I think the UK news industry may owe a debt of gratitude to Prince Harry.
They are words I never thought I would write given Harry’s often fractious relationship with the media.
I was initially sceptical about his denunciation of the UK tabloid press as “bigoted” earlier this month and found it hard to believe the claim made in the Oprah documentary that negative coverage of his wife Meghan Markle was prompted by racism.
But Liz Gerard’s review of press coverage from recent years has revealed elements of bigotry and intolerance based on prejudice.
While Gerard’s review was excoriatingly critical overall, she said she could not find certain evidence that the coverage was rooted in racism.
However half of the 1,002 Press Gazette subscribers who chose to respond to our race and the media email survey said they had seen Meghan coverage that they thought was racist. And among non-white survey respondents, the vast majority said they had seen Meghan articles that they thought were racist.
Some two-thirds of the 721 survey respondents describing themselves as journalists said they thought there was some evidence of bigotry in the UK media, and they said it was not an issue that was confined to the tabloids.
Mail Online may have intended to merely point to the rags to riches nature of Meghan’s journey with its “(almost) straight outta Compton” story. But a significant number of people (particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds) were seriously…
