Maligning the mainstream

"Make sure that doesn't auto-correct to a pack of lies."   So came the scornful pseudo-advice over my shoulder as I stood outside a court in Blackpool tweeting the outcome of a case in which three councillors were convicted of highway obstruction during an anti-fracking protest.

It was a message delivered by a man (not one of the councillors) who clearly wanted to direct it at what he would no doubt disdainfully describe as the "mainstream media".   Even as a lowly local television reporter, I was, as far as he was concerned, its embodiment.   Such was his opinion of the outlets covered by this catch-all term that even a blatantly inaccurate court report would not be beyond my odious modus operandi.

Seconds later, the dispenser of the dismissive missive paraded up and down the pavement, mobile in hand, recording his own piece to camera.   The verdict was duly - and, in fairness, correctly - reported and all in a loquacious and unscripted style, which would have been the envy of anybody in the business of live broadcasting.

Unsurprisingly, however, there was something which differentiated our anti-fracking friend from the mainstream masses he so despises.   For following the facts, came a cavalcade of comment - from justification of the protestors' actions, to what was in the judge's mind, to the predicted downfall of the fracking industry.   To the man behind the diatribe - and many of those who will have seen and shared his post on-line - this is what constitutes news.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when in recent years the phrase "mainstream media" began to be spat out with bile by those whose lips the words crossed - but 2017 certainly solidified its place in the pantheon of social media insults.   While the term itself doesn't discriminate between its intended targets - print or broadcast, partisan or not - there are clear and crucial distinctions between those who use it and why.

For most, it's a reaction to a sense of bias, either political or in the coverage of a contentious subject like fracking.   Yet for some, it's prompted by the sight of a very real injustice - as reflected in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, when both BBC and Sky reporters felt the force of a community's anger directed at a profession which they felt had failed them.    

The disaster rightly prompted some mainstream media soul-searching, most memorably in the form of Jon Snow's searing MacTaggart Lecture just a few months later.   Whether it was by dent of being actively ignored by a media elite or simply by concluding that it wasn't worth approaching such an out-of-touch collective in the first place, residents who raised prior concerns about safety were failed when they rightly expected respected outlets to raise their voices with them.

In analysing the use of 'MSM' as a weapon, a dearth of distinction between motivations is as unhelpful as the imprecise way in which the term itself is increasingly deployed.   Such oversights fuel the theory that all members of the mainstream are legitimate targets and that all targets are legitimate if they do not subscribe to a particular world view on any given issue.

Not only does that do a disservice to those whose grievance is undeniable, as in the case of Grenfell, but it fails to recognise the important difference between broadcast and print outlets and the rules governing each.   The requirement for due impartiality in broadcasting is something which many who decry the medium may not recognise, but is a far stronger buttress against bias than anything which their social media bubble has to offer.   

Even within the partisan print press, basic accuracy is a requirement - although it would be myopic to argue that proprietorial agendas don't have the potential to distort the facts and, in several cases, do.   Yet amidst anti-mainstream rage, every newspaper is lumped together for coagulated contempt - local and national, broadsheet and tabloid - and their reduction to "begging for donations" is celebrated.

It all points down a path where many cannot wait to delight in the demise of the mainstream media, even if they have never been directly wronged by it.   A post on my own Facebook 'news' feed earlier this year took just such a tone, even though it was written by someone who has ever dwindling engagement with the outlets which he now claims don't serve his suddenly discerning media tastes. 

It feels like those who dissent from this view are rapidly becoming a minority.   However, a survey at the end of the tumultuous 2017 suggested the public might have more of a capacity to differentiate between sources than has been apparent during the divisive twelve months gone by.   In the accuracy and impartiality stakes, individual newspaper titles ranked roughly in the order which might be expected - but broadcasters easily outflanked the press and social media, topping the lists measuring both of those qualities.

Ensuring such markers remain regarded as qualities at all - and ones associated with the mainstream to which broadcast belongs - requires a robust defence of the medium's record.   Broadcasters aren't infallible and I certainly sat through some programmes last year which weren't the finest examples of the news and current affairs genre.   

Yet the breadth and depth of stories tackled is testament to a profession fighting against a turning tide.   From hidden poverty amongst working parents to deficiencies in housing policy, standards in children's homes to NHS whistleblowing.   The resultant reports have relevance not only in their own right, but also by maintaining broadcasting's role as a much-needed watchdog.   How many mainstream naysayers are even aware of the existence of this kind of output?

As its detractors continue to denounce it, broadcast journalism needs to be braver still, answering criticism where it is merited by affording time to complex issues - both research time to unpick them and airtime to explain them.  

If the mainstream does what it does best, even its most ardent critics can potentially be won round.   There was a time when the single barb which came my way outside that Blackpool courtroom would have been just one of many.   But a concerted effort by a small team proud to be part of the mainstream has persuaded many anti-fracking protestors no longer to construe balance as bias - and instead to relish the opportunity to be challenged and so speak to an audience which doesn't already share their views. 

When the words "mainstream media" are typed into Google, the top results include "lies", "bias" and "is dying" - reflecting a narrative which is as flawed as any purportedly projected by the mainstream itself.   The challenge for those outlets which comprise the maligned mainstream is no longer just to make their content pay, but to disprove claims of malevolence by making it matter - because it still does.

The bongs verses the beats - or just old news?

When the print press turns its attention to the broadcast news industry, it is usually to report machinations that matter only to media insiders or to generate soap opera-style intrigue for the masses.  In both scenarios, the basis of the story is so often ITV's News at Ten.   Whether it be the original decision to axe the programme in the late 1990s, its various comebacks or a change to its many iconic newscasters, the programme has inspired more than its share of column inches.

Rarely has this been more evident than in the months since the channel revamped the format of what was the nation's first half-hour news bulletin. From the moment Tom Bradby was installed as the programme's new anchor, there has been an avalanche of articles focussing on the fluff -  his looks and royal acquaintances - and the facts - a serious attempt to overhaul a broadcasting institution.   Not to mention a spat over ratings with BBC counterpart Huw Edwards, which straddles both categories.   QED.

Bradby was brought in with the seemingly contradictory objective of making the programme less formal and yet also more upmarket.   However, October's overhaul was a soft launch (which fermented this week with a new on-air look) and so a degree of experimentation could be justified in the name of getting it right.   Since then, the strikingly conversational tone has been slightly subdued, but other editorial changes have bedded in - longer packages and a more analytical bent, in the form of extended conversations with correspondents.   Three months in, the strategy might now be best described as less formulaic rather than less formal, more interpretive rather than more intellectual (although the phrase "non-sequitur" made an unlikely appearance last week).

In spite of the breathtaking ignorance and arrogance which characterises much of what passes for informed media comment on this subject, ITN is simply building on what ITV News has always done best - bold, but accessible, thoughtful, yet meaningful television journalism. Unfortunately, the myopic actions of a malign ITV management regime nearly twenty years ago allowed a narrative to be woven which conflated a then downmarket trend in the channel with the quality of its independently-produced news output.   No such link existed, but the dye was cast and sadly stains to this day.

ITN weathered the 'News at When?' wilderness years and more enlightened channel bosses soon recognised what Trevor McDonald later described as the "shocking mistake" of sidelining news content and put it back at the heart of the schedule.   Yet, even today, broad-brush misconceptions persist, perhaps best crystalised by Polly Toynbee opining on Twitter that she would "hardly ever see" Robert Peston after his defection to ITV - as if her finger might dissolve should it even hover over the third button on her TV remote.   All too often, media commentators appear to have read the script, but not watched the output.  

Whilst it would be invidious to compare the relative merits of Bradby as a solo anchor to the established pairing of Mark Austin and Julie Etchingham, there is, in any case, much else about News at Ten's refresh which is worthy of comment.   ITV News seems to cultivate a culture of powerful and creative storytelling;  it is one one which has percolated through the ranks from one generation to the next, with a spine of long-serving correspondents at its core.   The likes of John Irvine and Geraint Vincent, amongst many others, turn the process into something akin to an art form.   So it makes sense to afford more time to the building block of TV news - the package - when it is such a well-practised craft.   

Similarly, the analytical weight offered by an expanded team of editors brings greater scope for context and allows for easier development of running themes.   Tracking a group of refugess across Europe was standout journalism of the type for which ITN (via ITV) is famed - at least by those who understand the history, rather than the histrionics, of broadcast news.   Dedicating the vast majority of one edition to disecting an interview with fomer Guantanamo detainee Shaker Aamer was something else - a statement of intent.

Yet as much as this revamp matters to ITV and ITN, it matters just as much to the wider broadcast news sector.   It's a stark fact that the audience figures over which Edwards and Bradby were quibbling late last year are down by around a combined seven million for the flagship BBC and ITV bulletins since the late 1990s, with ITV's audience barely a third of the level it once enjoyed.   Even allowing for the scheduling clash which has arisen since, that is evidence of a clear direction of travel, reflected in the decreasing share of total viewing accounted for by news.   So is appointment-to-view news just an ageing anachronism in an on-demand era?

Clearly, there are still millions who value the concept of a daily digest and many, like me, who would not want their news any other way.   Yet statistics unsurprisingly show a sharp decline in linear television news viewing within the youngest age groups.   Even amongst those for whom 'the news' has been a constant, the possibility of a drift to digital is a real one.

The evangelists say such a shift does not matter, that content is king.   Yet the ecosystem of broadcast news is delicate when transposed into a digital-only future.   OFCOM found that, whilst three in five people regularly use the BBC website or app, just one in twenty use that of ITV and, perplexingly, a meagre one in a hundred turn to the televisually-trusted Channel 4 News when operating in the on-line world (1).

That portends a significant future threat to a key component of a healthy broadcast news industry and one which this blog has regularly championed - plurality.   Should the sad day ever come when their primary on-screen product becomes unviable, it seems unlikely that commercially-funded operators will make the same level of investment in a digital offering with such potentially poor returns.

Competition between the main players in broadcast news has always been to the benefit of the viewer.   Coincidence of timing it may be, but the BBC has this month lengthened its own ten o'clock bulletin as a new front opens in the ratings battle.   And whether or not it is so manifestly overt as it has been in recent months, professional pride will always engender a desire to be the biggest, the fastest - or simply the best.    That makes for better content across the board and helps television defy the digital odds and remain the most popular platform for news consumption (2).

So whatever judgment is finally made about the latest News at Ten revamp, it will hopefully have achieved one thing for which even its competitors should be thankful - making a demanding and distracted audience think again about television news.

(1) OFCOM News Consumption in the UK 2014    
(2) OFCOM News Consumption in the UK 2015 

Competition and collectivity

Awards ceremonies.   Slightly awkward affairs where the great and good of a particular industry indulge in what is sometimes nauseating and occasionally insincere back-slapping.

Usually associated with creative professions and typified by the emetic acceptance speeches of actors lacking any semblance of self-awareness, these annual get-togethers have long since become an established part of many a career - some more worthy than others.   Teaching, healthcare, operational excellence in a health and beauty retailer (just trust me on that one).   Be it a vocation or merely an occupation, recognition and the desire for it is widespread.

It is no surprise that awards for journalism predate many of these more recent attempts to aggrandise the average or turn a calling into a red carpet career.   By its very nature, journalism is a competitive industry - the desire to expose and to be first in doing so runs deep.   That competitive edge, coupled with gallons of free-flowing booze, does not always make for the most edifying of spectacles, especially when rival print outlets are gathered in the same room.

I have no way of knowing whether broadcast journalists were any better behaved at the Royal Television Society's TV Journalism Awards last night, though I very much suspect they were.   If nothing else, any unseemly scenes involving TV's most-respected faces would be far more damaging than a bust-up between largely unknown hacks at a naval-gazing junket.    Yet this presumed good behaviour is probably also attributable to the fact that broadcast journalism largely fosters a very particular kind of competition.

It is a competition which, whilst as intense as that in any branch of the profession, appears more capable of genuinely recognising the achievements of others in the field.   Of course, all self-respecting broadcast journalists compete in the pursuit of plaudits for themselves and their employers.   In the process, however, they seem ready to acknowledge that it is the collective endeavours of the entire industry which serve to maintain and advance its reputation as a trusted and worthy source of news in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Not for a minute does this create some kind of "after you, Sir" collusion, with journalists collaborating for a greater good - witness the wariness over the proposal even to share technical facilities for regional news across the BBC and ITV.   Yet the common standards and regulations binding broadcast journalism stand in marked contrast to a print press riven with political and, as evidenced this week, commercial considerations.   

Print journalists would no doubt rightly posit that in the cossetted world of the licence fee on the one hand and OFCOM news quotas on the other, broadcast journalism can afford its big-picture perspective.   Whilst newspaper groups delight in and increasingly instigate the travails of their rivals, television and radio news is founded on a less grudging form of shared respect.   

Of course none of this means that the nation's broadcast newsrooms are fully paid-up members of a mutual appreciation society and nor should they be.   Neither does it mean that there is not some ill-founded snobbery about the relative merits of different outlets.   But does Dispatches really seek the downfall of Panorama?   Does BBC News long for the oft-forecast disappearance of its dogged ITV rival?   It would be beyond foolish if they did.

As last night's RTS attendees reflect on their personal achievements, the winners, the runners-up and the how-the-hell-wasn't-I-nominated can take heart from the strength of the competition - both for the awards themselves and for content on a daily basis.   Without it, there would be far less worth getting dressed up for.

The news conspiracy

"What is wrong with Channel 4 News?" demands the title of a blog on the website BS News.   It's a tough question to ask of an outlet that recently retained the RTS News Programme of the Year title and is usually regarded as a bastion of original, long-form journalism.

Seemingly, it's an equally tough question to answer - the author draws her conclusions over the course of three blog posts, spanning twelve months.   Or rather she adduces evidence which she sincerely believes supports the conclusion reached in the opening paragraphs of the very first blog - namely, that the mainstream media is incapable of disentangling itself from vested interests and/or official sources and producing truly independent journalism.

The power of the argument being advanced, which focuses on the quality of foreign news reportage, hinges on whether you accept the premise that all such pieces should be 360-degree polemics that relay every conceivable contradiction about the protagonists involved.   Apart from practical considerations like limited time and the finite knowledge of even the best journalists, would such an approach be as illuminating as the blogger suggests?   An increase in standalone, off-diary reports on foreign affairs might be a better remedy than trying to explore tangential global complexities in each and every package from the world's troublespots.

Yet it's doubtful that contributors to Bullshit News, to give it its full title, would be swayed by any proposed solution to the inadequacies they identify in the "mainstream media" (imagine that phrase spat out with contempt, because I have a feeling that's how it is written).   For them, like so many other corners of the internet, the mainstream is all that's malign.

The author of the Channel 4 News critique doesn't even grant these seasoned ITN journos the status of conspirators with the vested interests they should be challenging - instead, they are dismissed as being "conditioned" to the point where they cannot even recognise their own shortcomings in holding the powerful to account.   To suggest that the likes of Paul Mason (who has turned looking askance into an art form) and the rest of his profession are in thrall to some global elite seriously undermines the case.   It also seems curious to alight upon a broadcaster which has a strong investigative history (both at home and abroad) and which, only this week, broadcast a host of new angles from the Syrian conflict, at a time when it could easily be dismissed as a story in stalemate.

Yet BS News is far from a lone voice in the on-line wilderness.   Visit a media messageboard or enter a Twitter hashtag for any of our broadcast news or current affairs programmes and it's not long before a stream of critical armchair analysis unfolds.   The BBC, unsurprisingly, is berated for supposed bias at both ends of the political spectrum (as here and here), while the editors of various programmes are accused of allowing their reporters to misrepresent the facts of any given story.   Maybe when journalists find that they are annoying everybody, they are pretty close to doing their job properly.

In years long since past, the most a broadcast journalist had to worry about was an official complaint to the regulator or a critical review in the print press.   Nowadays, their work is subject to a cacophony of comment with which different reporters and editors will engage to varying degrees.   That can only be good for the sum of human knowledge and journalists should never be allowed to occupy some higher plain where they go unchallenged.   Moreover, the growth in fact-checking, both from within and independent of traditional media, has been a great leveller in holding journalists themselves to account.    

Sometimes viewers or listeners with particular knowledge will be able to add facts and perspective to a story, as was the case with this blog, which put a more nuanced spin on BBC coverage of an exodus of train carriages from the North to the South.   Still, the author couldn't resist having a pop at "headless chicken" journalists in the process.   

Whatever the on-line world makes of the mainstream, it's fanciful to suggest that broadcast journalism is populated with those who are too blind, too lazy or too conditioned to pursue the real stories.   Be it professional pride, egotism, or a combination of the two, the majority of broadcast journalists thrive on the age-old thrill of the scoop.

The profession is far from perfect;  time pressures and human fallibility mean there will always be examples of poor journalism or instances where the industry falls short of the high standards it sets itself and mistakes are made.   But acknowledging these weaknesses does not mean acquiescing to the view that broadcast journalists are living in a lemming-like stupor or engaged in a grand conspiracy.

The potential for an on-line commentariat to improve and complement (if never compliment) traditional media output is a journalistic fact of life in the digital age.   However, its insistent, insidious undermining of the mainstream just for being mainstream often drowns out anything worthwhile which it has to say.  

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.