Television News

The BBC Doubles Down

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The Guardian reports that the BBC is shrugging off the unprecedented levels of criticism of their Diamond Jubilee television coverage with the practiced ease and disinterest of the vast, bloated behemoth of an organisation that it is – one that doesn’t have to generate its £4.2bn annual budget by turning a profit, nor justify the way in which that money is spent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/06/queens-diamond-jubilee-bbc

In fact, as the chorus of complaints grows louder, it emerges that the BBC executive in charge of the jubilee coverage has actually gone on holiday, and will not be available to answer any of the criticism:

The senior BBC executive responsible for the corporation’s diamond jubilee coverage has been unable to defend the output amid mounting criticism, because he is now on holiday.

BBC Vision director George Entwistle, a leading internal candidate to replace Mark Thompson as director general, went on holiday on Tuesday evening and could not appear on Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday to defend the corporation, which has faced criticism from vnewspapers, celebrities and even former executives about its four days of diamond jubilee coverage.

By Wednesday afternoon the BBC had also received 2,425 complaints from viewers and listeners about its diamond jubilee coverage, with the vast majority – 1,830 – about Sunday’s Thames pageant. The BBC said it had also received “lots of positive feedback”.

Though the majority of the complaints centred around the lightweight presenters and their lack of a decent command of their subject matter, the BBC chose to duck this line of criticism altogether, focusing instead on defending itself against a number of other decoy straw man arguments:

A senior BBC source said that this was the biggest outside broadcast of a flotilla ever undertaken, with 80 cameras attempting to film 1,000 boats.

“You cannot rehearse something of this scale and you certainly cannot have a running order or predict monstrous weather,” the insider said.

The source said that senior staff involved in the coverage were too tired to appear on the Today programme: “They had worked flat out and we were unable to put up somebody who knew exactly what they were speaking about.”

Fine, but the cloudy weather, scale of the event and the technical hitches had nothing to do with the fact that you assembled a cast of C-list presenters who between them had less gravitas and knowledge of the unfolding events than the jubilee-themed sick bag that one of them, in her wisdom, decided to promote.

Here’s some news, BBC – just because you caught the attention of 15 million largely captive viewers in the UK doesn’t mean that your coverage was any good. It wasn’t. It was really, really, uncharacteristically bad.

And as an organisation you really need to acknowledge it as such if you want to avoid a similar broadcasting catastrophe when the next big national event rolls around.

Live Television – How Not To Do It

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

There has been widespread public criticism – and not just from the usual suspects in the fusty, traditionalist right-wing media – about the quality of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee river flotilla, which aired on Sunday.

The Telegraph, twisting the knife, claims that the BBC’s reputation is “sunk” in the River Thames:

Like many viewers, I watched the BBC on Sunday with incredulity and mounting anger. It has become a truism that our national culture has been infantilised and made stupid. But if ever anything could be relied on to provide a temporary halt in that slide it would, surely, be the BBC’s coverage of the Diamond Jubilee. Much to the irritation of other channels, we turn to the national broadcaster at times of national togetherness. The BBC just gets it right.

Not any more. Sunday’s broadcast was not merely inane, it was insulting. The instruction had clearly gone out from on high that the audience would comprise imbeciles with a mental age of three and a 20-second attention span. And that any celebrity sighting, no matter how minor, would trump anything happening on the river.

So the flotilla – an event so awe-inspiring that it drew well over a million people, on a cold wet day, to stand 10-deep on the banks of the Thames to try to catch a sight – was treated merely as background for the witterings of the BBC’s most lightweight presenters and the D-list celebrities they had lined up to lurk anywhere but on the river.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9311490/The-BBCs-reputation-is-sunk-in-the-Thames.html

The Daily Mail sneers about the tasteless product placement during the broadcast:

The item that came in for most criticism featured Miss Cotton discussing a jubilee sick-bag with singer Paloma Faith.

After being asked by Miss Cotton whether she had had ‘a lovely jubilee weekend’, the singer seized the opportunity to plug her new album.

The pair then went on to discuss a number of bizarre items of jubilee memorabilia, including jelly moulds shaped like the Queen’s face; a high-visibility vest bearing the words ‘High Viz, Diamond Liz’; and, finally, a sick-bag bearing an image of the Queen.

Holding the bag, Miss Faith explained: ‘Then, if you’ve eaten too much, you can just vomit into a jubilee sick-bag.’

Miss Cotton replied: ‘Lovely, isn’t that just lovely? And you can choose your colour, red or blue, it’s up to you.’

The presenter, 30, last night congratulated herself and colleagues on ‘seven hours of spotless TV’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154222/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-2012-BBC-sank-tide-wittering-inanity.html

Having personally sat through most of the Sunday coverage myself, I can only agree with these assessments.

Traditionally, Sky News has been (to my mind) the channel you turn to when there is breaking news and you want to see immediate, if somewhat shaky footage, shot from a helicopter and narrated by the reporter who is first on the scene, but is perhaps not fully briefed on the background of the story they are covering, while the BBC is the channel that you give an extra half hour for their reporter to turn up at the scene, but who then delivers a more nuanced and knowledgeable report when in situ.

This Jubilee weekend the situation was reversed, and I found myself giving up on the BBC’s lamentable, dumbed-down coverage in disgust, and switching over to Sky News so that I might actually learn something about what was taking place on the river, rather than have my intelligence insulted any further by the BBC’s callow, youthful and unknowledgeable presenters.

I suppose that my serious point would be that any large commercial broadcaster (Sky, ITV) can televise a large outdoor event and make it cheerful and perky. However, the BBC’s long history and deep institutional experience of broadcasting important national events – not to mention the fact that they are publicly funded by the television license fee – means that they are rightly held to a higher standard on such occasions. Certainly, in my view, the BBC should not merely replicate what is already readily available in the commercial media. But more importantly, like it or not, the BBC’s coverage of such events becomes the “coverage of record”. This is the footage that we will want to watch again when we ourselves are old, and the footage that future historians will study a century from now.

The BBC’s lamentable, frankly amateurish televised coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations has given those future historians an unintentionally revealing insight into what our pop culture, media and attention spans are apparently like in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But they will be sorely disappointed if they watch it with a view to learning anything at all about the British nation, British history or the monarchy – supposedly the reason for the broadcast in the first place.

On Closed Information Loops

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Apparently we are all busy fleeing from, unsubscribing from or de-friending people who espouse differing political opinions on the social media sites that we frequent. Or so says Howard Kurtz, writing in The Daily Beast in an article entitled “Unfriending Over Politics”:

“According to a fascinating survey by the Pew Internet Project, 9 percent of those who frequent social networking sites have blocked, unfriended or hidden someone because they posed something about politics or issues that the user disagreed with or found offensive.”

I find this interesting because it doesn’t chime with my personal experience at all. While I will never know how many people have spat out their morning coffee and hurriedly de-friended me after reading one of my rants on Facebook, I do know that I have never even thought of doing this to anyone else. Well, with one disclaimer – I once defriended someone after she posted a comment in which she eagerly anticipated the death of Margaret Thatcher, a callous thing to say but really only the straw that broke the camels back in terms of that particular connection.

facebookdislike
Computer, cross-reference my friend list with the electoral register…

 

Perhaps I am the exception to the rule, but I rather like hearing contrary opinions expressed on Twitter and Facebook. I like dissenting and hearing other people disagree with me. Sometimes it makes me change my mind, and other times it makes my own arguments stronger. Life would be so dull if we lived in a world where everything that you posted was automatically “liked” by everyone else, with no dissent or discussion. But apparently this is the world that a lot of people are slowly moving towards.

Of course, we have observed this phenomenon for some time in terms of the traditional media, the newspapers and television news. With ever more options at our disposal it has never been more easy to gather one’s news from friendly sources and voices with whom one shares the same biases, prejudices and political leanings. I am guilty of this to some extent myself. As the US Republican Party has drifted ever further to the reactionary right over the course of the Obama presidency, I have found my television news habits shifting from a blend of CNN, Fox and MSNBC to the significant exclusion of Fox News and a slight decline in MSNBC viewing, compensated for by a large reluctant increase in CNN. And in terms of UK politics, when The Times Online went behind a paywall, my first instinct was to gravitate to The Daily Telegraph as a natural substitute, over The Guardian or The Independent.

However, I try to always remain very aware of the political biases of the news sources that I consume, and to compensate for them by reading or watching alternative outlets too. This is really important if we are to avoid buying in to the two-dimensional caricatures of our political adversaries that the television talking heads often perpetrate. Most Republicans are not racist, backward people harbouring a cultural resentment against President Obama and interested only in their own economic wellbeing, and most Democrats are not union-beholden thugs committed to subverting America and establishing a socialist economic model in the United States.

But at times you could be forgiven for holding one of these opinions, given the poisonous rhetoric and lack of balance that exists almost everywhere now. Take CNN for example, the only major cable news network that makes an honest effort to tow a middle-line and avoid political bias in its coverage – they are consistently beaten in the ratings by FOX and MSNBC, each of whom have carved out a lucrative niche catering to and reinforcing the preexisting leanings of their viewers.

Should we go back to the old days, when the trusty voice of Walter Cronkite or the generic BBC News announcer was the sole source of information and the undisputed truth? Surely not – though it is hard to see that movements like the “birtherism” movement in the US, questioning President Obama’s citizenship, would have prospered were it not for a television news network ready and willing give such radical voices succour and airtime.

Surely we would all do well to take time to watch and read the news from alternative perspectives sometimes – and not just to laugh at the crazy stupid liberals/conservatives, but really to watch and see the world from another perspective. We don’t have to change our minds, but we can change our tone and improve the level of public discourse in our respective countries.