The current affairs conundrum

If you had your fill of shiny floor shows and sensationalist soaps over Christmas, you might just be in the mood to settle down to some serious current affairs (humour me, I realise I am in a minority).  Yet as you scan the TV listings for the well-known strands the genre has to offer, you may discover that they are a little more difficult to find than they once were.

Fortunately, these big beasts are all still roaming the television jungle.   However, schedulers no longer rely on the heft of the brand to pull in viewers to their current affairs output - rather, they let the subject matter do the talking.   To that end, established names like Dispatches, Panorama and Tonight are relegated to sub-titles and are usually absent altogether from on-screen guides - whilst what once would have been an episode title instead takes the lead in the listings.   Only relative newcomer Exposure now dares to maintain its own moniker upfront.

The rationale for this development is obvious.   At a stroke, it eliminates the 'turn-off' factor amongst those who would automatically bypass anything with the whiff of a genre which they assume is not for them.   It is a clever bit of positioning which seemingly works.   A boxset-addicted friend recently revealed, to my surprise, that she had watched an episode of Dispatches.   Of course, she failed to identify it as Dispatches and simply asked if I had seen "that programme about Aldi last night?"   Does she know anything about the series or its heritage?   No.   Would she have watched had the programme simply been billed as Dispatches, even with an accompanying blurb about the content?   Almost certainly not.

My own anecdotal evidence was borne out across the country on that particular occasion, as Aldi's Supermarket Secrets became the highest-rated edition of Dispatches in six years, drawing in more than three million viewers, compared to a series average of 1.3 million.   However, eschewing the strand only gets the programme-makers so far - the substituted title must still captivate in an instant if it is to generate a healthy audience.   

There is no doubt that this device has quickly developed some notable traits.   As in the Aldi edition of Dispatches, there seems to be a preponderance of programmes whose title claims the revelation of "secrets" - something which the best current affairs does by definition, but has never trumpeted so loudly before.   Then there is the (very) direct question - "Are You Addicted to Sugar?" (Dispatches), "How Safe is Meat?" (Tonight) and the forthcoming Panorama, "Can You Cure My Multiple Sclerosis?" - designed to pique our natural self-interest and leave the potential viewer almost obliged to watch.   Finally, if all else fails, throw in the word "Britain" - the subliminal message being:  this issue concerns the whole country, so it must concern me.

So what does this trend tell us about the current state of current affairs?   The template for titles risks setting a tabloid tone, but, mercifully, the journalism remains largely as rigorous as ever.   The topics under discussion can be populist, but there is no shame in being rooted in relevance.   World in Action, the ITV stalwart which should be the inspiration for any current affairs programme, produced groundbreaking investigations about extremism and righted miscarriages of justice - but wasn't afraid to consider more mundane matters like the potential for manipulating the top 40.      

The danger is that the pursuit of ratings and relevance becomes a pre-requisite in a genre which is not always guaranteed to deliver either.   In that scenario, the potential for squeezing out the exceptional public interest journalism which has always punctuated current affairs strands is obvious.   For the most part, such pressure is being resisted - precisely because, for those involved in producing the programmes, it is usually a force exerted from above and not a temptation in itself.

Documentary producer Roger Graef makes the point that he and his counterparts across the industry want their efforts to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.   However, he rightly cautions against an obsessive focus on potential ratings at the commissioning stage, for fear that this creates a stultifying atmosphere which works against generating the kind of popular success that both broadcasters and producers are seeking.

Current affairs, in particular, walks a tightrope between mass-appeal and meaningful journalism.   In the analogue world of the 1980s, ITV licencees were often as interested in the prestige of a programme as its popularity.   Back then, they could afford to be.   London Weekend Television tacitly acknowledged an inversely proportional relationship between the two measures (1).   Today, even the BBC is not immune from considerations of cost and audience share.   It is heartening, therefore, that in multi-platform 2016, 'brave' commissioning decisions are still being taken.

Dispatches editor Daniel Pearl draws a distinction between "programmes where you want a lot of people to watch and programmes where it's not about audience."   It is a mark of the strength of the TV current affairs ethos that such a line has survived the twin pressures of dwindling budgets and a rush for ratings - and remains intact across all outlets.   Accordingly, Dispatches still manages to produce exemplary foreign affairs pieces from warzones, Panorama affords a chunk of primetime to consider the routinely neglected Northern Ireland and Tonight tackles the little-known subject of contaminated cabin air.   Perhaps most extraordinarily of all, Exposure crafts a commercial hour for ITV on the British firms who offer bribes for business abroad - direct relevance to the average viewer may have been close to zero, but it matters that programmes like this are made.

Not everything about television current affairs is perfect - since this blog last assessed the genre in 2012, Panorama has had its investigative wings clipped, almost all the strands have a markedly smaller annual slate and not every edition of every series always hits the mark.   Its stoicism and its scope, however, are worth celebrating and promoting.

Ultimately, chasing ratings in current affairs may be as futile as it is frustrating. The sector's share of viewing has remained static at around 4% for the past decade.   And while there are individual ratings hits, these rarely come from the tougher end of the spectrum - and, in truth, never did. Yet even in the digital age, that fact has not precluded any of our terrestrial broadcasters from exploring challenging and unexpected topics - a victory in itself.   Because if the message ever goes out that certain subjects are off limits to the journalistic force that is current affairs television, then, as citizens, we are all the poorer for it - whether, as viewers, we notice or not.

(1) "LWT in the 1980s," Rod Allen, in ITV Cultures, Catherine Johnson & Rob Turnock (eds), Open University Press, 2005.

Should we compel TV to produce compelling journalism?

There was a time not so long ago in broadcasting history when the commercial channels were so heavily regulated that it must have seemed to them as though their schedules weren't their own.   Quotas existed for all kinds of public service programming, coupled with what now seems a scarcely believable requirement for much of it to be given a nod of approval by the regulator even before it was aired.

Those were the days (insert a full stop here depending on your viewpoint) of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the organisation which oversaw commercial television and radio until 1990.  Yet, ironically, they were also the days when television was probably least in need of such onerous regulation.   Once independent television was truly established by the late 1960s, a culture developed which dictated that success should be based on prestige as well as ratings - it was a notion that held true until the multi-channel, converging media world of the mid-1990s.   Of course, this was an easy principle by which to stand when the resources were plentiful, the competition minimal and the income virtually guaranteed. 

Just a couple of decades later and things have necessarily changed beyond recognition.   The quotas remain, but they are largely limited to news output and are much more readily re-negotiated than in the past.   Yet even in this climate, another integral aspect of public service programming, current affairs, survives - and often thrives - with three distinctive strands across BBC1 (Panorama), ITV1 (Tonight) and Channel 4 (Dispatches).   However, within the genre, there is a sub-category whose existence is less assured - investigative journalism.

The House of Lords recently debated a report highlighting the challenges of maintaining worthwhile investigative reporting across all platforms, including television.  And it seems that members of the Communications Committee flirted with the idea of recommending a quota similar to that imposed for current affairs in general.    One of the difficulties of such a policy would be to define exactly what constitutes investigative journalism.  Any given edition of the staple current affairs shows mentioned above might count as an investigation - but that does not necessarily make them investigative.   Investigations can be exploratory, illuminating and a forum for debate, but to be classed as investigative requires something unique.

Investigative journalism is the revelation of hitherto unreported facts, the discovery and reporting of what is truly new, rather than just a more detailed take on some aspect of the news agenda.   It not only informs debate, it shapes it by the strength of its findings.   We are fortunate that all of the major current affairs strands undertake investigative projects on quite a regular basis.   Given the reach and potential impact of television compared to individual newspapers (which have always been more prolific in investigative terms), it is vital that they continue to do so.    However, it still feels like there is much less of this type of programming than there once was.

The unceremonious and myopic way in which World In Action was jettisoned by the then management at Granada Television in 1998 changed the landscape for broadcast current affairs.   The programme - which had mounted huge investigations into the IRA, paved the way for the acquittal of the Birmingham Six, brought about the jailing of a serving member of the Cabinet and often found itself defending its output in court - left a gaping void.   The fact that, on one occasion, the joint Managing Directors at Granada were themselves prepared to go to prison in defence of the programme's journalistic integrity (1), is a mark of the pervading investigative culture of the time.   Although often mis-remembered as having produced ground-breaking investigations every week (the programme recognised that, for many of its viewers, it was the mundane that mattered), World In Action's demise was a pivotal moment.

With the disappearance of Thames Television's This Week earlier in the decade, it seemed as though investigative broadcast journalism was going to be the preserve of the BBC.   Yet even the corporation's flagship Panorama was, for a time in the early 2000s, buried late on a Sunday night before eventually re-emerging in peak, but with a reduced running time. 

In spite of the perceived threat to investigative television journalism during that era of flux, the situation today is far better than might have been expected.   ITV's Tonight, often derided because of the status of its illustrious predecessor and an initial preponderance of celebrity interviews, is a different programme for a different era (and, no doubt, a very different budget), but today it still provides an outlet for mainstream investigative work which chimes with a wide audience.    In Panorama, the BBC does exactly what is expected of it by maintaining an investigative strand which continues to live up to the gravitas earned over several generations.   Meanwhile, it is Dispatches that can probably best lay claim to being the rightful heir to World In Action, with a diverse slate of programmes running the gamut of topics and often investigative in the truest sense of the term.  Just last month, when the television gods conspired for Dispatches and Panorama to produce editions on identical subjects in the same week, it was Dispatches which adopted the more investigative stance, in this case infiltrating a training course for the assessors of incapacity benefit claimants.

Even those of us with few qualms about imposing quotas to ensure the most important programme genres remain on screen might just balk at the notion of attempting to stipulate the content that goes into them.   Just like compulsory voting, it might achieve a given target, but the quality of the outcome could be somewhat dubious.   Maybe we should instead be thankful that the golden age of investigative broadcast journalism has inspired - and maybe even required - a new generation to sustain it and maintain television's tradition of unearthing a good story.  

(1) The Dream That Died, Raymond Fitzwalter, Matador Publishing (2008)

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.