Is BAME an ‘unhelpful’ term?

BBC abandons acronym in newsrooms and corporate communications

Black Lives Matter protesters in London
Black Lives Matter protesters in London
(Image credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images)

Four UK broadcasters will no longer use the acronym “BAME” to describe black, Asian and minority ethnic people after an industry report found there was a “lack of trust” around the term.

The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 will follow the findings from the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, which said that the collective term had been used to “hide failings in the representation of specific ethnic groups”.

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 Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.