Self-censorship

A colleague drew my attention today to a piece in Saturday's FT by John Lloyd, "An Insult to Reason".

Lloyd writes about attending a session organised by the BBC governors for senior BBC staff and a few outsiders on impartiality.

He says that what struck him most forcibly were stories from senior journalists of a tendency among younger BBC journalist to self-censorship.

Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News and Current Affairs, ... recounted a story that, when she was in charge of the Radio 4 Analysis programme, she had to encourage producers who had discovered that most bullying in young offenders' institutions had been done by black on white inmates, to reflect that result in the programme.

Boaden and other executives with similar tales had said: if this is true, it should be broadcast - squashing what they saw as self-censorship instincts of their juniors, who presumably felt they might be regarded as racist or at least be providing ammunition for racists, had they broadcast what they had discovered.

I think anyone involved in journalism education will be familiar with this reluctance on the part of young journalists. They are, by and large, decent people who worry greatly about things like this. The world they often find is very often at odds with the liberal, soft-left world view they, even the Thatcher generation, have grown up with.

But Lloyd is right. Perhaps much of the alienation so many people feel with politics and the mainstream media is precisely because they don't accurately reflect the reality of the world many actually live in.

And it also underlines the need to attract into journalism people from a greater diversity of social, ethnic. religious etc. backgrounds.