You can tell a lot about the UK newspaper industry by the people the Society of Editors chooses to garland in its annual UK Press Awards. This year, as if anointing the Mail on Sunday’s Sanchez Manning “specialist journalist of the year” for her ongoing campaign of anti-trans scaremongering and vilification wasn’t bad enough, the creator of this repellent cartoon was made a fellow of the Society of Editors.

Now you might think that showing sinister, hook-nosed figures marching over borders and depicting foreigners as vermin is a chilling echo of the Nazi propaganda cartoons of the late 1930s. And you might think that a political cartoonist with five decades in the newspaper industry might have at least a working knowledge of the history of political cartooning. But you’d be wrong, because Mac just happened to replicate Nazi propaganda by accident.

He had quite a few accidents, it seems. One cartoon, in which Mac responded to the NHS recruiting overseas doctors by showing a black immigrant “witch doctor” frightening a white NHS patient, resulted in an apology from the Daily Mail to the British Medical Association. Many others portrayed black people as big-lipped, boggle-eyed, loincloth-wearing savages. In 2010 Mac illustrated “multiculturalism” by showing a man marrying a farm animal, and in 2015 he depicted the newly deceased entertainer Cilla Black being forced to wait at the pearly gates because “there are thousands of illegals trying to get in.” In 2017 he equated refugee boat people with monkeys.

There’s an irony here. The society of editors, which claims to represent the very best of the UK newspaper industry, has missed a very important piece of news: it isn’t 1971 any more.

Update

The thing about diversity is that without it, you can be blinkered. I’ve seen many white, cis, straight men defending Mac’s worst cartoons on the grounds that they don’t think the cartoons are racist, or homophobic, or offensive generally. And with the greatest respect to those people, if you’re not a member of a minority group then you don’t get to say whether it’s offensive to that minority or not. Just because something doesn’t affect you doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect people who are different to you.

Despite some positive efforts, the British media remains overwhelmingly white: while the population is only 80% white British, the media is 94% white; muslims account for 5% of the population but just 0.4% of journalists; 3% of the population is black but only 0.2% of journalists are. It’s sexist, too – women are outnumbered by men and paid significantly less than their male peers.

Ironically enough, that lack of diversity was demonstrated last night by the inaugural diversity award. It went to a white man. A gay white man (the excellent Patrick Strudwick of Buzzfeed), admittedly, but hardly a sign that the media establishment values writers from other ethnic backgrounds. As someone pointed out on social media, there were more people of colour serving wine than sitting at the tables, let alone being nominated for any awards.

Writing on Gal-Dem, Micha Frazer-Carroll writes about the British media’s diversity problem.

The awards have been running since 1962 and are some of the most prestigious in the industry – but not one black woman or non-binary journalist featured on the list of 157 entrants this year. To add insult to injury, just three people of colour’s names made the cut.

…If people of colour only scrape into the lowest positions in news and media organisations, it’s naturally less likely that our ideas will ultimately get airtime… this is a problem that can’t be radically overhauled by simply appealing to “diversity”, particularly if it’s only in the lowest ranks of an organisation. Meanwhile, actively harmful coverage of marginalised groups within the very same papers doesn’t create an environment that feels safe for us. That includes the rampant transphobia that’s swept the mainstream press in recent years and seen the likes of Janice Turner – who claimed that children had been “sacrificed” for trans rights – up for journalism awards.

Writing for the Association of Independent Professionals and Self Employed, Ben Capper wants to share his hard-won wisdom: when it comes to freelancing, there’s no such thing as luck.

His tale of nine months freelancing reads very much like a tale of luck: his ex-boss had moved to a new gig, giving him his first sizeable project; while stuck on a train, he decided to check LinkedIn and found a job ad. But Capper argues that luck has nothing to do with it. You make your own luck.

While Capper has a whole nine months of experience, Adam Banks has 18 years.

Ben has been freelancing for nine months and benefited from considerable luck.

I’ve freelanced for 18 years and know many other freelancers. It has everything to do with luck. It’s vital to understand this when the time comes that yours runs out. Don’t blame yourself. Cling on x

I’ve been a freelance for 20 years now, and I can honestly say that luck has been much more important than talent or hard work. Not just luck, but privilege too. For example, BBC Scotland recently ran courses to help women get invited to talk about stuff on air. As a man, I didn’t have to do any courses; simply working for a magazine was qualification enough to be invited on air. That was over 15 years ago and I’m still doing it.

Capper again:

You can create the business you want, the work-life balance you want, and the client list you want; and it’s entirely in your hands.

That isn’t true. Working hard is good. Being open to opportunities is good. But luck still plays a part, and privilege has a huge influence on how “lucky” you are.

For example, in 20 years of freelancing I have been lucky not to have doors slammed in my face because of my race, or because of my gender, or because of my background. As someone who appeared to be a straight, white, reasonably well educated cisgender man I was never discriminated against. Lucky me.

I mean it: lucky me. Would I have been invited on air as often if I’d had a thick Scots Asian accent, or if I’d come out as trans 20 years ago? Would my career have been different if I’d been subject to the sexism and the online abuse my female peers have been forced to endure for years?

I think it can be hard for some of us to admit just how much a factor luck and privilege have played in our careers. Our ego much prefers to believe that we’re where we are because we’re smarter and work harder than everybody else, that we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, but that isn’t true. There are plenty of people who are smarter than us and work harder than us, but they didn’t get the opportunities that we did because those opportunities were never open to them.

In mythology, hubris led to nemesis: people who thought they’d outsmarted the gods would soon be the on the receiving end of a godly arse-kicking. In employment, it works in much the same way: if you don’t believe that luck plays a part in what you do, you won’t be prepared for the day when your luck runs out. And as every freelancer who’s been doing this for more than 9 months can attest, sooner or later the luck does run out.

Craig Grannell, another long-term freelancer:

There’s a lot of luck in freelancing.

I’ve got major clients from an unlikely combination of connections, reputation, and timing.

But I’ve also twice lost 50% of my income in single emails/calls pre-announcing mag closures.

The road is bumpy, and you can’t easily plan for it.

BBC Scotland’s flagship news programme, The Nine*, appears to be making the same mistakes  that affect current affairs programming nationally and on radio: it’s trying to get on-air bust-ups instead of trying to inform its audience.

I don’t know how much of this is deliberate – one of the channel’s aims is to create content that goes viral on the internet – but it undermines the BBC as a serious journalistic enterprise.

In a recent item on schoolkids’ climate change protests, the programme invited the Global Warming Policy Foundation. You might not have heard of the organisation, but you’ll know its chairman Nigel Lawson. It’s an anti-science, climate change denial lobby group that won’t tell anybody who’s funding it.

So many environmental groups and experts refused to share the sofa with the group that the item had to be pulled.

It shouldn’t have been organised in the first place. The BBC in England warned staff about featuring such cranks – Nigel Lawson in particular – back in 2018. Director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth wrote:

To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.

And last night, in a discussion on islamophobia in relation to the Christchurch terror attack, the programme invited Brendan O’Neill of Spiked. Spiked is at least partly funded by hard right US billionaires: its writers are propagandists, not impartial journalists. Their approach is simple: if “the left” say it’s white, they say it’s black. O’Neill believes that islamophobia is a myth and that we should be nicer to right-wing writers who write viciously anti-muslim articles.

The rest of The Nine’s output may be brilliant, but stunt casting like this undermines the whole enterprise.

As National columnist Kirsty Strickland put it on Twitter:

It isn’t interesting. In a world of instant news and no shortage of idiots willing to argue that up is down if they think it will boost their profile, this style of ‘debate’ is overdone and lazy. Thoughtful, informative broadcasting is what we desperately need.

She’s right. The world isn’t short of people deliberately taking an antagonistic opinion to any subject you like: smacking children, LGBT rights, climate change, islamophobia. Opinion is only worthwhile if it’s informed opinion. If it’s denying established fact – arguing against settled science on climate change, for example, or denying that islamophobia exists – then it should be left to shouting at cows, not given a national platform. People have the right to believe anything they want, but they don’t have a right to be on TV.

This is a problem for journalism generally, but it’s a particular issue for the BBC. The BBC has a unique place in the UK because of the licence fee: it’s supposed to free the BBC from the ratings-obsessed, clickbaity bullshit of ad-funded broadcasting, which is why we are made to pay for it instead of letting it compete in the cut-throat world of commercial media.

If it doesn’t offer programmes of a higher quality, if it prefers bear-pit populism to informed journalism, why should anybody be compelled to pay for it?

* Vested interest alert: I recorded a non-broadcast pilot for the programme before its launch, I know some of the production staff and presenters and I’ve been invited on to talk about tech several times although I haven’t been able to appear for personal reasons.