Voyeurism populi

I know practically nothing about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, something I have in common with the rest of Britain, in spite of and also because of the sick-makingly voyeuristic media coverage this case has attracted.

Like the rest of Britain I plead guilty to having followed this case with a horrified, saddened and sometimes prurient fascination. I have moved between judging the parents, and anger at those who judge them without knowing the full facts. And I have watched with helpless indignation the obscene and unthinking xenophobia which engulfs Brits, exemplified by the press at all levels, when something Bad happens Abroad.

And then, just as I have despaired of any sense of common decency emerging from this tragedy, at last (some of) the public rebels against the hysterical slaverings of the media:

Listeners outraged by a BBC Radio Five Live debate on Madeleine McCann forced the station to change a phone-vote on her disappearance. Victoria Derbyshire's morning phone-in today asked listeners to vote on whether they still had sympathy for Madeleine's parents Gerry and Kate after they were officially made suspects in the case by Portuguese police on Friday.

Dozens of listeners contacted the programme to say they did not think it was a suitable subject for debate while the legal process was still ongoing. ... The weight of the negative reaction was such that producers were forced to change the vote to whether the station should be discussing the case at all - and listeners voted by 68% to 32% that it should not be.

It’s coming to something when the BBC - the BBC - has to ask its own listeners if it should exercise any editorial restraint when speculating live on air about an ongoing criminal investigation about which its journalists and listeners will know next to nothing beyond recycled tittle-tattle and their own prejudices.

'Nuff respect. Not

Ron Brown - who served the people of Leith as their MP for 13 years, until 1992 - died last week of liver disease, aged 69.

BBC Online chose to headline his death, Former MP 'Red' Ron Brown dies. Quite why they felt it necessary to repeat his nickname so prominently even beyond death is a little beyond me. To me, its refusal of dignity shows a casual lack of respect.

Even the most anti-BBC right-wing bloggers might accept that Auntie would be pretty unlikely to come up with equivalent obituary headlines for the Tory dear-departed come the time: ‘Former MP Norman ‘Polecat’ Tebbit dies’ or ‘Former PM Thatcher ‘The Milk-Snatcher’ dies’.

And I suspect most people would find it just a little tasteless if Geoffrey Howe’s departure were to be memorialised as ‘‘Dead Sheep’ Howe dies’. (The same applies of course to David ‘Dr Death’ Owen.)

Everyone deserves a bit of respect in death.

Channel 4 - what a load of rubbish

This isn’t yet another post about fortnightly alternate weekly waste collections. Honest. However, I accidentally found myself tonight watching Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, ‘Bin Wars’, in which Oxford heavily featured.

Regardless of your views - whether you think 160+ councils have taken leave of their senses, or that increased recycling rates are well worth the extra effort - what struck me most (on today of all days) was the programme’s polemical style. I recall Dispatches being a programme which took an objective and balanced view of the issues it put under the microscope, dealing with them sensibly and soberly.

Not any more. This was shoddy, shoddy journalism - so bad it could almost have been on ITV.

C4 will doubtless defend the show’s balance on the grounds that both sides had their say. True, kind of. But what you in fact got was a handful of residents opposed to the scheme, counterpointed with a Council official (or councillor) putting their perspective.

The C4 agenda was clear: this was a programme about politicians versus the people.

And yet - as the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail, has discovered - knock on people’s doors in this city and the vast majority of residents are quite content with our 'recycling revolution'. But was their view represented by C4? No.

I’m very happy to go round my Headington ward with a Dispatches film crew and talk directly to my residents about the scheme, and let C4 hear it for themselves. But, then, as evidenced by Ofcom today, could I really trust C4 to edit the programme properly?

This once-proud not-for-profit's factual programming is rapidly becoming The Independent of television - fun to flick through, but would you really trust it to present the facts, rather than filter them?

Much more of this, and they’ll have me thinking the BBC poll tax licence fee is a good idea.

How long does it take to count some votes?

I’m just curious… Some 88 hours have passed since the polls closed for the local elections, yet the BBC graphic still says there are two councils yet to declare their results.

Assuming it’s not simply because Auntie can’t be arsed to update, can I ask which two councils have decided to leave their candidates on tenterhooks over an entire Bank Holiday week-end?

Why, dude?

Look, I’ve stated many times that I’m no fan of the BBC licence fee. But I still have huge respect for Auntie’s programming output. Yet, in the name of all that’s good and true, can anyone provide me with a justification for this, as reported in Media Guardian:

... fans of Neighbours have started an online petition in a bid to keep the soap on the BBC. Nearly 4,000 people have already signed the petition since it was set up on April 25. It calls on Fremantle to "accept the BBC's offer to continue showing Neighbours", with several signatories saying they will stop watching it if it moves to ITV or Five.

A free-to-view show moves from one channel to another channel and remains free-to-view. And the problem those 4,000 folks have is what, precisely…?

Because the pictures are funnier

The Guardian carries one of those rather tired ‘Whither radio comedy?’ articles today. Y’know, the kind of article which appear every couple of years, citing past gems from the archives, and finds today’s current crop wanting:

This Thursday Radio 4 is pointing out just how significant its role has been, giving over most of the night to Radio Ha Ha - a combination of features, archive programmes and studio chat with comedians, producers and agents.

The show debates how well the station has done so far and, more importantly, what it should do next. Curiously, there is a nervous element to the proceedings. For one thing, the comedy industry and critics alike have been complaining rather loudly recently.

"The problem is that Radio 4 hasn't developed a really huge zeitgeisty show since Little Britain," says radio critic Will Hogkinson.

Omitted from the article is any mention of That Mitchell and Webb Sound, as it might not have fitted the pre-ordained argument.

Incidentally, the BBC is running a poll to find out which Radio 4 comedy programme it should play at the conclusion of its Ha Ha special. My message is simple: vote for The Day Today On The Hour. You know it makes sense.

Old arguments revisited

I was intrigued by this graph in the Economist’s analysis of ‘The future of the BBC’:

"… the BBC is not equally loved by everyone. The rich and the old are keener on it than the poor and the young, who in effect subsidise the viewing and listening of more prosperous households."

There has been much holiday discussion about the need for the Lib Dems to regain our risk-taking cutting edge, to dare to be different.

I have to confess to some degree of amusement, though, that I can imagine our party more happily agreeing to scrap Trident than the BBC licence fee.

The Richards-Robinson spat revisited

Steve Richards’ accusation in Tuesday’s Indy that the BBC’s political coverage ‘is symptomatic of an anti-politics movement that serves no one’ has touched a nerve with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, who has penned a long rebuttal on his blog.

It’s a shame that Mr Richards chose to focus his argument on the BBC’s reporting of Tony Blair helping the police with their enquiries in the ‘cash for honours’ row. This has allowed Mr Robinson to brush aside his more substantive points, rehearsing the rather dull argument that “the police’s first ever interview of a serving prime minister was a major news story”.

Well, yes, of course it is. But, as President Bartlett would have said, “What’s next?” Mr Richards’ critique of the BBC seems apt and justified:

There was little attempt to explain, place the event in context or question what the police were up to. Instead the assumption was that the day had been simply another disaster for Blair.

(Though I might add that such a criticism should appear in, of all ‘quality’ newspapers, The Independent - which long since ditched the ideological aspiration of its title - is a pretty cute irony.)

In a lecture in Oxford last month, the head of BBC TV news, Peter Horrocks, noted how artificially binary used to be the corporation’s understanding of impartiality:

How did we interpret the BBC’s key value – impartiality? Well, on arrival we were soon taught how to handle that. In an era of neatly polarised Left/Right views - both domestically and internationally – it was easy to make sure that you delivered impartiality – simply by balancing interviews. A Tory minister balanced by a Labour spokesman. An industrialist with a union leader. An American foreign affairs expert with a CND activist.

And yet, all too often, this attitude persists in BBC coverage. It is exemplified by its late-night weekly discussion show, This Week, in which Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo battle it out, with tedious flirtatiousness, to prove who can be the most critical of their respective red ‘n’ blue leaderships. Occasionally a Lib Dem, or other (non-)party representative, is wheeled on to demonstrate how balanced the Beeb truly is (and, if they are female, to show-up quite how contemptuous Ms Abbott is of members of her own sex).

In spite of itself, the programme is sometimes interesting - though that has far more to do with the sceptical intelligence of the host, Andrew Neil, than of his so-last-year guests - but only when it attempts to understand the complexity, the subtlety, the nuance of today’s political issues. Programmes which follow the old adage - never under-estimate the public’s intelligence, nor over-estimate their knowledge - are the ones which work. They are all too rare.

But it is not just the BBC’s over-reliance on Crossfire-style debate, in which a rock and an immovable object are pitted against each other to slug it out in the name of neutrality, which compromises its integrity. (And if you’ve never seen it before, by the way - or even if you have - Jon Stewart’s brilliant demolition of CNN’s Crossfire is one of the most sparkily intelligent 15 minutes of television you will ever watch.)

Every time a journalist uses loaded words of any figure in public life - that they have ‘admitted’, ‘conceded’, ‘defended’, ‘denied’ whatever has been put to them - there is an implicit assumption that this figure has been tripped up, that they were being evasive, concealing, or even duplicitous until their double-dealing was exposed by the media. It is an unconscious journalistic tic, but one which feeds the ‘anti-politics’ agenda which Mr Richards has described.

I have concentrated here just on the BBC - which is perhaps unfair, as its reporting is far, far more objective than any of the newspapers (with the exception of the FT), which long ago gave up any serious pretence of reporting news, and have transformed themselves into identifiably partisan brands with news agendas to match.

But the BBC is held to a different standard, not least owing to its public funding, and indeed wishes itself to be held to a different standard. If it is honest with itself, and does not allow itself (pace Mr Robinson) to become over-defensive, it will recognize the justice of Mr Richards’ central thesis:

The BBC is not anti-Labour or pro-Tory, but unable to take a stand on policy issues, and, wanting to make waves, it has inadvertently become anti-politics. … I cite its thoughtlessly clichéd output last Thursday as symptomatic of the way as a country we have lapsed into a complacent view of politics, assuming the worst, unable or unwilling to understand the dilemmas politicians face.

I think Mr Robinson’s boss, Mr Horrocks, does recognize precisely this. He has set out what should be the BBC’s mission:

So, the days of middle-of-the-road, balancing left and right, impartiality are dead. Instead I believe we need to consider adopting what I like to think of as a much wider “radical impartiality” - the need to hear the widest range of views –all sides of the story. So we need more Taleban interviews, more BNP interviews - of course put on air with due consideration – and the full range of moderate opinions. All those views need to be treated with the same level of sceptical inquiry and respect. The days are over when the BBC treated left wing or pro-diversity views as “loony” or interviewed anti-Europe or anti-immigration spokesmen insufficiently often. We lost considerable credibility with some of our audience by excluding views that significant parts of the population adhere to. So please get used to hearing more views that you dislike on our airwaves. This wider range of opinion is a worthwhile price to pay to maintain a national forum where all can feel they are represented and respected.

I hope he achieves that national conversation, and that the BBC will once again become politically engaged. We need it.