Mary Fitzpatrick made the BBC less ‘hideously white’

Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc.

Her most infamous pronouncement, when she was at the Beeb, was that the BBC had too many white foreign correspondents. People reporting from Muslim countries should be Muslim, from Chinese countries Chinese and so on. The audience, this berserk woman suggested, needed ‘valid and culturally accurate’ reportage, which meant far fewer honkeys. Everybody, at the time, said that this was offensive gibberish and the BBC sort of disowned her comments. But watching BBC news reports recently it would seem to me that this is precisely what they have done. Not a scientific study, I accept; but there seems to be far more foreign correspondents on the pay roll who hail from the countries from which they are reporting – and are sometimes unintelligible for that reason. Anyone else noticed this?