How the media became painfully middle class
Unpaid internships ensure that only the middle classes can afford to enter the profession
I am a journalist. I live in Islington. I listen to Radio 4. I have even, in my darker moments, been known to talk about house prices. I am, in fact, a symptom of the problem I am about to discuss, and what follows is quite appallingly hypocritical.
But I am going to say it anyway: the media is too middle-class. The rise of the unpaid internship is to blame. And no one seems willing to admit it.
The Guardian came close last Friday, when it revealed that the Low Pay Commission was to investigate whether employers were taking advantage of the recession to use graduates as free labour. Adverts for internships are up nearly 400 per cent in a year, it said. MPs have saved themselves up to £5m through unpaid interns.
The result, warned NUS president Wes Streeting, was that the opportunities open to graduates were increasingly determined by their parents' wealth. "People who aren't supported by the bank of mum and dad are excluded."
But there was one aspect of the story that the paper mysteriously downplayed. Unpaid internships have been a fact of life in the media for years. Long before the
current recession, the offices of news publications bustled with graduates so keen to get on the ladder that they didn't mind a few weeks - or months in some cases - of low-level exploitation.
Years ago I found myself on a two-week placement at the Independent. There my efforts to ingratiate myself with the staff were thwarted by the fact I struggled to find any among the sea of
other interns. Around the same time, a contemporary of mine applied for a job at a small consumer magazine. The response he received said he was unqualified for the job, but was 
About the author
Jonn Elledge is a journalist covering business and public policy. He read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and has contributed to... MORE
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Would that mean someone like Richard Littlejohn's dad - an engineer on the railways - might not be able to help his son into journalism?
Posted by Sibadd at 10:29am on August 6, 2009
Jonn, quite understand and agree with what you are saying. I'd only say that perhaps the media are taking too much on their shoulders here. Shouldn't the media focus on holding the government to account who have the responsibility as well as the means to be addressing these matters such as housing, culture, work? The concerns you have are not something you or I can address individually yet government officers pay themselves a lot of money to provide Promises instead of solutions for - yet rarely do they seem to be held accountable for cost of the failures/inaction they inflict on us. The recent expenses scam exposure really pointed a finger at politics. More of that on the broader agenda as well might get recognition for the issues you relate and more importanty action. And expose them again and again when when action is not forthcoming so that the inept public servants in high places' are forced to fall upon their unkept promises. Sometimes I feel that the middle class media is too in bed with the middle class public servants when it should be at the latter's throats when they are letting the public down.
Posted by Ian Edwards at 10:42am on August 6, 2009
Yes, spot on! This is exactly the kind of self-critical thinking that the media so frequently avoids. Exactly the same can be said for the art world and the music industry and whilst (of course) there are exceptions, there is almost no way into these professions without a period spent working for free first. I personally have seethed since leaving university whilst many around me have entered the creative industries through unpaid internships that I simply cant view as an option. So yes, in classic ideological fashion, the industries that represent our societal "higher brain" are recuringly dominated by less smart, less able people with a narrow view of society that have seldom had to (truly) support themselves and so cant understand why the lower classes dont just work harder or play harder if they want to get their own internship.
Posted by sam thomson at 12:55pm on August 23, 2009
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