The media is rigged in favour of the privileged. That is a fact

A former Sun journalist has angrily tried to rebut my claims about the British media. Unfortunately for him, the facts are on my side

Oh, no, not this again.

In the 13 years I’ve worked the British national media, there have been occasional episodes where I critique how it’s rigged in favour of the privileged and is afflicted by many other dire qualities.

This then leads to several journalists getting extremely annoyed indeed and trying to rebut my claims about privilege by firing out unrepresentative anecdotes.

My critique goes further than that: groupthink, kicking vulnerable minorities, spreading harmful myths and disinformation, marginalising and demonising points of view that have widespread support, kowtowing to privileged interests while trashing any movement or individual which believes in outrageous ideas like ‘stop killing people’ and ‘maybe we should redistribute wealth and power more fairly’, and so on.

There is then the undemocratic travesty that most of our national newspapers are the playthings of extremely rich moguls, who transparently see media power as a means to influence the democratic system.

In the latest example, the former Sun journalist Mark Solomons has written a piece responding to one of my tweets, headlined ‘Privileged, posh, amoral and stupid? Don’t tar all journalists with the same brush’.

This is a response to a tweet in which I wrote:

The thing about the British media is that it’s disproportionately populated with people who have this toxic combination of being very privileged, well connected, having no moral compass, being shameless careerists, having minimal intellectual curiosity but also being really thick.

This was in response to a tweet describing how “Gaza has become home to the largest group of amputee children in modern history”, and I made clear my disgust at the failure of most prominent journalists to speak out.

Firstly, the facts speak for themselves. Objectively speaking, the national media is one of the most privileged occupations in Britain.

A fact which has, ironically enough, been pointed out in… the Press Gazette itself. 2022 research found that 84% of journalists or reporters came from ‘higher socioeconomic backgrounds’, with just 16% hailing from ‘lower and middle socioeconomic backgrounds.

According to the last Sutton Trust figures, 43% of the top journalists are privately educated.

That’s 6 times higher than the general population.

It is unfortunate that in an article responding to a tweet in which, in part, I challenged the aptitude of many top journalists, my argument isn't even accurately represented.

I didn't say “all” journalists, as the headline suggests. I said “disproportionately”. Not the same thing! Solomons misrepresents my critique by suggesting it boils down to the media being “overwhelmingly populated by upper class twits from private school who only got their jobs through nepotism, old school ties or some other form of privilege.”

Disturbingly, Solomons says that critiques of media privilege are “more annoying” than journalists’ pay being cut and sub-editors being fired, among other things. An interesting confession of priorities, there.

What Mark Solomons does in his article is reflect a common failing of our national media: a reliance on anecdote over data, attempting to rebut my argument by pointing to the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire and the Daily Mail’s Andrew Pierce.

Given he worked for The Sun, he's undoubtedly familiar with this technique, normally used to demonise e.g. benefit claimants or migrants, here inverted to defend the national media.

He claims: "Like all good journalists, it is their talent not the education section of their CV that count." If he thinks the national media is simply representative of the most talented possible journalists in Britain, then given how disproportionately privileged they are, Solomons would have to believe working-class people lack talent. The truth is many excellent potential journalists are barred from getting anywhere near the national media.

It is unfortunate that Solomons has responded to a tweet in which I criticised the “minimal intellectual curiosity” disproportionately afflicting the national media by writing an article misrepresenting my argument, and only discussing in passing research which entirely contradicts his claims.

He’s suggested that I’m the “shameless careerist”, misses out that I was educated at northern state schools, and implies I was well connected because I worked for the Labour left and left-wing trade unions 2005-2009.

Yes, famously a well-trodden route to national media success!

As it happens, I didn't have ‘connections’ before working in the national media.

I wrote a book called Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class for the brilliant small radical publishing company Verso and it became a bestseller, so I was asked to go on TV and write about it, and it went from there. As for “shameless careerist”: why yes, which dedicated ladder climber wouldn’t have seen socialism as the obvious means to climb to the very top in 2010.

But also I'm no working-class hero - my dad was a white-collar local authority worker, my mum an IT lecturer at Salford University. That's more privileged than a very large number of Brits. We should indeed ask why so few actual working-class people make it to the media.

I'm perfectly happy to discuss the odds rigged in my favour - including, say, being a white man - without feeling as though I'm being personally attacked, which is how many leading journalists respond every time I critique the objective facts about the national media.

To his credit, Mark Solomons rightly mentions how traditional routes the national media have declined, like local newspapers.

Indeed, the number of jobs in local press has collapsed from 13,000 to now around 4,000.

However, he doesn't mention the growing emphasis on expensive post-graduate journalism qualifications that are beyond the means of most, or the role of unpaid internships.

The latter not only block the less privileged, they often go to friends and relatives of existing media figures.

Solomons attacks what he describes as "blogs, podcasts and anything that gets them more likes on social media." Well sorry, Mark, but building your own audience is one of the more effective ways a non-privileged, non-connected person can make it into the media at all these days.

What is slightly amusing is that Solomons bemoans the decline of journalistic standards, with journalists forced to find “new ways to describe what Kim Kardashian is almost wearing for online clickbait.” Once again: this man used to work for The Sun, which until relatively recently splashed topless women on page 3, and has long peddled myths and lies about, say, gay people, migrants, refugees, Muslims, trade unionists, benefit claimants… well, we could go on.

It is notable that journalists like Solomons happily worked for a media outlet which obsessively kicks often vulnerable people who lack platforms to defend themselves, but as soon as critique is turned on the journalists themselves, he feels moral indignation.

There are other longstanding problems: how political journalism is afflicted by ‘groupthink’, with political correspondents often sharing same basic ideological perspectives, becoming excessively close to powerful politicians, fearing being excessively critical because it will block access to exclusives, and treating politics like a soap opera.

And to circle back to a disproportionate lack of moral compass, which Solomons doesn’t even bother to engage with, probably because as a former Sun journalist he knows he’s on a hiding to nothing.

A genocide is currently being committed against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, directly facilitated by Western governments like our own. Our media has facilitated this, suppressing the expressed genocidal intent of Israeli leaders and officials, failing to frame their coverage around that intent, helped spread outright lies and fail to rebut Israeli propaganda, hidden and diminished multiple atrocities from their audiences, failed to communicate international law - we could go on.

Above all else: with very few exceptions, to show any meaningful interest in the scale of the crime being committed with British and Western complicity. Which, to circle back to how this started, as the UN Secretary General puts it, now leaves Gaza with “the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world”.

As I said. No moral compass.