The race commission didn’t send the UK’s only race correspondent its report – I can’t help but wonder why
‘I’m afraid the commission specified a tight list of journos to be given the trail,’ a government spokesperson told me
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Your support makes all the difference.Even though I’m the UK’s only race correspondent and my brief is to cover issues that affect ethnic minority communities, the commission decided not to send me a preview of the report when it was rolled out to the media on Tuesday night.
This information was confirmed to me by the Equalities Office when I reached out asking why I had not received it when journalists from other newsrooms had.
“I’m afraid the commission specified a tight list of journos to be given the trail,” the email from the GEO read. Though an apology was given, which was nice.
Fortunately, I know some good people in the political sphere who leaked the report preview to me because they understand the important role that journalists play when it comes to holding power to account and relaying information to the public, so I was able to report on it as soon as the embargo broke in the early hours of this morning.
When the full version of the commission’s probe was finally published at midday today, I read the thing in horror and quickly began to realise why I may have been omitted from the mail-out. The absolute state of it.
From the lack of context amid cherry-picked data to harmful tropes and shameless gaslighting, the report is insulting on many levels and is obviously the culmination of nine months of doing very little or, to use the Jamaican expression with which chairman Dr Tony Sewell will be familiar, lay lay.
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As it turns out, I was part of a number of journalists who were not afforded the privilege of being able to properly scrutinise key points from this highly-anticipated, government-backed study. Other journalists, many of whom are Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds didn’t receive the summary, or “trail”, either.
This is curious given that the report focuses on ethnic minority communities and the government purports to champion diversity within a United Kingdom that “should be a model for other white majority countries” on race.
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