How the media became painfully middle class
Unpaid internships ensure that only the middle classes can afford to enter the profession
Iam a journalist. I live in Islington. I listen to Radio 4. I have even, in my darker moments, been known to talk about house prices. I am, in fact, a symptom of the problem I am about to discuss, and what follows is quite appallingly hypocritical.
But I am going to say it anyway: the media is too middle-class. The rise of the unpaid internship is to blame. And no one seems willing to admit it.
The Guardian came close last Friday, when it revealed that the Low Pay Commission was to investigate whether employers were taking advantage of the recession to use graduates as free labour. Adverts for internships are up nearly 400 per cent in a year, it said. MPs have saved themselves up to £5m through unpaid interns.
The result, warned NUS president Wes Streeting, was that the opportunities open to graduates were increasingly determined by their parents' wealth. "People who aren't supported by the bank of mum and dad are excluded."
But there was one aspect of the story that the paper mysteriously downplayed. Unpaid internships have been a fact of life in the media for years. Long before the
current recession, the offices of news publications bustled with graduates so keen to get on the ladder that they didn't mind a few weeks - or months in some cases - of low-level exploitation.
Years ago I found myself on a two-week placement at the Independent. There my efforts to ingratiate myself with the staff were thwarted by the fact I struggled to find any among the sea of other interns. Around the same time, a contemporary of mine applied for a job at a small consumer magazine. The response he received said he was unqualified for the job, but was more than welcome to work for free for the next three months.
None of this is unusual. And the result is that today's young journalists are overwhelmingly university educated and bourgeois. Without work experience, you can't get a job. And without money, you can't afford the work experience. Those whose parents are unwilling or unable to fund them through the lean times will rarely even get a foot in the door. This is a far cry from the days when most reporters started on their local rag at 18.
All this seems likely to induce a chorus of 'pass the violins'. With unemployment soaring and homes being repossessed, the fact that a few graduates can't get the career they want is never going to inspire sympathy.
But it matters - and not because of the whingeing of a few middle-class kids. The media is meant to be where Britain talks to itself, and debates the issues of the day. While it's dominated by one section of society, those debates will be painfully narrow, and those outside that clique are deprived of a voice.
Dominated by one section of society, media debates are painfully narrow
Thus it is that discussions of housing obsess over house prices, not shortages. The immigration debate is pitched as a battle between multiculturalism and nostalgia, while the economic impact on unskilled workers is roundly ignored. And politicians fight for Essex Man and Worcester Woman in the pages of the Daily Mail, quite oblivious to the needs of Dagenham or Dewsbury.
It's not clear what the solution to this is. Someone with experience is always going to be more employable than someone without. Earlier this year the Government announced that graduates could use their job seeker's allowance to fund an internship, but since this only kicks in after six months on the dole it's not going to do much for social mobility.
One thing is clear, though. The newspapers, struggling to cut costs, can only benefit from an army of willing unpaid labourers. While that's true, they'll be in no hurry to change any of this.
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