Media Guardian: Race & Religion Article #2

(Highlighted parts are in blue)

Trevor Phillips lambasts Channel 4

John Mair and Chris Tryhorn

MediaGuardian, Friday 2 February 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/feb/02/raceintheuk.broadcasting

The government's equality chief, Trevor Phillips, has accused Channel 4 of failing to take responsibility for the Celebrity Big Brother race row.

Ramping up his previous criticism of the broadcaster, he dismissed executives' attempts to defuse the row over allegedly racist bullying by ordering an internal review.

He said Channel 4's director of programmes, Kevin Lygo, had behaved like "a 14-year-old boy boasting to his mates that he got away with it" when he defended the way the row had been handled last week.

The Channel 4 programme sparked a national debate and a minor diplomatic incident last month after Indian contestant Shilpa Shetty was subjected to allegedly racist bullying by white housemates.

The broadcasting watchdog Ofcom took a total of 45,100 complaints, easily the largest such protest on record, while Channel 4 is believed to have fielded more than 10,000. Another Channel 4 reality show, Shipwrecked, was embroiled in a second race row, with 1,300 complaints to Ofcom after a contestant defended slavery.

"What we saw on Big Brother was racism," Mr Phillips said in a speech on media and morality to students from Coventry University. "It was prejudice, and should have no place in our society ... what took place was a noxious brew of old-fashioned class conflict, straightforward bullying, ignorance and quite vicious racial bigotry."

He said the broadcaster's managers should have considered their future. "Either they take responsibility for their actions or they resign. If the latter, then so be it," he said, answering questions after his speech.

In his career as a broadcaster, Mr Phillips produced Channel 4's pioneering programme on multiculturalism, Black on Black.

Now chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, he described Channel 4 as "a media organisation set up with a specific brief of giving voice to minorities". But he criticised the broadcaster's recent track record on race programming, pointing to its decision to categorise its cricket coverage "a demonstration of multicultural Britain" to increase its "non-white" programming output.

The Big Brother row had been a case-study of how "management failed to take responsibility for the management of their own output", he said.