- Peter Knowles
- 2 May 08, 03:47 PM
The أغر؟´«أ½ is hosting three lectures in a series about the role of public service broadcasting and first up was Sir David Attenborough, in a speech delivered on the evening of 1 May in London.
أغر؟´«أ½ Parliament has developed a two hour slot in its schedules - 2100 Saturday evening - for speeches and lectures of a broadly political and historical nature. This one fits the bill. But, to be honest, if it had been David Attenborough reading out loud from a plant catalogue, I would probably have gone with that. Next in the series are lectures from Stephen Fry and Will Hutton.
Sir David spent some time describing the physical characteristics of the early TV studios in Alexandra Palace, when short stories were declaimed to camera by men in comfy armchairs. Having knocked the microphone off his lapel, the first three minutes of the lecture found us unexpectedly re-enacting some of the limitations of those early years.
David Attenborough gave a very short definition of public service broadcasting in the modern era: "programmes with small audiences".
Sir David fears the effect of reducing the habitat of a genre to just one or two occasional programmes and makes the point that the world-beating units - the Natural History Unit in Bristol being the prime example - have size and continuity on their side. His dislike of faddish popular genres, such as the makeover shows, is expressed clearly and was picked up in of the lecture:
He argues that niche channels haven't done too well for audiences and that they therefore miss the point of broadcasting.
So I'm not entirely sure whether the broadcast of this lecture on 'counts' as public service broadcasting, by Sir David's definition. We're showing it (or hiding it, depending on your point of view) on a channel which reaches more than a million viewers a month. But not, as you may have guessed, all at the same time.
Sir David's vision of public service broadcasting is that it must be appropriately funded and played out on a whole and coherent network dedicated to the purpose. And it must have a healthy audience.
He describes what he sees as the toxic effect of foisting publicly funded public service programming onto a commercial schedule where, inevitably, the programme would be treated as a pariah by the scheduler.
I hope you find the time to watch the whole thing at 2100 BST on أغر؟´«أ½ Parliament and then on iPlayer. If you feel that your Saturday nights have, for too long, been given over to hedonism, you can follow it with a lecture by Baroness James of Holland Park on (2135 BST) and round off the evening at 2215 BST in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury, lecturing on to the London School of Economics.
All three lectures were delivered this week and they offer first-rate public discourse that you won't find anywhere else. Saturday nights are never going to be the same again, are they?
Peter Knowles is the controller of أغر؟´«أ½ Parliament
- Kevin Marsh
- 2 May 08, 11:17 AM
Another week, another book about journalism.
This one - by of London's City University.
Anyone interested in British journalism should read it - not because it gives the right answers to its title: it doesn't. But because it asks the right questions. And at least it's been written by someone who's actually worked in a newsroom.
Prof Monck's purpose is unambiguous: "What I aim to do in this book is burst the trust balloon. I want to question just why it is we want to trust the media and lay out why that will never be possible."
Two things: one, he portrays the أغر؟´«أ½'s promotion of trust to value number one as an act of choice, not the (welcome) inevitability it is for a publicly funded broadcaster. Two (for different reasons and by a different route) he's joined me in diagnosing as the malignancy in journalism's sick body.
Journalists want to be trusted, broadly in inverse proportion to the trust in which surveys say they're actually held. But there's a missing proposition in the question normally asked. Trusted to do what? Portray the world as it really is? Not possible - any account of the world can only ever be a subset of all the facts. Trust resides in the journalist's motivation in selecting the facts he/she does and in the realisation of that motivation.
Prof Monck tells us that "trust is not important. Not being trusted never lost anyone a reader or a viewer". And, he adds, it's journalism's job to aggregate facts and "get the entertainment values right". This may well be a description of the current state of journalism: but it's not much of an aspiration for the institution of journalism that - still - plays the defining role in the public sphere.
And it's simply not tenable for a publicly (and more or less universally) funded broadcaster like the أغر؟´«أ½ to accept Prof Monck's lowest common denominator description without some aspirational pushback. Nor is it possible for the أغر؟´«أ½ to be in the same game as the commercial press which can, say, choose its facts to suit its readers.
Even if it wanted it - and it doesn't - the أغر؟´«أ½ can't choose to make its way in the world by mimicking the exhausting diurnal anger of the Mail ('woe that the 1950s are gone') or the hand-wringing of the Guardian/Independent ('woe that global warming/capitalism is taking us to hell in an organic hand-basket').
But the really big thing in Can We Trust The Media? is this: journalism itself isn't the problem. The problem is journalism's fetish - 'the story'. And so it's no bad thing that 'the story' is dead... or dying.
That's an awkward paradox. 'The story' - in the sense that journalists mean it rather than the broader idea of narrative - is the source of all that's great in journalism and all that's vile in it.
On the credit side, you can go from Russell of the Crimea through Hersh of My Lai, Woodstein of Watergate to Peston of Northern Rock. In all of these, 'the story' has been the only way journalism could happen. The only way of handling the information asymmetry, the inevitability that power has information and journalists (on behalf of citizens) have to spanner it out, chunk by chunk.
On the debit side, all those things that make journalists seem untrustworthy. Why this story and not that? Why these facts and not those? The lure of the unusual, the rogue (and unreliable) data? Sensationalism, half-truths, self-fulfilling prophecies.
'The story' can easily become the journalist's way of evading responsibility. 'It's only a story' equals 'I don't need all the facts or even the best selection of them'. 'The story' can be no more than waypoints in a convincing narrative... convincing, so long as the reader looks no further than 'the story'.
Which is why 'the story' is dead. The people we journalists used to tell our 'stories' to, with a 'trust me' wink, now routinely look beyond 'the story'. And we help them. Websites like the أغر؟´«أ½ News website are built on the basis that users will look out their own subset of facts, context and background.
More than that, news websites blur the distinction (a distinction that was only ever really relevant to journalists) between 'news' and 'information' while news aggregators make no assumptions about any individual's news agenda in the way that 'the story' has to.
In other words, the process of selection that used to be the province of the journalist - the process we used to call 'storytelling' - is now the province of each member of our audiences. Good.
This is where Prof Monck and I are in total agreement. He doesn't quite put it this way - but the death of 'the story' is part of the answer to the trust conundrum. Now journalists can get on with increasing the access of the people formerly known as the audience to the information they need and in the way they need it.
And that hand journalists once used to polish 'the story' can instead be held out to guide readers, listeners and viewers through their selection of facts, context and background and not ours.
Kevin Marsh is editor of the أغر؟´«أ½ College of Journalism
- Jon Williams
- 2 May 08, 09:33 AM
Tomorrow, 3 May, the United Nations marks . Granted, it's not in the same league as , or as widely supported as flag days for Cancer Research or the hospice movement. But I hope you'll forgive me if I take the opportunity to reflect that journalism is a dangerous business - and getting more so.
In Zimbabwe in recent weeks, we've seen the dangers faced by reporters, arrested for simply trying to inside that country. And in many places, journalists face far worse. This week, the - a US based campaign group - published what it calls an , a name-and-shame list of countries where governments have consistently failed to solve the murders of the journalists.
The war in Iraq makes Baghdad the most dangerous place on the planet for reporters. But most journalists who've died there were killed not in combat, but rather, were targeted for professional reasons and murdered. The vast majority are Iraqis - 79 deaths remain unsolved.
While Iraq tops the Impunity Index, followed by other war-torn countries such as Sierra Leone and Somalia, the most sobering statistic us that the majority of the 13 nations named are established, peacetime democracies.
This week I was in Mexico. There, reporters regularly investigate drug trafficking, organised crime and official corruption. Too many pay a heavy price. The families of seven reporters murdered in Mexico are still seeking justice. Also among those named-and-shamed are India, and its South Asian neighbours, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
I confess a personal as well as professional interest. Last October, a young journalist, in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan. The politics of Central Asia are murky and dangerous. Osh is on the border with Uzbekistan - a country where dissent about the regime of President Islom Karimov is not tolerated.
Alisher had worked for the أغر؟´«أ½ and other international news organisations - he was also the editor of an opposition Uzbek newspaper. He had just finished working on a film for when he was gunned down as he left his office. His family and friends believe he was killed by an Uzbek gunman, hired to silence him. Alisher was 26 years old. His wife has just given birth to their first child.
Six months on, no-one has been brought to justice in Kyrgyzstan for Alisher Saipov's murder. Indeed, the investigation into his death has twice been suspended, despite assurances to the أغر؟´«أ½ by the Kyrgyz authorities that they would spare no effort in hunting his killer.
Journalists don't deserve special treatment - but the friends, families and colleagues of those who die doing their job, do deserve answers.
Jon Williams is the أغر؟´«أ½'s world news editor
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