Talking trust
- 4 Sep 07, 12:49 PM
“Least said, soonest mended” is Peter Preston's on the 'trust' row that dominated the Edinburgh TV Festival and which is taking up a fair chunk of our time at the College of Journalism too - though I wouldn't describe the work in progress as searching for what Peter elegantly calls ”paradise probity lost”.
Peter's pessimistic take on the human condition - that stuff happens, good intentions founder, public distrust persists in the face of attempts to turn the tide - may have an element of truth in it. But it would be wrong for educators and publicly funded broadcasters to conclude that there's no point trying or that the mission is doomed to failure. Or that they should shut up about what they can't control.
It would be wrong, too, to ignore the most striking passage in Jeremy Paxman's MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
"Once people start believing we’re playing fast and loose with them routinely, we’ve had it." Jeremy said. And by people, he didn't mean the people at the Edinburgh TV Festival or other broadcasting worthies. He meant audiences - the people who've been significantly absent from platforms and podiums (though not from the blogs and message boards).
It may be that some broadcasting bosses are a bit fed up with the trust thing, as Peter Preston suggests they ought to be… and jaundiced in their views about remedies. Audiences, though, aren't.
When Newsnight (which you can watch here) looked at Five News' opportunistic to ban some TV editing techniques (though not editing per se, you notice) its blog attracted nearly 150 thoughtful audience posts.
Many of those posts - and similar ones to the Guardian's Edinburgh Festival - illustrated a truth that lies behind Jeremy's "fast and loose” comment and poses a real problem for those of us trying to construct useful, credible learning for ѿý content producers.
For the most part, audiences realise that all media is artifice and contrivance. Even the hardest, straightest most factual news report is the result of choices and framings in the deployment, recording, editing, scripting and presentation.
And there's an element of audience collusion with content producers; both want strong, insightful, compelling narratives… of the kind that you don't get if you present the world without taking the boring bits out.
But it only goes so far and context is everything. “Playing fast and loose” in news could mean intercutting unrelated footage to produce a false relationship of events; do the same in a drama or comedy show and no-one in the audience would raise an eyebrow. The discussion, debate and learning around that judgment of context really is worth talking about. Because the audience cares - is angry, cheated - when broadcasters get it wrong... whether deliberately or in a panic.
At Edinburgh, Jeremy said this too: "The problem is not going to be addressed until senior people in this industry have the courage to come out and state quite clearly what television is for... What’s needed is a manifesto, a statement of belief."
Another reason to reject Peter Preston's call for a period of silence. The boundaries between Big Journalism's constructed content and the content web users make and post for themselves is blurring. Broadcasters can't control - shouldn't want to control - how the web develops and what trust, truth and artifice mean there. But they can decide where they stand and what - in that evolving media world - they stand for.
That's got to be worth a bit of chat, too, hasn't it?
Kevin Marsh is editor of the ѿý College of Journalism
