Whose story is it anyway?

Show me a broadcast journalist who has never got a story or an idea for a story from a newspaper and I'll show you a liar.    

Cross-media fertilisation might sound like a concept straight out of a digital babble bible, but it is actually as old as broadcast journalism itself.   What kind of newsroom would operate in complete isolation, blind to the output or content of other sources?   Just as press journalists will monitor television and radio news programmes, so broadcast journalists have traditionally checked the papers (and now their websites) to ensure that they are not missing out on a story which is yet to appear on their own radar.

This fact was seized upon by some critics of BBC local radio when the corporation announced a review of the service last year.   Claims abounded that local radio journalists were lifting stories from local papers in their coverage area.   Research by the BBC debunked that suggestion, but the threat of swingeing cuts to the local radio budget raised fears that local stations would be rendered incapable of sustaining the current standard of journalism.   Last week's announcement that local stations are having less money taken from them will hopefully secure their journalistic future.

The issue has, however, highlighted the oft-overlooked question of originality in broadcast journalism, at both the local and national level.    Is the primary role of the broadcast journalist to uncover stories or to bring them to life for the widest possible audience?   Every broadcast journalist with an ounce of pride will say that it should be both - but, in reality, how many times does the necessity for the latter mean the former is sacrificed?   

Original journalism is the holy grail for any journalist, but it does seem the press often takes the lead when it comes to doing the digging.    Perhaps that is because broadcast is more labour intensive and the need for recording, editing and presenting a polished product usually leaves little time for anything else.   Yet considering the pagination of newspapers nowadays, the 24-hour business of updating their websites and the fact that press newsrooms have seen some drastic cutbacks of their own, maybe that explanation is just a little too easy.   Here's a more uncomfortable proposition - are print journalists just more suited to good old-fashioned investigative journalism than their broadcast counterparts?

Fortunately for broadcasters, however, nobody owns the news.   Just because one organisation has originated a story does not preclude others from reporting it.   And here is where broadcast comes into its own.   Broadcast journalists are the profession's storytellers.   A relatively dry story on paper can be brought to life by a television or radio package or interview.   Real voices, explaining complex issues or conveying a sense of place or emotion.   The best broadcasters transport the listener or viewer to the heart of a story - and then guide them through it.

Broadcast journalists are also usually best placed to develop a story.   Original journalism is not confined to the bald notion of uncovering facts.   It can be about moving a story on, putting the facts unearthed by another organisation into perspective - and under scrutiny.   This weekend, the BBC's Sunday Politics did not originate the story of a potential £8 million bonus package for the RBS Chief Executive Steven Hester - but it was able to put the Sunday Times findings to a cabinet minister and press him as to whether such a deal would be acceptable.   That still counts as original journalism.

Similarly, as the most trusted and widely used source of news, broadcast outlets are well positioned to present stories in an accessible and engaging way for the widest audience.   Last year, ITV Anglia ran an extended feature on the planned NHS reforms, hinged on the fact that the new commissioning groups were being trialled in the region.   Anglia Television journalists were not the first to uncover the potential pitfalls and controversies of the reforms - but they did highlight and explain them to an audience which might otherwise have turned the page when seeing the issue reported in the press.   Original journalism.

Of course, broadcast journalists do still get traditional exclusives.   In the top tier of the hierarchy of news, broadcasters will often find stories come to them first.   In 2005, the preliminary findings of the inquiry into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground were leaked to ITV News, which handed them a powerful exclusive on one of the biggest stories of the year.   Meanwhile, broadcast journalists routinely prove just as capable of cultivating their own sources as their print counterparts.   Last year's Newsnight investigation into alleged corruption in boxing was an example of what many would regard as traditional original journalism - the direct reporting, rather than the re-reporting, of a story.   So while broadcasters must guard against the worst forms of churnalism, maybe their originating capacity is sufficient that the odd local radio or regional TV story 'sourced' from the previous day's papers can be forgiven.

Perhaps in this multi-platform world, it is not surprising that traditional news outlets are also beginning to collaborate with each other, for their mutual benefit.   Channel 4 News has worked closely with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on several stories and ITN and the BBC have both partnered Guardian Films.   Competition is a healthy aspect of the profession, both in broadcast and print, but as traditional outlets face new challenges, co-operation might need to be more readily embraced.      

The apparent surprise in some quarters that the BBC occasionally uses private investigators (as revealed last week at the Leveson Inquiry) is perhaps indicative of a perception of the level at which broadcast journalism operates.   There seems to be a tacit assumption that it is not the role of the broadcast journalist to dig as deeply as their counterparts in the press.   Yet while broadcast outlets must fulfil their primary obligation to bring the news that matters to the masses, they should never lose sight of the scoop.   

So as well as telling a good story, broadcasters should always be trying to find one, too.

And the headlines - television news still matters

The permanent hum of new media soothsayers predicting the imminent demise of traditional sources of news has reached almost deafening levels.   And at the end of a week when one of the oldest provincial papers closed its daily operations and more than a million people were found to have drifted away from Sunday newspapers, the doom-laden prophesying of the past decade seems ever closer to becoming a reality.

Yet it's not all bad news for the news.   A long-term academic study by Westminster University has just given television news a clean bill of health.   Analysis of bulletins across the terrestrial network found no evidence that news on the main channels is dumbing down and, in contrast to the last time the study was carried out in 1999, the researchers' confidence both in the future worth and relevance of television news was positively unbridled.   Their prediction that appointment-to-view television bulletins will remain broadly unaffected by on-going technological change is a bold, but welcome one.   That television news has already weathered a digital revolution does seem to bode well for this particular branch of journalism, even while the rest of the profession appears to be in a state of constant flux.

Although the reach of television news is not what it once was (the combined BBC and ITV audience for their 10pm news programmes today is less than that enjoyed just by the ITV/ITN bulletin thirty years ago), recent polling by OFCOM has reaffirmed the value placed on it by the viewing public.   Three quarters of people rank television as their primary source of news and an even higher figure regard it as the most trusted source.   Incredibly - given the carefully-cultivated narrative of the direction in which news consumption is heading - the internet fails to make it beyond single percentage figures on either measurement.    Meanwhile, we are still watching more than twenty minutes of television news per day on average and the regular combined audience for all terrestrial bulletins exceeds ten million.

So what do the millions of us who are still tuning in actually get?   Fears about trivialisation have proved largely to be unfounded, with all the terrestrial channels except Channel 5 following an overtly broadsheet agenda.   The unfortunate (but persistent) lie that the ITV bulletins have dumbed down in recent years should be nailed by the fact that their tabloid content has remained static, at about a third, for over a decade.    The slight shift in their editorial stance - often overblown by ill-informed commentators - came not after the abandonment of the original News At Ten in 1999, but in the years prior to that, as costs were cut to the bone when the network merged into two controlling conglomerates.   Remarkably, ITN is today producing content not dissimilar in terms of scope to that which made the organisation renowned, but for little more than half the £80 million budget they were afforded in 1990.   

Editorial shifts and the vagaries of the news agenda have, in fact, resulted in tabloid levels fluctuating across all providers.   At times, the BBC's tabloid content has hovered around a third, but has now settled at a fifth.   It is also worth pointing out that 'tabloid', in the definition adopted by the study, includes crime and consumer stories, many of which are inherently worthy of reporting and appear on bulletins across all channels.

The healthy ecosystem of television news in the UK is due in no small part to the breadth of coverage on offer - something which stems from having competing and slightly contrasting providers.   The BBC's ten o'clock bulletin, for instance, features the highest proportion of foreign news of any programme, whilst Channel 4 is the place to go for detailed coverage of social policy.   Interestingly, political coverage has also generally increased in the past decade, in spite of the perceived wisdom that politics, for many, is a turn off.

Against all the technological and societal odds stacked against it, television news has proved itself to be a resilient beast.   It is comforting to know that, even in the digital age, when we want to know what's happening, many of us simply still turn on the TV - and find news that is worth watching.

 

"Keep the red flag flying, Auntie"

So Ed Miliband is concerned that the BBC isn't giving Labour the coverage it merits in its news programmes.   William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith doubtless felt similarly ignored as Tory leaders in the late 1990s and early 2000s.   

Does any of it equate to bias?   Hardly - just a simple, if harsh, political reality.    Leader of The Opposition is a tough gig when your party has been kicked out after more than a decade in power.   It is even tougher when the replacement government is a once-in-a-generation (so far) coalition, making decisions which are having such a direct impact on everyday life.   Competition for minutage in news bulletins is fierce.

Broadcast media will always gravitate towards the doers, rather than the would-doers.   That's hardly news.   And neither - sadly for Ed - is every policy announcement that comes out of Labour HQ on a wet Wednesday afternoon.   However, does the Opposition really have it all that bad when it comes to broadcast coverage?   Just this weekend, Miliband's declaration that Labour has a "very clear plan" duly appeared on bulletins on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.   In fact, all of the mainstream political parties know full well that making any kind of statement on a Saturday or Sunday virtually guarantees a packaged or live slot on the weekend television news.

The welcome impartiality of broadcast news in the UK means that even when Government policy is being reported, comment is usually afforded to the Opposition.   Then there are the set-piece party conferences, which command high profile coverage on television and radio for much of September, and the carefully-calculated quotas which apply to broadcast news to ensure absolute fairness of exposure in the run up to a General Election.   With specialist, well-staffed, political reporting teams across the BBC and commercial networks, the average citizen wants for little in terms of political broadcast coverage.  And neither - in truth - do the political parties themselves.

All of which makes it somewhat curious that Labour should turn its ire on the BBC, in particular.   With the breadth and depth of its political coverage (both within mainstream news bulletins and specialist programming), Labour must surely get more exposure via the Corporation than any other broadcaster.   Moreover, the party's recent themes of "too far, too fast" and "the squeezed middle" do seem to have found sufficient exposure somewhere to become part of current political discourse. 

Perhaps Labour's complaint against the BBC is born out of frustration at the coverage the party is receiving in the print press.   Whatever the reason, it gives the distinct impression that senior Labour figures believe the BBC is duty bound to follow, slavishly, every esoteric twist of its years out of power.   It isn't.   The path to greater exposure for any Opposition lies in having more to say that is deemed - by an impartial, public service broadcaster - to be newsworthy.   To that end, Labour knows exactly what it has to do.

To borrow (and conflate) a phrase from Private Eye - that's just how politics and journalism work.

Judgement call

Coverage of the verdict in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial this week resulted in some broadcast news reports that might have had the most cautious of media lawyers heading for the hills.   The possible involvement of other individuals whom the police have long referred to as "prime suspects" in the killing, prompted an understandable question - where might the case go from here?   

Cue one report about previous stabbings "connected" to the gang - none of which were brought to court and one of which involved the death of an Asian man - and a live debate in which claims went unchallenged about the influence that the father of one of the convicted men might have had in scuppering the original police investigation into the entire gang.   Outrageous?   Not really - and for several reasons.

First, although the police have been at pains to stress that their investigation is very much on-going, there is not, at this stage, an active criminal case (in the legal sense of the term - no arrest, no charges) against any of the individuals identified as "prime suspects".   In that respect, the case is quite unusual - police would normally restrict descriptions of "prime suspects" either to individuals that were at large and in need of tracing or those against whom criminal proceedings were in the process of being brought.   Neither applies in this instance.

So does that mean that the more responsible news organisations, like the broadcast media, should restrict their reporting on the basis that a trial against these individuals is possible (maybe not even likely) in the future?  The law does not explicitly require such caution and, in a case like this one, there would surely be little point.    The suspects, if they do ever become defendants, will have to overcome a whole archive of adverse publicity in the public consciousness.   They, like the now convicted David Norris and Gary Dobson, will have to rely on the capacity of jurors to follow the judge's directions to reach a verdict only on the evidence presented in court.  Such directions should not give the media carte blanche to recklessly publish prejudicial information (particularly after arrest or charge), but they are increasingly the only method of ensuring fairness in the most high profile of cases.

Broadcast media have earned a reputation (albeit not totally unblemished) for responsible reporting of criminal cases, particularly when contrasted to the breath-taking disregard of some sections of the tabloid press.   Just twelve months ago, several newspapers were in the process of conducting the character assassination of Chris Jeffries, the landlord wrongly accused of murdering his tenant Joanna Yates.   Fortunately, he did not end up in the dock and he later successfully sued for libel.

Broadcasters do have a fine tradition of constructing and, let's not forget, deconstructing criminal cases against individuals - it was the stock-in-trade of programmes like World In Action and Rough Justice for many years.   Whilst broadcast news organisations should strive to remain within the letter and the spirit of the law regarding prejudice, it would be an unfortunate side-effect if that led to sterile reporting.   The coverage of the continuing Stephen Lawrence investigation is an example of the broadcast media perhaps pushing the boundaries a little more than it usually would.   The fact that this is done rarely and selectively should enhance, rather than diminish, its standing as a trusted source.   Responsible and meaningful should not be incompatible aspirations.