Tuesday 17 April 2007
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The Media In An Age Of Moral Ambiguity
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One of the great pleasures of being Director-General of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is the many contacts I have with the public. In meetings, on the street, on the phone, but most frequently through email and letter. There can't be many people who get such a big post bag, or one so full of thoughtful, closely argued, coherent letters. But they’re not all like that.
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"Dear Sir, some years ago I wrote on behalf of my daughter to Mr Dick Van Dyke. He was kind enough to send some signed photographs of himself. Unfortunately, I have since lost his address and therefore cannot thank him. Can you help in any way?"
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Or how about this one: "Dear Director-General, are there no longer dress regulations at the ´óÏó´«Ã½? Like many others, I am appalled at the tieless habit that has suddenly invaded our screens. How scruffy the open-necked community appear!" As another correspondent was kind enough to note: "The middle-aged male neck is not a thing of beauty!" Well, I think that's rather a matter of opinion actually...
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One angry licence-payer wrote to me recently to complain about a storyline in that weighty drama, Bob The Builder, in which our small clay hero set about building an entire new town all by himself. To imply, the letter said, that Bob "is able to not only carry out building work but that he is capable of producing architectural, structural and services drawings for buildings and urban development plans when he does not have any training skills, or qualifications in this professions is a flagrant distortion of reality and should not be perpetuated".
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Children's programmes are a notoriously dangerous area. A few years ago when I was Controller of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two, I was lucky enough to commission another enduring masterpiece Teletubbies. It went on to be a big success for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ both here and around the world – oddly enough, we've recently done a deal to open a chain of gigantic Teletubby stores across the People's Republic of China. But when it was first launched, there was an aggressive press campaign which ran for weeks accusing the ´óÏó´«Ã½ of using the Teletubbies to dumb down the whole English language. Now, as you know, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is always looking for fiendish new ways of lowering standards. Nonetheless, you have to admit it takes a pretty sick organisation to dumb down a programme that was only aimed at two-year-olds in the first place.
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My title this evening is: The Media In An Age Of Moral Ambiguity– and the question I want to explore is to what extent we can reasonably look to broadcasting and other media to be a force for good in the world, promoting understanding and enlightenment, despite the widespread uncertainties that exist about values – even about the possibility of an objective view of the truth. Or, to put the opposite point of view, to what extent the critics of contemporary media are right in their characterisation of it as a force by and large for bad and for confusion, simplifying, misleading, a promoter of misunderstanding and sometimes even hatred.
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The ´óÏó´«Ã½ often finds itself in the midst of this argument. Our motto is the rather stately: "nation shall peace unto nation". If you had to choose one word to describe the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s ambition, it would probably be that word enlightenment.
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And yet there are plenty of people, certainly in the press and in my postbag, who believe that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is responsible for pretty much every crime under the sun – from encouraging poor diction to corrupting the nation's youth.
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Well, the modern media landscape is vast – the range of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s own output is prodigious, our website for instance has over six million pages – and everyone can find something, whether good or bad, to support their argument. So I'm not going to attempt a definitive survey tonight, or to try to prove to you definitively which way the wind is blowing. Almost everyone is an expert in modern media because almost everyone is an extensive user of it. You'll have your own views based on your own experiences and your own evidence.
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Our man in Gaza
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Instead I want to offer you a few conjectures based on my own experience and my own perspective. And I want to begin with my colleague Alan Johnston.
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As I guess most people here will know, Alan has been our correspondent in Gaza for the past three years. Five weeks and a day ago, he was abducted on his way home from our bureau there. This week, a previously little-known group claimed that they had killed him. There has been no independent verification of this claim and, as of this moment, we do not know whether it is true or not. Nor do we know for certain who is holding him. I believe that the Palestinian authorities and the British government are making strenuous efforts to resolve the situation and, if possible, to secure Alan's safe release. We're doing everything we can too. Yet you can imagine what an agonising period this is for Alan's family and friends.
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I want to spend a few minutes talking about what Alan was doing in Gaza. It's not an easy place to work and he certainly doesn't do it for the money.
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Violence and the threat of abduction have never been far away – though the duration and nature of Alan's own abduction is unprecedented and had not been foreseen. And, although we have a strong and supportive team on the ground, it's also a rather isolated posting.
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Alan stayed there so long, and stayed after so many other Western correspondents had left, because he wanted to tell the story of Gaza, and to tell it not from a studio in London or by voicing-over pictures taken by an agency or a freelancer thousands of miles away, but on the ground and among the people of Gaza. And he wanted to do that with what I think you could call rather classic ´óÏó´«Ã½ values – with humanity but also with objectivity and impartiality.
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In a way we live in an age in which news is two-a-penny. There are getting on for a dozen continuous television news channels in Arabic alone. And yet serious, dispassionate, impartial journalism is at a premium.
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And my first conjecture – or perhaps I should call it my first article of faith – is that this kind of reporting makes a difference. No one could argue that on its own outstanding journalism can make the world a better place, but it does feel like a necessary, if not sufficient, condition. This is an ambiguous world, with any number of debates both about values and about the status of objective truth. Like most working journalists though, I remain committed to what you could call a kind of critical realism – mindful of the complexities that lurk beneath the narratives and perspectives of our world, but with a strong belief in the possibility of a valid form of underlying objectivity.
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Throughout my own time in journalism, from the famines in Ethiopia in the 1980s to the modern killing fields of Darfur, accurate, revelatory journalism – in both cases, as it happens, from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ – has been the first step in mobilising global opinion and, at least in the case of Ethiopia, global action.
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In zones of conflict from the former Yugoslavia to central and south America to some parts of Africa, it's understood that independent journalistic institutions are a vital part of building, or rebuilding stable political structures and a broader civil society.
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The threats to independent journalism
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One set of people who need no convincing about the positive potential of free and serious journalism are those who are against the building of open and peaceful societies. To them, free media is a dangerous threat.
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That leads me to my second, I'm afraid rather depressing conjecture which is that, precisely because of its potential to increase understanding and to start new and fruitful conversations, in many parts of the world free media is under a growing threat.
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In the case of the ´óÏó´«Ã½, I think of Simon Cumbers, our cameraman murdered in Saudi Arabia in the same incident in which our security correspondent, Frank Gardner, was very badly injured. I think of our producer, Kate Peyton, shot and killed in Mogadishu, in a city where the only source of reliable news is the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Somali service.
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But of course it goes far beyond the ´óÏó´«Ã½. Last autumn, the groundbreaking Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in the stairway of her Moscow apartment. Her name joins a list which is longer and growing more quickly than at any time in recent memory – the international list of journalists murdered, injured, intimidated, prevented from doing their work. The picture around the world is uneven, of course – there are many regions where press freedom is growing, either through democratisation or the brute force of the internet – but some of the dark spots are growing darker.
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In global broadcasting, jamming – that throwback from the Cold War – is on the increase. In our case, for instance, the Iranian government decided last year to block our Persian website. The site is not in any way anti-Iranian or anti-Muslim. It is simply seeking to make impartial and truthful news about Iran and the rest of the world available to those Iranians who want to access it. That seems to be the problem.
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In Russia last autumn and around the time of the Litvinenko assassination and its diplomatic aftermath, some of the companies who rebroadcast our Russian radio service on FM – this is the way most people access the service in that country – some of these rebroadcasters overnight began to encounter mysterious technical problems. As a result, the Russian service simply came off the air.
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Now every case is different. As I said, there are some parts of the world, where press freedom and openness of expression are improving. But if you doubt whether accurate, impartial, independent journalism can make a difference, you should recognise that some of the forces opposed to it don't doubt it for a second.
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Bend it like Beckham?
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But of course, global media is about a lot more than journalism. Many of those who worry about the malign influence of modern media would accept the positive value of free access to news and debate. Their anxiety might focus rather around the pernicious effect of what they might see as shallow, materialist, consumerist values on cultures across the globe. They might also see modern media, and especially the web, as conveyors of dangerous ideas and repellent content – from Islamist extremism to the international trade in paedophile pornography. Are these fears groundless? Of course not. Let's take them one by one.
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There is something striking about the universality now of some aspects of Western media culture. In Tokyo, in Beijing, David Beckham is as big a celebrity as he is in the UK. When I was in China a couple of months ago, I went straight from a meeting of the publicity department to a central Chinese TV studio where they were broadcasting Supermodel Of The Year. Mao Zedong once proclaimed: "It's time to let a thousand flowers bloom." It's still hard to imagine what he would have made of Supermodel Of The Year.
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Years ago, I arrived at night at the front-line of Ethiopia's civil war. There was an encampment with largely teenage soldiers. No mains power, but a petrol generator. And the soldiers were sitting quietly in rows watching a VHS tape of Sylvester Stallone in the film Rambo, not in itself an obvious contribution to world peace.
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So I think yes, there is an extraordinary pervasiveness of Western entertainment – Western consumerism and marketing too – which probably began with Charlie Chaplin and the first Hollywood movies, but has now reached some kind of fever pitch.
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Even here, there's rather more going on than might first meet the eye. Modern eclecticism, combined in some countries with an increased interest in learning more about other cultures, and enabled in some cases by the falling cost of production and distribution, means that the world is being flooded by rather more than just Hollywood blockbusters and football celebrities. International cinema is flourishing, particularly films from South Asia and the Far East. Even in the United States, audiences are watching and enjoying more foreign-language movies than they used to.
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The theatrical documentary, almost unheard of in movie theatres in the UK or US in the decades after the Second World War has made a come-back, and from Supersize Me to Fahrenheit 911 to An Inconvenient Truth, it's often documentary with something significant to say to global audiences. Arguably, there's more variety and sometimes more serious intent in Hollywood's fictional products too – films like Crash, Brokeback Mountain and the two recent British successes The Queen and Notes On A Scandal are all unexpected and ambitious.
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Finally, the global market for large-scale, serious television is also robust. The most talked about TV programme in the United States in recent weeks has not been Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives, but our very own Planet Earth. Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire edition of her show to it, and you can't say fairer than that.
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Do global audiences want to be entertained? Yes, and around the world a lot of people are making a lot of money doing just that. But my third conjecture is that it's never been more clear that many of them don't just want to be entertained. Many of them want to learn – and many of them want to be challenged.
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Clearly the new platforms and means of distribution can enable criminals and extremists to organise and distribute destructive and evil content more quickly and less traceably than in the past. At the edges, that can support terrorism and other forms of violence as well as paedophilic pornography and other grotesque and utterly unacceptable forms of content.
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More generally, pressure groups – even tiny ones – can seem, perhaps actually more powerful, the tiny voice of the hidden Wizard Of Oz magnified many times by email and the internet. We had a relatively mild taste of it when some extreme, self-described Christian groups campaigned that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ should not show the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera. Even in this case, it meant more than 50,000 emails – though how many people were behind those emails is harder to say. It also meant serious threats to some of my colleagues.
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There is a new battleground in other words – at its most extreme, between national and international law-enforcement agencies and terrorists and criminals; more broadly, between pressure-groups and both them and other communities and institutions. But, while this is clearly troubling and potentially dangerous, I think it's wrong to assume that, not just security and control, but some sense of proportion and discrimination will prove impossible to achieve.
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Some content, some activity will of course remain utterly beyond the pale and will rightly always be put into the hands of the police and the courts. But, even though I was one of the targets of it and certainly believe that some aspects of it were unacceptable, I wouldn't want to condemn the Jerry Springer protest in its entirety. People have a right to campaign and to complain, and they have a right to be heard doing it. If the web and other new media devices help them to do that, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Many politicians call for a more active, engaged citizenry. Although the Jerry Springer experience may not have been a particularly comfortable example of it, I think was an example of exactly what they are talking about.
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The point is that the market-place for ideas and opinions is getting noisier and more diverse. The market-place is open 24-hours a day. The speed with which word travels from one end of the market-place is getting faster and faster. And it's a market in which almost everything is for sale.
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At the extremes, of course, we need the police and the computer scientists to limit the damage. But for most content most of the time, I believe what is most important is the demand side – to try to help media consumers form their own sensible judgements about the parameters of debate and acceptability; to help children, for example, learn not just about web safety but about how to find the best of the web. I also believe that safe havens of content, havens like the ones we try to provide on the web, on channels like CBeebies and C´óÏó´«Ã½ and more generally for families on TV and radio as well; that these kinds of safe havens will also become more important.
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Seriouser and seriouser?
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The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, suggested at the weekend that we may be seeing a change in the public mood, away from celebrity culture and towards a greater interest in the serious – serious issues, serious debates – who knows, serious politicians?
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His remarks sparked some lively political reactions and it's certainly not for me to enter that fray! My own rather lateral take about what's going on in this country, this media market would go something like this:
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First, as I've said, the appetite for serious subjects is there and stronger than I remember it ten years ago. The topics which concern people today – terrorism and conflict, especially since 9/11; climate change and sustainability; immigration, race and identity; and finally values and how we can agree on what makes for a good, peaceful society – these topics are more complex and less four-square than the ideological debates of much of the last century. Events like the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Climate Chaos season or the recent Iraq Week reach big audiences. Programmes like the Ten O'clock News do more analysis and more foreign news than they did a decade ago because there's more to analyse and more to report.
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But I'm not sure that means a turning away from celebrity or personality necessarily. Comic Relief, which this year we hope will raise more than £70 million, is self-evidently focused around stars and celebrity – one of the highlights, and a brilliant bit of television if you haven't seen it yet, was Tony Blair's frighteningly good sketch with Catherine Tate. This summer, we'll be televising an enormous global rock event to focus public attention on climate change. A serious issue, one of the most serious, brought to life at least to some extent through the commitment and the talent of a group of celebrities.
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One of the few things which I am not currently responsible for is Big Brother – thank the Lord – but I would say that even the recent controversy about racism in Celebrity Big Brother points both ways. Superficiality, cynicism, exploitation were all words that were used of the programme. Yet I also believe that the programme raised some uncomfortable and valid questions about racism in our country – questions which more respectable TV doesn't always ask. In a way, this takes me unexpectedly back to the theme with which I started – a determination to tell the truth. Truthfulness is an obvious virtue in serious journalism, but it turns up in the best of every kind of media – in the best documentary, the best drama, the best comedy – even, dare I say it, in the best reality television.
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Conclusion
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Modern media is what media has always been – a mirror with plenty of ugly and unflattering aspects of our world on show. It's very tempting to think how much better the world would be if those blemishes were simply airbrushed away. But, for me at least, the world's media is at its least convincing and its least valuable when it is bland and reassuring. My faith in media is at its greatest when it's disputatious and unsettling and unflinching.
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It's what we say about the ´óÏó´«Ã½ – if you like everything we're doing, if there's nothing there that drives you into an absolute blind fury, then something has gone very badly wrong.
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Thank you.
