1) Anti-Harold Ford Ad Draws Racism Charges
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/200601024_harold_ford_ad/
2) Microsoft Edits Black Person Out of Ad; Everyone Offended
3) Black Newspaper Portrays Nina Turner as Aunt Jemima
4) Cartoon of Obama in Russian ice cream ad is being called racist
5) Anti-racist advert in black and white
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1376473/Anti-racist-advert-in-black-and-white.html
2) Sony under fire for "racist" advertising
http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/06/sony-under-fire-for-racist-advertising/
3) Racist Advertising
http://raceatrhodes.blogspot.com/2009/04/racist-advertising.html
4) Intel Ad Might be Racist, but Boy Does It Make Me Want a Core 2 Duo
http://gizmodo.com/284037/intel-ad-might-be-racist-but-boy-does-it-make-me-want-a-core-2-duo
5) Kids Company guilty of racist advertising says ASA
http://www.ligali.org/article.php?id=1979
Article #1
Equality board defends racist posters
THE COMMISSION for Racial Equality yesterday defended its decision to launch a racist advertising campaign which suggested that black people were rapists and compared them to orang-utans, prompting more than 30 complaints from the public.
The government-funded race relations watchdog said the pounds 250,000 poster campaign was designed to shock the public into thinking about racism and challenging it when it occurred.
The posters, which went up at 192 sites in cities across Britain on Friday, were yesterday covered with the message, "What was worse? This ad, or your failure to complain?"
But the exercise was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority, which said the commission could have the "dubious honour" of becoming the first organisation to be forced to have its campaigns vetted.
An authority spokesman said: "It is a shame that the CRE did not work with us within the guidelines laid down. The complaints we have received have come mainly from irate members of the public and there have been others from race relations organisations."
The three posters, which were spoof advertisements for bogus companies and did not mention the commission, prompted more than 30 complaints to the association.
One of the posters for a rape alarm shows a white woman sitting on a bus with a black man in the foreground. The accompanying slogan reads: "Because it's a jungle out there".
Another, for sports footwear, shows a black man jumping at a basketball hoop and an orang-utan in a similar pose reaching for a branch. The caption reads: "Born to be agile".
The final poster goes under the guise of a recruitment company's advertisement. It depicts two businessmen, one black and one white, climbing a ladder. The white man is treading on the hand of the black man with the caption reading: "Dominate the Race".
The commissioin was unapologetic. A spokesman said: "We have been hitting our heads against a brick wall when trying to get British society to pay attention to [racism]."
Sir Herman Ouseley, the chairman, said: "The campaign is designed to force people into considering their own personal attitude to racism and is specifically intended to provoke a reaction - preferably complaint or condemnation.
"There were still thousands of people who must have seen these posters and thought about complaining but couldn't be bothered."
Brett Gosper, who led the team that devised the advertising campaign, said its message was aimed at the "passive majority".
If a racist joke was delivered among such people in a group, they would not protest: "They will perhaps laugh and move on. The statement in this campaign is: condone or condemn, there is no in-between."
Sir Teddy Taylor, Tory MP for Southend East and Rochford, said the commission should be closed.
Article #2
Ford workers angry as blacks are whited out
When Henry Ford launched his Model T automobile, he told customers they could have in any colour they liked - as long as it was black.
Mr Ford's comments will be seen as bitterly ironic by British workers who were photographed to launch the "Everything we do is driven by you" advertising campaign in 1991.
Five members of ethnic minorities were invited to appear in the picture to show the racial mix of Ford's workforce at Dagenham, but in an "ethnic- cleansed" version of the photograph last year, the black and brown faces had been mysteriously replaced by white ones.
Four of the five workers still working at Dagenham have since registered their anger over what they perceive as blatant racism.
Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, yesterday condemned the incident as "deeply offensive". He said: "This is an appalling situation which reveals the depths of racist attitudes in our society."
He said the union had elicited fulsome apologies from management and a pounds 1,500 cheque for each of the workers, in compensation for their hurt feelings. "We shall be equally vigorous in tackling racism in future, wherever it surfaces."
The dramatic transformation in the picture was first noticed by Noel Sinclair, a worker at Ford's Dagenham plant, when he walked into a showroom in Essex.
Mr Sinclair took the new brochure back to the paint, trim and assembly department at the Essex plant and showed four of his friends, who had readily agreed to pose.
Douglas Sinclair, a 56-year-old black man who has worked at the plant for 30 years, said his body remained in the picture, but a white, bespectacled face had appeared on top of it.
"My body was there, dressed in my overalls, the rings on my fingers were still there, but I had glasses on and a white face. It was embarrassing. People at work started to come up to me and call me 'Two Face'."
Patricia Marquis said she felt "humiliated and angry" when she saw that her face had aged 20 years, that she had put on 10lb and turned white.
Article #3
Yesterday's racist ads are today's Collectables
There was a sharp intake of breath, and a muttered "Jesus". Bernie Grant, militant black MP for Tottenham, was reading the caption on a postcard that showed five black toddlers sitting in a row. It said: "God made the little niggers, he made them in the night. He made them in a hurry, and forgot to make them white."
Then a rueful smile began to play on Mr Grant's lips, and he shook his head. This was not some racist propaganda from the present day. It was a postcard from 1929, part of a collection of black ephemera due to go on sale at Bonham's the auctioneers in London on Tuesday.
The Independent on Sunday had asked Mr Grant, veteran campaigner for black people's rights, to give his verdict on the collection. It includes books, songsheets, advertising posters and packaging from Europe and the US, dating from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Taken as a whole, the collection provides a fascinating insight into the way white society's attitude to black people changed over the years. Such material is usually snapped up by black American collectors, say the experts at Bonham's, who expect it to sell for more than pounds 2,000.
"Maybe they're buying this stuff to get it off the shelves," Mr Grant said at first. But his views changed as he saw more.
The earliest items in the collection are trade cards and packaging for goods such as soap and boot polish, dating from the 1880s. Beautifully illustrated, they portray young black men as exotic, almost superhuman figures from faraway lands, riding on giraffes and elephants. They are at one with nature - or, as Mr Grant said, "like animals".
Some are dressed as dandies, minstrels or huntsmen - which would have seemed amusingly outlandish to white Victorians. Many ads show products such as cocoa and cotton with the Africans who produced them, for authenticity. Others use shock tactics. Few show slaves in chains, but several portray black subjects as menacing. "The idea is to shake people up, in advertising terms - to attract their attention," said Mr Grant. "It's similar to what Benetton do now."
Some of the packaging mirrors the Victorian fascination with tales of brave missionaries "civilising" the savages. One ad entitled "The Birth of Civilisation - A Message from the Sea" shows a black man clutching a bar of Pears soap, washed up from a shipwreck. "The consumption of soap is a measure of the wealth, civilisation, health and purity of the people," says the caption.
Items from the turn of the century onwards show a fascination with black children rather than adults. The two most popular themes of the period are children eating watermelon - still an exotic food in Britain at the time - or being eaten themselves, by crocodiles.
"There was colonial unrest," Mr Grant said. "The missionaries felt that these people were sub-human, but they were still people. Portraying them as happy, smiling children, always eating, meant that they were not threatening. They needed educating, and there was no need to worry about them as a threat.
Two Stephen Fry-fronted TV ads for Twinings Tea have been cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority after a complaint that they presented a negative stereotype of a black man as sexually promiscuous.
The watchdog accepted the arguments by ad agency Lowe that "race was not central or relevant to the ads", which were based on Fry's character being "older and less cool" than the young black American man he featured alongside.
Twinings ad: features Fry talking to three women about tea In the first ad, Fry was shown alongside the man, called Tyrone, and speaking to three white women sitting at the counter of a teashop about tea. When he comments that they are "well informed" one of the women says: "Tyrone's been filling us in."
The women are then seen laughing and looking at Tyrone who drops a tin of tea to the floor with Fry commenting: "Oh has he? Has he indeed?"
A second ad showed the same teashop and featured Tyrone writing on a blackboard the words "Earl Grey puts the Zing in your ding-a-ling".In the course of a discussion about the phrase and the quality of the tea, Fry urges Tyrone to "feel" the taste. Tyrone responds "In your ding-a-ling?", with Fry retorting: "No Tyrone. Not in your ding-a-ling."
According to one viewer, both ads were offensive and harmful because she believed they played a negative racial stereotype of a black man as sexually promiscuous and, in the case of the first ad, also existing to provide sexual services for white women.
According to Lowe's submission to the ASA, this was the first complaint that the Twinings campaign was racist.
Lowe said that the character of Tyrone was picked as an opposite to Fry and was "intended to be a way of contemporising the brand and making tea cool".
In its ruling, which cleared the advertisement of breaching its standards code, the ASA said: "Although we acknowledged the innuendo was mildly sexual, we did not consider that it was reliant on the young man's ethnic origins or a racial stereotype.
"We noted the character of Tyrone was shown as an attractive, confident young man and ... clearly enjoying the attentions of, and flirting with, the women.
"We did not consider that his or the women's enjoyment of the situation implied that his character was there simply to provide sexual services for white women, but rather that he was a young man enjoying the confidence-boosting attentions of a group of women."
We considered that Tyrone was shown as a positive character and, because neither ad was reliant on race for its humour, viewers generally were unlikely to believe the ads implied that black men were promiscuous or there to provide sexual services for white women.
"We concluded that the ads were not harmful or likely to cause offence to most viewers."
Article #2
Guinness faces lawsuit for KKK advert
A former pub landlord is suing Guinness because he claims the company's advertising led to a boycott of his pub.Paul Doherty said students organised the boycott after a poster featuring a image of the Ku Klux Klan was put up in his pub.
Mr Doherty is claiming the poster, part of Guinness's "Not everything in black and white makes sense" campaign, was put up by a Guinness sales representative while he was away on holiday.
The poster was a reference to a cinema advertisement that showed a Klan rally with the comment: "44% of Ku Klux Klan members were delivered by a black midwife".But Mr Doherty said that because the poster in his pub showed the Klan image but did not display the statistic, it could be interpreted as racist.
He said several customers had asked him what the poster was doing there."I got asked a lot of questions like 'Does Guinness support the Ku Klux Klan?'" he said. "The poster was nothing to do with me personally but there is a minority of people who think if something like that is displayed in your premises then you are responsible for it."Guinness is contesting the action and the case is expected to last five days.
Article #3
Court lambasts 'racist' Land Rover advert
Land Rover has been forced into an humiliating climbdown after an advertising campaign it ran in South Africa was judged racist and "a mockery of African culture".
A South African court has ordered the company to withdraw the offending advert, which showed a semi-nude African woman whose elongated breasts are blown sideways in the tailwind of a Land Rover.
But in an unprecedented move against an advertiser, the court also ruled the company must publish a statement that amounts to a humiliating public apology in all the publications the three-page advert originally appeared in.
The replacement adverts will contain a ruling by the country's Advertising Standards Authority, which judged the advert "irresponsible, exploitative and constitutes racial stereotyping and violates human dignity".
It added: "The insensitive portrayal of the woman makes a mockery of African culture."
ASA executive director Deline Beukes said this was the first time such a move had been ordered and that the sanction reflected the severity of the case.
Ms Beukes said the new sanction was a reaction to accusations the ASA was a toothless organisation.
She said it would discourage so-called "hit and run" advertising, where the desired shock effect is achieved before the ASA has the time to ban an advertisement.
Article #3
Monkey advert 'resembling' Obama is pulled in Japan
Friday 27 June 2008
A Japanese mobile phone firm said today it had pulled a TV advert depicting a monkey as a political candidate amid accusations that it was a racist reference to Barack Obama, who is seeking to become the first black US president.
The ad, for eMobile, shows a monkey in a suit addressing an election rally, surrounded by supporters carrying placards with the word "Change".
The apparent intention is to persuade subscribers to other mobile phone carriers to transfer to eMobile.
But the combination of the monkey, and the resemblance of his message to the theme of Obama's campaign - "Change we can believe in" - prompted bloggers to accuse the company of making a racist slur against the Democratic hopeful.
The company, which stressed it had used the macaque mascot in several other adverts, said it had never intended to insult Obama but had decided to pull the "Change" ad in response to criticism in the blogosphere.
"We had no bad intentions, but this is a cross-cultural gap issue and we have to accept it," eMobile's chief executive, Sachio Semmoto, told Reuters. "There are African-Americans in Japan, so we decided to take prompt action and shut down the ad."
Semmoto went further, describing the senator from Illinois as the kind of leader who could benefit not only the US but also Japan. "For two years I've been saying Obama has the capacity to change America, the kind of capacity that Japan needs," he said.
Monkeys are revered in Japan, and their image can be found at numerous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, but eMobile's choice of animal for this ad did not impress the foreign blogging community.
Zurui, in a message to the Black Tokyo site, wrote: "Well it seems like the ugly head of racism has reared its big head again on Japanese television.
The stars due to appear on Celebrity Big Brother when it launches this week have been coached about the race row that consumed the show two years ago and warned not to repeat such behaviour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/31/celebrity-big-brother-race-coaching
The reality show, which returns to Channel 4 on Friday after a two-year break because of the row involving Jade Goody and Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty that prompted the most serious crisis in Channel 4's history, is expected to include celebrities including Ulrika Jonsson, Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan and Austin Powers actor Verne Troyer.
Programme executives said they were confident they have done everything necessary to prevent a repeat of the controversy that consumed the show, prompting more than 50,000 complaints.
Celebrity Big Brother executive producer Sharon Powers said all the celebrities had been spoken to about the 2007 controversy and been sent DVDs of previous series of the show.
"We have spoken to the celebrities. If they have not seen it already we have explained to them the things that happened in the last Celebrity Big Brother and made the rules really clear to them, what sort of language won't be tolerated and unacceptable behaviour," said Powers at the programme's launch yesterday.
"We have spoken to all of them in detail and they are all very clear what the boundaries are. I think they have all seen [the show]. We have told anyone who hasn't seen it to go and look at it on YouTube."
Executive producer Phil Edgar-Jones added: "Frankly they are not stupid. They know if they say anything like that they will be chucked out."
The last series of Celebrity Big Brother, which aired at the beginning of 2007, became the most notorious show in Channel 4's history.
Shetty's treatment by fellow housemates Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O'Meara prompted 54,000 complaints to the station and media regulator Ofcom and led to effigies being burnt on the streets of India. As the row escalated, Gordon Brown was forced to defend Britain as "a country of fairness and tolerance".
Ofcom ruled that Channel 4 had breached the broadcasting code and Channel 4 was also forced to air three apologies ahead of the 2008 Big Brother series.
Powers said: "We don't ever set out to create controversy as such. What we aim to do is get an interesting bunch of famous people who we talk to and meet on an individual basis.
"The truth of it is we don't really know what is going to happen. The first time they meet each other is when they walk through the Big Brother doors. That's the beauty of Big Brother."
Edgar-Jones said a special welfare team would watch the contestants around the clock to spot if anyone was feeling isolated, unhappy, or not unwell.
"We do understand there is a lot of scrutiny of television at the moment. Procedures have been pretty much the same [and] we have tightened them up. If things are getting out of hand we will deal with them," he said.
David W illiams, the commissioning editor for Channel 4, said: "From a channel's point of view it has never been a case of sanitising Big Brother. As we do after every year we look at our procedures. We have got procedures in place which are tried and tested so that we can cope with every eventuality."
Celebrity Big Brother was rested at the beginning of 2008 in the wake of last year's race row, but its replacement, Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, failed to capture viewers' imagination on digital channel E4.
The final of last year's Celebrity Big Brother, won by Shetty, averaged 5.8 million viewers across two hours of television. It peaked with 7.3 million.
But the final of this year's main Big Brother show attracted the lowest audience of any of its nine series' climaxes, with a peak of 5.1 million viewers watching Rachel Rice emerge as the winner, according to unofficial overnight figures.
The show's ratings high-point was series three in 2002, when Kate Lawler's victory attracted an average of 9.4 million viewers to the 10pm final night show – a 50% share of the audience.
The programme was axed in Australia this year because of low ratings.
Article #2
The right ethnic mix
Monday 22 June 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/22/masoods-eastenders-bbc
The director shouts "Cut!" - and wardrobe, props and make-up people swarm the set. One of the principal actors beckons me over and asks: "Can you pronounce it for us again?" As I say "Alhumdulillah" (praise to God) the rest of the cast repeat it over and over until they are satisfied it sounds right.
In the meantime, I am pulled into a discussion about the Indian sweets on set: are they the right ones; by tradition, which character would give them to whom?
I am not on the set of a British Asian film, but rather at the studios of EastEnders. For six months I have been working as one of a group of occasional consultants: looking over scripts, sometimes being on set, and advising on aspects of British Asian culture relating to the Masoods.
Playing unsafe
Albert Square's previous Asian family, the Ferreiras, were criticised as boring and unrealistic - their first names were a mixture of Muslim and Hindu, their surname was Portuguese. "We admittedly came under the spotlight with the Ferreiras," says John Yorke, the BBC's controller of drama production. "We played safe with them and ultimately didn't give them good story lines. We're certainly not doing that with the Masoods, but the devil is in the detail and now pretty much everything we write for them that has a cultural or religious aspect is checked."
While the Ferreiras were "safe", the Masoods' current story line is at the other end of the scale - with the elder son, Syed, embarking on a gay affair. "Part of the reason we chose the Masoods is that it does present us with a whole new set of taboos," admits Yorke. However, he says merely being able to feature such an issue is a positive sign. "Post 9/11, Muslim characters in drama became either saint or terrorist - there was no middle ground.
But the fact that we can now actually do a gay Muslim story line is testament to exactly how much we've moved on."
EastEnders is the third most popular series among ethnic minorities, according to Barb, the audience ratings body, behind The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent: on average 43% of the non-white TV viewing audience watch the programme. It also has a long history of featuring black and Asian characters: the first episode included a Turkish cafe owner.
And although cliched roles in soaps and primetime dramas also still exist, ethnic minority representation in drama has advanced across the board over the last decade or so with dramas such as the recent Moses Jones, which focused on issues in London's Ugandan community, and characters such as Anwar in Skins.
But Coronation Street's key Asian character, Dev, is rarely seen through the prism of his religion, and Channel 4's Hollyoaks takes a similar approach with its black and Asian characters. Does that make characters less realistic? Lucy Allan, series producer on Hollyoaks, says the show is keen not to hammer home ethnicity. "We recently had a skin bleaching story line around one of our female Asian characters, and obviously that is a culturally specific issue and it had a big reaction; some viewers were shocked, others identified with it. But as a rule we don't look at any of our ethnic minority characters in terms of just their ethnicity, and if the online viewer forums are anything to go by, we've got it right."
Research and consultation are employed by most broadcasters when it comes to black and Asian characters. But while this is a short cut to accuracy, it would perhaps not be necessary if there were more off-screen talent diversity.
Ade Rawcliffe, diversity and talent manager for Channel 4, believes there is still not enough representation behind the camera. "We're trying hard to make it easier to get in, to make it not about who your dad is, but there is still a way to go. There is no shortage of people from minorities looking to get into the industry, but finding and nurturing that talent is key."
Black Doctor Who
For Ben Stephenson, the BBC's controller of drama commissioning, on-screen representation is potentially even more important than off-screen in terms of attracting minorities to the industry. "The more on-screen we can do with minorities, the more those groups will feel like television is a realistic part of their experience and therefore a career option for them."
Stephenson insists that desire for more minority representation was not behind the casting of a black actor as Friar Tuck in Robin Hood. "Obviously you wouldn't cast a black actress in the role of, say, Margaret Thatcher but in a fantasy series like Robin Hood you've got leeway to play around with the characters. Similarly with Doctor Who - it's the least of our concerns whether the Doctor is black or white, it really is just about who is right for the part."
Yorke agrees that on-screen portrayal has improved, but acknowledges that diversity in the off-screen teams is still an issue. "We're working hard to rectify that, and what we really need is a long-term strategic investment in talent."
Things are changing - but given that one writer recently asked me "exactly how this praying five times a day works", there is some way to go before the industry can be sure that a lack of off-screen diversity is no longer an issue.
Article #3
Channel 4 to stoke race debate
Wednesday 14 October 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/14/channel-4-stoke-race-debate
As controversy builds around British National Party leader Nick Griffin's imminent appearance on BBC1's Question Time, Channel 4 is set to stoke the race debate by giving airtime to two professors who believe black people are less intelligent than white people.
The documentary, fronted by former BBC reporter Rageh Omaar, will explore what the broadcaster describes as "science's last taboo".
In the documentary, Race and Intelligence: Science's Last Taboo, Psychology professor Richard Lynn will say there is a global "league table", using evidence from IQ tests, to claim that intelligence is based on race, with north-east Asians in the top tier and Australian aborigines at the bottom.
Fellow psychology professor John Philippe Rushton, who has claimed that Europeans are more intelligent than Africans – and that men are cleverer than women – will also appear in the programme, due to be broadcast later this month .
"The differences between men and women's brains are due to spatial ability, but the differences between black and white and east Asian brains is due to general intelligence," Rushton tells Omaar. "That's what we think is the situation."
The academics appear as part of Omaar's investigation into controversial claims made by Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer James Watson two years ago that black people are less intelligent than other races.
Channel 4's head of specialist factual, Ralph Lee, said Omaar, now a presenter on Arabic language news channel Al-Jazeera International, also spoke to scientists who drew "radically different conclusions" to the views held by Lynn and Rushton.
"Does genetic science back up the idea that race and intelligence are linked? It is absolutely clear that it does not support the link. Rageh is able to challenge and present the absolute opposite arguments," added Lee.
"He didn't start with a fixed position – he started with an open mind – and he discovers that there are inequalities in society that are leading people with different backgrounds to perform differently and succeed differently in society and that is nothing to be comforted by.
"He thinks there are important things that need to be addressed but he thinks the idea of a link between race and intelligence or the idea that skin colour is an indicator of intelligence is complete nonsense."
Another Channel 4 documentary in the season of programmes, Race: Science's Last Taboo, will ask whether there are biological advantages to being mixed race. The season is being supported by a marketing campaign showing a mixed-race Margaret Thatcher and a white Usain Bolt.
Oona King, the Channel 4 head of diversity and former Labour MP, said: "With race we will always have a heated debate. The point about this season is that I think it will change the terms of the debate. There is no point sweeping it under the carpet."
BBC1's celebrity dance show Strictly Come Dancing was at the centre of a race row earlier this month when it emerged that dancer Anton Du Beke had made a racially tinged remark about his dance partner Laila Rouass.
But King said Forsyth had missed the point. "I have a lot of sympathy for people who are not sure what is or isn't acceptable to say. My view is we need to open up the terms of the debate, not close it down," she added.
"The key point for me is that when people say you don't have a sense of humour, they are not taking the context into account. The context for a black child who is being bullied day in, day out and called racist names is entirely different from an off-the-cuff remark as Bruce was saying about limeys."
Griffin is due to appear on Question Time next week, with fellow confirmed panellists including the justice secretary, Jack Straw, and the black writer and critic Bonnie Greer.
King said it was important that viewpoints such as those held by the BNP were challenged in the mainstream. "My personal view is that if you don't confront people with counter arguments you allow them to move into a vacuum, especially when there is disillusionment with mainstream parties," she added. "I think it is incumbent upon the mainstream to challenge views that are reprehensible and off the wall."
The BBC will only survive by understanding its diverse consumers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/15/bbc.television
A snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in just slightly more time than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in parliament. That was just one of a series of striking statistics from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in their Sex and Power report published last week.
It added that women hold just 11% of FTSE directorships, with the judiciary and others also strongly criticised. At the BBC, the figures are a bit better - almost 38% of all senior managers are women - but it does bring into sharp focus the challenge the whole media industry is facing to improve diversity among its workforce.
Tomorrow's Guardian Ethnic Media Summit is a chance to debate what is arguably our most pressing diversity issue - ensuring more talent from ethnic minority communities reaches the upper echelons of broadcasting. The growth particularly of young ethnic minority audiences, is soaring - way above the population average - making them a critical cultural and business challenge for everyone in our sector.
Things are definitely changing but still not quickly enough. The whole media industry needs to look afresh at what more can be done.
So why does a white, middle-aged bloke like me feel compelled to write about this? As the BBC's chief creative officer, overseeing our programme production made in-house, I believe passionately that only by drawing on the talents of every part of society can we best reflect the lives and concerns of our diverse audiences on screen.
We must do more and the BBC is certainly redoubling its efforts. And though ethnicity is very important, it is only one part of this story. We must also think in terms of age, disability, gender, social class and regional difference.
That is why I think the historic changes to move a significant proportion of BBC network production out of London to places such as Glasgow or North West England over the next decade might be key to all this.
We will transfer large numbers of staff from London but we will also recruit many new faces - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to add something substantially new to our gene pool of talent, to change the BBC's DNA a little.
We seem to be moving in the right direction, increasing opportunities for people from ethnic minority backgrounds at most levels.
The proportion of our staff from ethnic minorities is 11.5% - again comparing very well with both public and private sector organisations including the civil service, health service and the police. But as the Edinburgh Television Festival heard, still not enough people make it into senior management roles, particularly as controllers and commissioners.
The BBC has looked closely at the barriers to progress and announced new schemes to tackle them - costing £3m over three years.
Firstly, we need to change the way we recruit. We are dramatically increasing the outreach work we do - in community groups, colleges, schools and through open sessions across the UK - to encourage under-represented groups to apply to the BBC.
I recently worked with an energetic bunch of young students, mainly from ethnic minority backgrounds, who were introduced to the BBC by the University of Central Lancashire - from the former mill towns of Blackburn and Preston, not places we'd traditionally think to look for the next generation.
Then we need to be better at retaining talented individuals and supporting them in reaching their full potential and moving into senior roles. Our new mentoring and development programme, which offers greater one-to-one and intensive personalised support, is so important. In addition, our new trainee production scheme, which has just kicked off, and our journalism trainee schemes, have a strong diversity focus, so we are providing clearer pathways into all parts of the BBC.
On screen, we must constantly strive to reflect as accurately as possible the rich cultural mix of the UK.
Earlier this year BBC non-executive director Samir Shah criticised what he called "inauthentic representation" of ethnic minority communities, citing the Ferreira family in EastEnders.
It is unfair to highlight one five-year-old example from a drama series that remains the most popular programme on television among ethnic minority audiences. This example fails to reflect many other aspects of our work, particularly our in-house drama output. Our continuing drama series, including Holby City and Casualty, have led the way in casting diverse talent, in leading roles as well. Though we do not always get it right, overall we have much to be proud of.
The BBC set up the Writers' Academy, under John Yorke, four years ago, increasing the number of writers from diverse backgrounds working on our biggest programmes, including some of our continuing drama series.
In addition, programmes such as Criminal Justice, No1 Ladies Detective Agency, Life Is Not All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Shoot the Messenger, the entertainment series Last Choir Standing and a lot of our children's output have also been praised for the way they have represented diversity or addressed issues faced by communities from different backgrounds.
Part of this is ensuring we get closer to audiences when making programmes. For example, White Girl - part of BBC2's groundbreaking White Season - told the story of a white family relocating from Leeds to a predominantly Asian community in Bradford. Here the production team worked very closely with the community to ensure a sensitive and accurate portrayal.
In an increasingly globalised creative economy where competition will intensify, it is only by understanding our diverse consumers that we can stay relevant and survive. The BBC prides itself on keeping in touch with its audiences - to do so successfully we'll need to keep making changes, and fast.
