TV personnel are far too middle class, says Ofcom

BROADCASTERS must ask all employees where they went to school to end the middle-class dominance of the media, Ofcom’s chief executive has said.

Sharon White called for “diversity of thinking” as well as “visible diversity”, amid concerns that the focus on gender and race has led to social class and regional diversity being overlooked.

Ms White said she would be writing to broadcasters to ask them to begin collecting and sharing information on their employees’ social backgrounds.

Speaking at the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge yesterday, Ms White said: “It’s important because you want diversity of thinking, not just visible diversity. We are in a creative industry where you want great ideas from people of different backgrounds, different classes, different colours, different parts of the country.”

She added: “Next year we are going to ask the broadcasters to start providing us with more data on class so we can start to get a better collective understanding of where we currently sit.”

Ending unpaid internships would go a long way to end the “disjuncture between the social class of the media and the audiences,” Ms White said.

A survey of BBC staff earlier this year found they were three times more likely than average to have a middleclass background and twice as likely to have gone to a public school.