Keep Broadcasting Public - Victoria Brittain

Posted by Victoria Brittain

What we want from public service broadcasting:

I want to start by posing two questions in response:

What is media for? And, why am I a journalist?

Let us exclude the tabloids for a start – they are a poison in our industry and our society, and you can never say that often enough.

I am essentially talking about the serious media, the former broadsheets, the BBC, Channel 4. (Others have said a great deal more already about the BBC specifically.)

What is media for? 

My answer would be:

For gathering and spreading information about our society, and the wider world.

I read speeches by BBC management who seem to be obsessed with the need for media to be entertaining, and embarrassed by the idea that teaching and learning might be the first goal. This worries me a lot – it feels like shifting the goalposts.

Why am I a journalist?

It certainly isn’t because I set out to be entertaining – that’s a whole different career choice, and involves a set of talents and personality traits that I don’t have and don’t aspire to.

I’m a journalist because I believe that knowledge is power, the more people that have knowledge the more likely it is that powerful people will get checked on their way to becoming more powerful, and rich, and riding roughshod over the rest of us on the way.

I’m proud to be a member of the NUJ because I think our union leadership have given a great lead in this direction, not just with lip-service, but with practical programmes of training, not only in the UK, but in Third Worldsocieties where journalists are even more under the thumb of governments and elites than we are here.

I’m also a journalist because I like finding things out, and as I always say to the young would-be journalists who come to see me, it’s a privilege to spend your life constantly learning new things. I cant imagine being in a job which you master and then keep on doing.

But if you ask, What is media for? in other circles, such as proprietors, or government, you get, of course, very different answers.

The former would mainly say (at least in private), it’s firstly to make money, hence the great emphasis on entertainment, consumerism/celebrity/lifestyle stories, and secondly, to influence government policy towards helping them make bigger profits, and mould a society that is good for big business. (An exception to this is The Independent, owned by people rich enough to lose £10m a year, in the service of a free press. Good for them.)

While the latter (government) would also say, (also in private) it’s to get people to understand the world from our viewpoint. Hence the world of government spin and misinformation in which we currently live – confused, sceptical, and waiting for the weekend, and Bremner, Bird and Fortune giving the rest of us the chance to laugh at the self-important ministers and mandarins who have tried to pull the wool over our eyes in the previous week.

I imagine that in this room there would be few dissenters from the three propositions that,

1) the dumbing-down of news is a fact of life that we have learned to live with,

2) because of the dominance of monopolies in media, and the priorities I’ve already mentioned, and because of the key fact of how circular media is, always feeding off itself, dumbing-down will continue across the board unless there’s a powerful grass roots rearguard action to ring fence public broadcasting. If that were successful, it would, because of the circular waves that run through all media, significantly influence other news outlets and we might see a significant backlash against dumbing-down.

3) dumbing-down it is a process which is not just disastrous for our media industry, and our self-respect as journalists, working at something we used to be proud of, but it is catastrophic for our society, and for democracy itself.

You probably all saw the movie, Good night, and Good luck, and shared a pang of nostalgia for the Ed Morrow years – consistent investigative journalism with a real team of researchers, a proprietor who backed you (mostly) in government baiting, an obvious enemy of society in Senator McCarthy, and, best of all, the eventual downfall of the enemy.

And of course Morrow was not the only journalist of earlier days in the US to be a national hero because of his facility with a mixture of hard-headed analysis, straight news, and informed documentary – Walter Cronkite, and  Peter Jennings were others.Today, when you think of US television, it is with a shudder at the spectre of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s fantastically successful, unashamedly partisan, channel with audiences for some shows of over 2 million. Could it happen here? Yes, is the answer.

But back to Morrow and his investigations. We did them here once too: World in Action, the Sunday Times Insight team. But sadly today in the UK media investigations are more associated with News of the World-type sting operations against football managers or unpopular politicians, and more often concerned with people’s private lives than with earth-shaking trends like McCarthyism was, or the things which World in Action went for.

Consistency is what I admire most about Morrow’s work. Today itis out of fashion, in the constant search for the new and the fashionable, and the fear of being “worthy”, or oh dear, “boring”.

So, stories like:

The threats to the future of the planet, and the lives of most people on it, are carried spasmodically, or not at all in much of our Western media. Could this really be “boring”?

What are these threats, and which paper or TV channel can you rely on to keep them high on the agenda?

The current military-dominated big power economies and the corporations which essentially control them, have created a desperately unstable world:

firstly with the wars they fuel,

secondly with the evasion of  the real and coming impact of climate change,

thirdly with the massive pollution they export to the Third World,

fourthly with the corruption they engender and encourage,

fifthly with the export of an economic model which is unsustainable,

sixth with a war on Islam – with manifestations from Palestine and Iraq to Guantanamo Bay

All these things are causing deepening mass world poverty and anger: hunger, violence, dropping life expectancy, deprivation of education, mass movements of populations, the HIV/Aids explosion are among the manifestations.

The role of the current US administration in all this, and in particular the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and companies linked to him such as Halliburton, is blurred in such a way that the average alert newspaper reader or TV watcher here has learned from parts of the media to accept that the US claims to be spreading democracy in the Middle East, while utterly destroying societies and killing tens of thousands of people, are rubbish, but they have not really learned that the most powerful country in the world is led by war criminals who are a peril to our world.

That’s considered extremist, not, as it is, just literally true. We can dream of how Morrow might have gone at this US story, like a terrier, from every angle, and never letting go.

But the world story, the unfashionable issue of poverty, world poverty – is the story which should preoccupy us all and which has myriad angles to come at it from – as I mentioned earlier.

But the consistency I would most regret not finding in this story is the emphasis that:

Poverty is about powerlessness. This is the most dramatic facet of the inequality between our affluent lives in Western social democracies – and those of the elites in the Third world who are the ones most journalists and organisations in the West have relations with – and the rest of the world. These affluent lives are made possible by the exploitation of the world’s majority.

And of course – never forget -the most powerless and the most exploited are women, and I would like to highlight the amazing work of the NYT journalist Nicholas Kristof who has the power of a bi-weekly column and a great travel budget, and seems to use it almost exclusively on this subject of women’s powerlessness – read him on rape in Darfur, forced prostitution in the Sub-Continent – great reportage, an unswerving analysis of what lies behind it, a consistent tone of outrage. If only the BBC had just one journalist, or just one strand, which was famous in this way.

Kristof is exceptional because in the mainstream western media the dominant story lines most of us journalists accept when writing about the Third World, evade looking squarely and consistently at the complex linked issues of  poverty and social justice.

Of course we cover all these frightening world trends I mentioned, and many well-informed, distinguished journalists like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, Channel 4’s Jon Snow, or The Guardian’s Chris McGreal, and George Monbiot, give shining examples of how in the mainstream it is possible to go beneath the surface and consistently pull these lines together.

But these are individuals, and there are many examples of the same organisations dumbing-down with the best, or should I say, the worst, of them. I’ll just mention one, because it illustrates some of my points about media management priorities and budgets, and about the circular nature of media, and how those play out in coverage. Ch 4’s Washington correspondent did a recent report from Venezuela which played into every prejudice about oil-flush tyrant threatening the US – pictured with Saddam Hussein; spreading revolution, pictured with Fidel and Evo Morales; posing a nuclear threat, pictured with Iranian leadership; there was an underlay of interviews with rabid anti-Chavez  types in the oil industry and US-funded independent media. It all echoed the hysterical US-based reporting on Chavez which Rugman is no doubt immersed in, how could he not be. It was a low moment in Channel 4 news. Washington-slanted Latin  American reporting, or Middle East reporting, like African reporting done from Johannesburg, is reporting on the cheap. It is no substitute for the real thing – being there.

The BBC’s World Service is a bright icon of thoughtful in-depth coverage: for instance the recent series of young Muslims in Europe, and on extraordinary rendition of Muslims flown about the world to be tortured.

And for just being on the ground, and not flown in for a quick sensation, the World Service is often streets ahead of , say Radio 4, in insight. (Though the World Service has its own manifestation of  news on the cheap in its “Have your say” programme – not news at all, but unfiltered opinion and a sop to populism.)

Is the nemesis of all these conventional media outlets, with all their imperfections, going to be the Internet?

When I saw Rupert Murdock talking about this, and predicting a future in which “media becomes like fast food”, my reaction was  that it could be just the opposite – highly nourishing.

At the moment the Internet is often part of why our newspapers fail in reporting – desk editors tell people to look up the Internet, instead of sending them out to report (budgets again). But, on the other hand, there is an unprecedented explosion of available serious information on almost any subject or region where Western journalists know little. Just to take three examples of areas which I work on:

Iraq,

Palestine,

Guantanamo Bay

– there are websites, blogs, and email mass postings, which allow anyone with the will to pay attention, to be extraordinarily well informed. Conventional media will have to face up to this challenge if it is not to become just a backwater, as readers, listeners and viewers will gravitate to new media if the content is simply more informative. Lets believe in our readers, listeners and viewers, they don’t only want to be entertained, they want to be well informed.