades in hiding and had role models to guide me?
Yesterday, Rishi Sunak stood outside Downing Street as the first Indian Prime Minister of the UK. Many people across the world, regardless of their political beliefs, celebrated this milestone. If that is not a lesson in the power of representation, what is?
I work for YouTube because I believe in the power of open platforms as the place where connections are made, stories are told and communities come together. Whoever you are, whatever your interests, and however you identify, someone out there can relate, and you’re just a click away from hearing their story or sharing yours.
Open platforms allow new talent, new voices to emerge. Unheard voices, marginalised voices – voices that always deserved a stage, but back in 2005 when YouTube was created, would never have had a chance.
Lucy Edwards, a journalist and creator, is another example. She wanted to use platforms like YouTube to showcase how she lives her life without limits. Her channel has more than 680,000 subscribers and she was the first blind presenter on BBC Radio 1.
This representation has both a tremendous cultural and economic impact. Today, we pay out more for content than any other platform to creators, artists, and media companies. A new study by Oxford Economics shows that YouTube supported 40,000 full-time equivalent jobs and contributed £1.4bn to UK GDP in 2021. To give you an idea of scale, that’s more than twice as many jobs as people who work full-time at the BBC.
We all want content that makes us feel seen and heard, as a mirror to our experience. Understanding the lives of others helps address the anxiety people currently feel about engaging in a respectful way. The MTM research reveals that many people say they are concerned about their ability to speak about the issue of diverse representation without misstepping and facing scrutiny, including 50 per cent of Black-identifying respondents and 62 per cent of people with disabilities.
This even extends to the advertising industry, which has made some progress on representation in creative, but where advertisers and agencies we spoke to also revealed apprehensions. One possible consequence is that an overzealous approach to brand safety and keyword blocking could unintentionally become discriminatory by preventing diverse voices from monetising their content.
People love and trust media when they can see themselves reflected, and which exposes them to the lives and experiences of others. This broader challenge isn’t just about accents, it’s about the whole industry applying effort to improving cultural fluency. From broadcasters to brands, media businesses need to show not just a familiarity with different cultures – but an ability to communicate effectively in different contexts. It’s simple: the ones that do will gain a competitive advantage because they’re accessing a more diverse range of talent, ideas, and audiences. When they do, they will be benefiting not just themselves, but our society and economy as a whole.
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