Do we need more working-class foreign correspondents?

A career in journalism is often beyond the reach of people from working-class backgrounds – a foreign correspondent role even more so. But does it matter? Richard Hall investigates

Tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square in Beijing to quell pro-democracy demonstrations – one of the most memorable and important international stories in post-war history (Rex)

Over the past few years, the British media has been forced to reflect more than once on how it was caught off guard by some seismic event that it didn’t see coming. Brexit was one of them, the Grenfell Tower tragedy was another. In both cases, there seemed to be a blindness to the underlying causes behind them. A similar realisation took place in the US in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory.

Jon Snow, the veteran Channel 4 News broadcaster, summed it up best when he confessed to feeling “disconnected and frustrated” in the aftermath of the deadly tower block fire, which residents had long warned was inevitable. “In increasingly fractured Britain, we in the media are comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite,” he said.

It was a unusually frank admission, and made a point that we all forget more often that we care to admit: there are things we cannot see because we have not lived them.