How unpaid internships have made the media so middle class | News & Politics | News & Comment

LAST UPDATED 4:16 PM, AUGUST 5, 2009

more than welcome to work for free for the next three months.

None of this is unusual. And the result is that today's young journalists are overwhelmingly university educated and bourgeois. Without work experience, you can't get a job. And without money, you can't afford the work experience. Those whose parents are unwilling or unable to fund them through the lean times will rarely even get a foot in the door. This is a far cry from the days when most reporters started on their local rag at 18.

All this seems likely to induce a chorus of 'pass the violins'. With unemployment soaring and homes being repossessed, the fact that a few graduates can't get the career they want is never going to inspire sympathy.

But it matters - and not because of the whingeing of a few middle-class kids. The media is meant to be where Britain talks to itself, and debates the issues of the day. While it's dominated by one section of society, those debates will be painfully narrow, and those outside that clique are deprived of a voice.

Dominated by one section of society, media debates are painfully narrow

Thus it is that discussions of housing obsess over house prices, not shortages. The immigration debate is pitched as a battle between multiculturalism and nostalgia, while the economic impact on unskilled workers is roundly ignored. And politicians fight for Essex Man and Worcester Woman in the pages of the Daily Mail, quite oblivious to the needs of Dagenham or Dewsbury.

It's not clear what the solution to this is. Someone with experience is always going to be more employable than someone without. Earlier this year the Government announced that graduates could use their job seeker's allowance to fund an internship, but since this only kicks in after six months on the dole it's not going to do much for social mobility.

One thing is clear, though. The newspapers, struggling to cut costs, can only benefit from an army of willing unpaid labourers. While that's true, they'll be in no hurry to change any of this.

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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