‘When Articles Exclude Voices of People They’re About, It’s Dehumanising’ – UK’s Biggest Media Players are the Worst Offenders

It’s 2024 and headlines about ‘illegal immigrants’ are a dime a dozen.

We’ve heard every conceivable opinion on crossing the Channel (and a few inconceivable ones). We know Suella Braverman dreams of deportation. We’ve heard from more folks in the Cabinet and Commons and Lords on this subject than should frankly exist.

We know what charity workers think, we know what macroeconomists think, we know what Bob from Dover thinks, we know what Bob’s granny’s dog’s left testicle thinks.

What we weirdly don’t know is what so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ think (we won’t call them ‘people’, as an editor once told us – that would confuse readers). Why is this? Probably because in all the articles now making bombastic fish and chip wrapping, almost zero actually quoted one.

So here’s a question: is that good journalism?

We asked a non-binary journalist on our Media Storm podcast how they felt about the fact that zero out of 300 articles on trans ‘issues’ published by The Times and Sunday Times in 2020 bylined a trans person. They joked that they weren’t sure they could comment: they had been banned from covering LGBTQ+ news at their previous employer as they were ‘part of that community’. Apparently, they couldn’t be ‘objective’. 

So trans people can’t cover trans issues, because to be trans is to be biased (at least when it comes to your own human rights).

‘Objectivity’ is the exclusive reserve of the white, Western, wealthy worldview. The tabula rasa onto which others superimpose their subjective ‘poor-me’ interpretation of events. Identity politics. Whereas white male politics is just politics. Thank goodness the majority of editors are MOWERs (male, oldish, white, educated, rich, and probably with lawns to mow). Otherwise imagine how biased our media would be.

This arbitrary wielding of ‘objectivity’ in the newsroom is like saying black journalists can’t report on racism against their communities. Or people raised singing God Save The Queen can’t report on the monarchy. And yet, our royal correspondents have names like ‘Rebecca English’, ‘Jonny Dymond’ and ‘Jennie Bond’ (not making this up). Boris Johnson can tumble between Parliament and the Telegraph. Nigel Farage can wrap his ramblings in the journalistic banner of GB News.

But homeless people, sex workers, prisoners, rape victims, Travellers, addicts (scroll through our podcast: the list goes on)… they can’t get a word in edgeways on the stories actually about them.

It’s peculiar how accustomed we are to this deafening silence.

Perhaps that’s because news outlets brandish ‘both sides’. We hear from those who are for, and those who are against. And what else is there?

The BBC has successfully earned the disdain of lefties and rightists while sustaining a global audience of almost a billion— it must be doing something right. But ‘both sides’ does not equal ‘all relevant sides’. Not every debate is 50:50; not every view is equal. Only some people are genuinely impacted, others think their ‘right t