In the one-way conversation, the presenter – Jonathan Ross – said that the comic – Russell Brand –had slept with the granddaughter of the actor, whose name was Andrew Sachs. Brand confirmed that this was the case, and named the granddaughter. The pair suggested that Sachs might be so upset he would commit suicide. The conversation went on for some time.
The programme, which was recorded, was approved for transmission and broadcast in mid-October. The BBC received two complaints. A few days after the broadcast, the Mail on Sunday – one of Britain’s mass tabloids – exposed the programme. The next day, Monday, its sister paper, the Daily Mail, with other papers, also picked up the story. The numbers of complaints suddenly began climbing – to reach, at the time of writing, nearly 5,000. The granddaughter, whose name is Georgina Baillie, is a dancer in a group called the Satanic Sluts: and she had, she said, slept with Brand: but she objected strongly to his publicising the fact, and to his, and Ross’, harassment of her grandfather.
The issue was on the front pages, and top of the news bulletins (including of the BBC) for nearly a week. The director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, had to return from an Italian holiday to deal with the matter; Brand resigned from the show; Ross was suspended for six weeks without pay (which meant he lost £16,000 a day, more than many low-paid people earn in a year); and the head of Radio 2 resigned.
There was a general feeling among the intellectual classes that this was a fuss about nothing: more, since the intellectual classes tend to the left, that this was boosted by right wing newspapers (both the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail are on the right), in order to embarrass the publicly owned BBC.
There was something in that: the Mail, Sunday and Daily, specialises in outrage. But the story was so fascinating because it was about things which are important. These include
0 the limits of public decency (and indecency)
0 the role of a public broadcaster in setting standards
0 tolerance by one part of the audience for the tastes – even if shocking to the majority – of another part of the audience
But there is another factor behind these. That is, the shift, over the past 20-30 years, in what television, including public television, does. In one sense, television has become more obviously ”stupid”: in its quiz shows (often pitched quite low), its huge coverage of sport, especially football; its dependence on celebrities and above all in its many reality shows, it proclaims an era of the common man and woman for whom intellectual pursuits, and standards set by any kind of elite, are largely regarded as irrelevant at best, insulting more often. The notion that television should be done by people of higher education to instruct people of a lower education barely exists: instead, channels now operate win which people of higher education do programmes for people like them, while mass audiences are catered for by people of higher education who find out what people of lower education want, and give it to them.
It is from this world that the Brand/Ross incident comes: a world in which obscenities, insults and sexual revelation are the currencies of humour and of celebrity. And this means that public television channels, like the BBC and SVT, are losing their mission – without being able to explicitly say so. Because the are supported by public funds, they must claim, still, to represent in some way the nation’s main institutions – above all, its democratic institutions. But because they must compete in the marketplace to keep their audiences, they must serve many tastes.
The Swedish media researcher Tomas Lindbom put the problem well, when writing about SVT, in a piece on Open Democracy some years ago – ”for us viewers it is becoming increasingly apparent that public service TV has become conservative…. It is the medium for the nation not for the network society. Public service TV grounds its legitimacy in being more serious, more society-oriented and more all embracing than commercial companies. But a TV company must also be concerned and up to the minute, not just in its choice of subjects but in its slant, questioning and tone. When younger people instinctively feel that certain institutions are out of date, the problem is critical…each new generation defines the concept of quality, in line with a new age and its new conditions… it will take an internal metamorphosis if public service TV is to be able to survive in this new ecology”
Younger people’s tastes are now regarded as paramount: and in the eyes of adults (and of some young people too) these tastes are often bad: as bad as those of Brand and Ross. At the same time, they – and older cohorts of viewers – are not watching, or are ceasing to watch, news, current affairs and other ”serious” programming. The tastes of the mass audience – for reality, for celebrity, for high impact entertainment – are now eating into the public purpose of the publicly funded broadcasters – and at the same time causing a crisis in journalism.
* * * * *
The threats to journalism in democratic countries are not what they were. Censorship, suppression, imprisonment of editors, belong – largely – to another age. Now, instead, the talk about journalism is that it is threatened not by power but by indifference. Our enemies are not political power so much as market power; not the effort to impose one voice but the huge proliferation of choice; not a public forbidden to read or see or listen to what we wish to tell them, but unwilling to even sample it.
The problem is many-headed. It includes:
The internet bloggers satellite and cable free newspapers advertisers citizens, especially young citizens consumers corporations ; editors reporters
You will notice that most of these reasons are related, in one way or another, to one particular power: consumer power. With choice, readers, listeners and viewers have chosen to migrate from news: or at least – and the distinction is an important one – to migrate from one way of taking in news to many others, many of these not yet clear.
The pessimism which now abounds in journalism is often hard to overstate. It was well summed up in a speech by John Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles, in Seattle last year. He deplored the ”shrinking of newspapers’ social purpose”, and said that ”restoring the balance between financial performance and public duty is probably impossible under present ownership”. The job of journalists now was ”to save journalism itself…to ensure the existence long into the future of a large, independent, principled, questioning, deep-digging cadre of journalists in America, regardless of what happens to our newspapers”
In Britain, a famous TV presenter, Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight, gave the annual lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival last month – and echoed Carroll’s blast against newspaper owners, applying it to the bosses of his medium, TV. He said that ”People at the top are less concerned with content and more concerned with bottom lines. There are too many people in this industry whose answer to the question: what is TV for? is to say: ”to make money”.”
It is not that there is less news: indeed, there is more. In his lecture, Paxman said that in the ten year period from 1995-5 to 2005/6, the hours of news put out by the BBC had more than doubled, from 5270 per year to 12,485 per year. At the same time, though, budgets and time of analytical programmes – like his own – were being cut. News pours out in short pieces, as in 24-hour news or business news; increasingly put in niches for those who want to keep up to date constantly, or who want specific kinds of news. In these niches, a good living can be made and good journalism done: The Economist is one of the most successful news magazines in the world, and the FT is unique among British papers in increasing circulation over the past year. Busy and committed people will be able increasingly to tailor their news to their specific needs, receiving constant updates on the issues about which they wish to keep informed.
The people who don’t constantly want a lot of information on current affairs, or business, or foreign affairs are now served – free. They are, of course, a great threat to the established press – especially the remaining city evening papers. The sales of the Evening Standard, the long-established and (before the free sheets) monopoly London evening paper, have fallen by almost a half in the past year.
The loss seems to be in what has been thought of as the general news which is aimed at the national public. This had been viewed by those who made it or wrote it as bringing the nation together round a common agenda. It reached its apogee first in radio then in TV news, with the image and to an extent the reality of the nation gathering round the radio or TV to be informed on issues of the day. But newspapers shared that – though they differed greatly, they usually agreed on the choice of the most important stories. Now, mostly, they don’t.
One could lengthen the list of doom. But there is no point in doing that here. The larger issue is that which was brought out by John Carroll: that the job of journalists now who are alarmed by these trends is to make sure a journalism survives which is ”large, independent, principled, questioning, deep-digging”.
News is not now handed down, but is material to be shaped by the consumer, by the reader and the viewer. In part this is what I have called niche news; in part it is a preference for entertainment, celebrity and fun which drives the popular media; and in increasing part it is people engaged on that practically infinite resource, the Net – putting out their life on YouTube and MySpace, challenging received wisdom in blogs, creating received wisdom in Wikipedia.
On that resource, serious journalism will have to find its own niches. I use the plural because clearly there will be more than one. Already, a good deal of innovative documentary making is done for the web – often incubated in universities, paid for by not for profit institutions. Newspapers are developing websites which include the journalism done for the papers – and increasingly, journalism done for the web. And above all, people are able to put together their universe of news from the vast libraries of material available within seconds. It is of course confusing: as far ahead as can be seen, society will need that cadre of people called journalists who are paid to interpret events. In another decade, serious journalism will look something like this.
Magazines containing serious journalism, essays, investigations and analysis will continue to survive: Die Zeit, the Economist and the New Yorker will all still be publishing, and others may have joined them. Some of these will not make money: the British monthly Prospect, one of the best recent (in the last decade) new serious titles, may continue to need funding by private investors – as does the US Atlantic and the Italian MegaMedia. Some, like The Economist, will be very profitable. New niche magazines will continue to pop up, as in the past – though some of these may have a web presence, and some will be aggregating sites, as Signandsite and Arts and Letters Daily – both immensely useful reference points.
Newspapers may survive as global products, as the FT, Wall Street Journal and Herald Tribune, or as local notice boards, or as free sheets. It’s hard to see the appetite for a daily roundup of events which you can hold in your hand disappearing: though if a [portable ”scroll” on which newspapers can be downloaded is brought to the market successfully, then paper copies my more or less disappear. The great newspapers will survive – if they face the future intelligently – as electronic products, by developing the mix of professional and amateur journalism described above – and produce websites which publish this journalism, and amplify it by aggregation of material on the same subject, so that the reader can go more deeply into areas s/he wishes to know thoroughly.
Radio is often the forgotten medium in journalism: though it is ideally suited for analytical journalism, and many channels – as BBC Radio 4 – are distinguished in that regard. The public service model of state-backed support, or the subscriber/supporter backed network, as the US National Public Radio. Both public service and subscriber radio will continue – and the latter may even expand, as it has in recent years in the US.
Television will virtually cease to do serious current affairs as a routine matter on mass channels. These will go to niche channels, as they already have: the Discovery Channel has taken in the old 670 Minute show and is developing it for its worldwide viewership. Or they will go to internet production: much documentary and investigative material is now available on line – everything from amateur analysis and investigations on YouTube through to foreign reporting subsidised by not-for-profits and/or university journalism departments.
The Net will continue to develop hugely, and will be the biggest driver of and innovator in serious journalism. When – as will soon be the case – the TV screen and the computer screen merge into one, and the modern home will have screens which are active sites of discovery and creation as well as passive receivers of programming, the line between producer and consumer of media will become ever fainter.
Technology is creating a new present and foreshadows a new future for the news media. It is right to reflect on this with some foreboding: we have lost some precious things in journalism – as fine TV current affairs programmes, as many foreign correspondents networks on big city papers – and may lose more. But in the end, if we are to preserve serious journalism, we must now have faith that those who are its object – the readers, listeners and viewers – will wish to become its creators, and in doing so will open a new chapter. This will remove the ability of journalists, in any medium, to have the last word: to say, as Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchorman, famously did ”that’s the way it is”. There is no one ”way” of how it is: there is never a last word. If the net can make that into a reality – and more, into a way of doing journalism – then it will be a blessing, not a curse.
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