Preparing for my
SPERI/NEW Statesman lecture
(now sold out I’m afraid), I had a closer look at something that
had been in the back of my mind for some time. In the mid 1970s,
Peter Jay and John Birt put forward a new philosophy for broadcast
journalism. Their first article in the Times started
“There is a bias in television journalism. Not against any
particular party or point of view – it is a bias against
understanding.”
A lot of the points that I have made in this blog are in their
writing: the need to get more economic expertise into reporting, how
he said/she said reporting and panel discussion can reduce rather than increase understanding and knowledge.
What became of their initiative? Both had opportunities to put their
ideas into practice, and Birt became Director General (DG) of the BBC
in 1987 (in rather unfortunate circumstances, with Alasdair Milne
being forced to resign because of conflicts with the Thatcher
government, echos of which are perhaps still with us today). But
Birt’s period as DG seems to have been associated with more
centralisation of news and current affairs, and more ‘risk
management’, which included pulling programmes that were
controversial, and might have increased understanding!
It is tempting to draw the conclusion that the mission to explain
fell foul of political interference, but that may be too easy on
television journalism itself. It may simply be that the mission to
explain worked against dominant journalistic values and culture. The
need to generate scoops and headlines, for example, which comes from
talking to or interviewing politicians rather than explaining
economics. The entertainment value that comes from conflict and
debate. The idea that it is more exciting television to have a
correspondent embedded with troops in a war rather than calmly
explaining the roots of the conflict from somewhere less ‘dramatic’.
But whatever the reasons for the demise of the ‘mission to
explain’, it is not exactly the same as what I have discussed in
the past. Failing to explain does not account for what I call the
politicisation of truth: where something becomes true just because
one lot of politicians keep saying it and the ‘other lot’ do not
contest it. That comes from insularity, from an excessive focus on
the Westminster bubble.
I will talk more about this in my lecture, and subsequently in this
blog.
