Assistant Editor

We Cannot Keep Begging Their Media to Value Us While Refusing to Support Our Own

Black Britain already has independent journalists and community-owned platforms doing the work. The question is whether we will sustain them before the next crisis arrives.

After the vigil for Professor Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square, I saw people questioning why the BBC had devoted so little attention to an event that brought tens of thousands into central London.

MPs Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Bell Ribeiro-Addy were among those who addressed the crowd, alongside Lord Simon Woolley, the Good Law Project’s Jo Maugham and anti-racism campaigners. Abbott called for justice, while Woolley described what Arday had endured as a “public execution”. Singer Beverley Knight also joined the tributes.

Many chose to respond: write to the BBC, complain, demand better coverage. I thought breifly and concluded.

What exactly do we believe another letter or another 20,000 letters will change?

Black communities have spent decades appealing to the same institutions for fairness and recognition. We complain when our stories are ignored, when they are distorted, when Black achievement is treated with suspicion and Black suffering is granted less empathy.

Collect AKIMYAX Anime Keyrings

Meet Nori & Miko — the first original duo from the AKIMYAX Pocket Duo Series.

SHOP AKIMYAX

Then, once the anger passes, we return to the same organisations. We watch them, share their clips, circulate their headlines and reinforce their authority.

Meanwhile, Black-owned and Black-led platforms attempting to build something different are too often left struggling for attention, subscriptions and financial support.

AKIMYAX Pocket Duo — Nori & Miko

Two pocket-sized personalities, one original anime-inspired duo. Discover Nori & Miko and more artist-created designs from AKIMYAX.

VIEW NORI & MIKO

That is why JamRadio exists. The vision was to build a Black British talk-radio and current-affairs platform: somewhere we can discuss our own events, investigate injustice, challenge power and help determine the narrative rather than merely react to somebody else’s.

Mainstream outlets do not simply report the news. They decide which stories matter, who is considered credible and how the public should understand an event. Editorial power is political and cultural power. Black communities need institutions capable of exercising some of that power for themselves.

TEST THE JAMRADIO APP

JamRadio is not alone. The Community Reporter, founded by journalist Melissa Sigodo, produces independent journalism centred on Britain’s Black communities, highlights underreported stories and holds power to account. BlackCurrent News, founded by award winning journalist Nadine White as a self-funded publication, covers Black life, politics, culture and power across Britain and beyond.

Black Ballad has built a membership-supported platform focused on Black British women. The Voice has documented Black British life for more than four decades. Other independent journalists, broadcasters and community publications like All Angles UK continue doing essential work, often without the budgets, staffing or protection available to mainstream newsrooms.

These platforms already provide much of what we say we want: media that understands our communities before a crisis, recognises the history behind the headline and remains interested after the cameras disappear.

The problem is that we often support the idea of Black media more enthusiastically than the institutions themselves.

Journalism costs money. Reporters, editors, cameras, travel, hosting, studios, insurance and legal advice must be paid for. Yet Black media are frequently expected to survive on personal sacrifice and goodwill.

Many people will pay subscriptions to multinational news corporations and spend hours driving traffic towards mainstream reporting, but hesitate to contribute a few pounds to an independent platform serving their own community. They praise Black ownership in principle while treating Black-owned journalism as optional or less authoritative.

The uncomfortable answer is that voices require infrastructure, and infrastructure requires sustained support.

This does not mean the BBC and other major outlets should escape scrutiny. The BBC must be held to its public obligations. Complaints, corrections and regulatory action have their place. But challenging their power is not the same as building our own.

We cannot keep begging another institution for ten seconds of airtime while ignoring platforms prepared to devote an entire programme, investigation or front page to our concerns.

The response to Professor Dr. Jason Arday’s death should provoke more than anger about one broadcaster’s running order. It should make us ask why we remain so dependent on institutions whose treatment of Black people we repeatedly describe as dismissive, unequal or hostile.

A strong independent Black press can challenge harmful framing in real time. It can investigate the investigation, supply context, preserve dignity and provide a meaningful right of reply. But it cannot do that while underfunded, understaffed and noticed only after tragedy.

Support must come while institutions are still being built. It means subscribing, sharing original reporting, advertising with them, sending them stories, citing their journalism and treating their reporters as legitimate voices in national conversations.

JamRadio recently received a follow from a Black MP. That should be ordinary. Instead, it felt significant because recognition and community backing remain so scarce.

We are not short of Black journalists, researchers, commentators or storytellers. We are short of sustained collective investment in the platforms we are trying to build.

The question is no longer whether Black Britain can create its own media. It already has.

The question is whether we will support those platforms strongly enough to survive, grow and exercise real power, or continue returning to the same doors asking to be heard, and wondering why nothing changes.