Are the media racist asks New Statesman report

An investigation by the New Statesman magazine reveals that ethnic minorities are still largely absent from opinion pages, senior roles and staff jobs in UK press.

The report is part of the magazine's special report on race in the British media.

Columnist Mehdi Hasan writes in an essay for the special report:

 What have the following five individuals got in common: Gary Younge, Hugh Muir, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Amol Rajan and India Knight? They are part of a small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear regularly on the comment pages of our national newspapers. Well, OK, not quite. They are the small group of non-white newspaper columnists who appear on those comment pages. That's it. There's just five of them - the Guardian's Younge and Muir (both black), the Independent/i's Alibhai-Brown and Rajan (both Asian) and the Sunday Times's Knight (mixed race).It is a deeply depressing state of affairs.

The magazine surveyed surveyed the main comment pages of selected newspapers in the week between Monday 5 December and Sunday 11 December to count the number of non-white writers who appeared finding that 3 newspapers did not have a single non-white writer on the comment pages and only 5 non-white writers have a regular weekly fixed column in the British broadsheet press .