Ertblog

Digital Britain: the massacre that showed the failure of BBC regional news

The Government's proposals for a digital Britain hit the headlines this week. Supporters of the BBC were appalled by plans to share television licence funds with other broadcasters as well as the BBC, which has been the exclusive beneficiary of the fee for 80 years.

Supporters of the idea of sharing the licence fee argue it would avoid the BBC regaining the monopoly of public service news it enjoyed until ITV was created in 1955. ITV is now an almost entirely commercial broadcaster, while Channel 4's disastrous ventures in recent years have left it in a parlous financial state. Sharing the licence fee would subsidise competitive regional news services on ITV and Channel 4.

I'm sceptical about this. The licence fee, while unpopular with many, is easily understood. It's the way we fund the BBC, one of Britain's greatest cultural assets, and a world media leader. Who would decide how much of the fee should go to other media companies? What would be the criteria for deciding who gets what?

That said, the BBC is far from perfect, even in regional news. During our holiday in Dorset in early June, we watched the corporation's Spotlight south west news bulletins on BBC Breakfast. I was amazed that the same reports were played repeatedly during the programme. True, few will watch Breakfast from start to finish. But many will watch for an hour or so as they get the family ready for their day. And how could Spotlight on Breakfast have missed this terrific story: the discovery of the bodies of 50 iron age warriors on the site of Weymouth's controversial relief road? A road rushed through approvals so it could speed visitors to the 2012 Olympics sailing events at Portland. The warriors appear to have been massacred by the Romans as they seized Maiden Castle. Sky News covered it. But not, it appears, the public service BBC.   

A rubbish campaign: the Daily Mail rages against the humble wheelie bin

You can always rely on the Daily Mail to find something to rage against. Today, the paper's front page was devoted to condemning the humble wheelie bin. A large photo showed a street with a few bins on display. Hardly an outrage to prompt millions taking to the streets to protest in the fashion of the Iranian election.

I remember the days when pavements were strewn with black sacks on rubbish day, many of which had been torn open by the local cats. I can't help thinking the Daily Mail are going round stirring up apathy, in the immortal words of the Tory grandee Willie Whitelaw.

Sorry, these apologies won't kid anyone: MPs and media under the spotlight

Suddenly, sorry seems to be the easiest word to say. Britain's party political leaders have been falling over themselves to apologise for the parliamentary expenses scandal. David Cameron has said he may suspend MPs from the party for abusing the scandalously lax expenses system. And in the media, the new Russian owners of the London Evening Standard have launched an expensive advertising campaign saying sorry for the paper's activities under its old owners.

I can't help feeling other voters will share my deep scepticism about this rush of humility. (I've written before on Ertblog about the dubious nature of political apologies.) 

Take the politicians first. Brown, Cameron and Clegg only expressed the S word because their cronies were exposed as corrupt. The first instinct of all those dishonourable members was to say they hadn't broken the rules, ignoring the fact they designed the rules that lined their own pockets. Take Hazel Blears: the communities secretary has said she will pay £13,000 capital gains tax due on the property she designated as her second home. I didn't realised she had a choice: the rest of us can't choose whether to pay tax, it's imposed on us. I expect Blears to resign while a criminal investigation is opened into her tax evasion. And every other crooked MP of all parties. 'Sorry' doesn't cover it. 

Do MPs really understand why we're all so angry about this fundamental breach of trust between the elected and the electorate? Do they see why their behaviour is totally unacceptable? My feeling is that this generation of professional politicians is so tainted that only a complete clear out will start to rebuild trust. That's not to say that all politicians are corrupt: Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, offered an excellent and candid reflection on the complexities of the issue on her blog last weekend. And I'm even willing to give our local MP, Cheryl Gillan, the benefit of the doubt for claiming for dog food. But voters won't offer credit to good MPs given that parliament's closed shop allowed the scandalous abuse of taxpayers' money to develop. The last straw was the appalling speaker Michael Martin's tirade against the press for exposing the story. And the parliamentary authorities instinct to call in the police not to investigate corruption and tax evasion - but to hound the media for exposing the scandal.

I am uneasy that the Daily Telegraph paid for the leaked document detailing MPs' expenses - and the way the paper attacked Labour ministers and MPs for days before turning its attention to other parties' MPs. That was deeply partisan. But I suspect all the major parties will suffer badly from voters' backlash. Let's just hope parties like the BNP don't benefit at the polls.

Standard's sorry: masterstroke or blunder?

Finally, a media apology. London's Evening Standard has been saying sorry: for being out of touch, predictable and negative. A bold move, you might think. But wait: the Standard's owners are saying sorry for the activities of its predecessors, Associated Newspapers. That's easy - like Tony Blair apologising for the slave trade (but not Iraq). I was critical of the 'old' Evening Standard's blatant propaganda for Boris Johnson, and welcome its more open approach. But no one should forget that this is simply an old style marketing campaign for a 'new and improved product'. Not an apology.

The Guardian stands by Erwin James, murderer turned crime commentator

I've long admired the writing of Erwin James, the Guardian's columnist and commentator on crime. He knows his subject: he served a life sentence for two murders in the early 1980s. He started writing his Guardian column A life inside in 2000, four years before his release. His writing career flourished after his release, a testimony to his ability to offer a rare insight into prison life.  

Last week, he and the Guardian were seriously embarrassed when James - real name Erwin James Monahan - admitted he had lied about his time in the French Foreigh Legion in a piece for the paper in 2006. The Guardian's reader's editor Siobhain Butterworth explained  in her Open Door column today why the paper would be giving him another chance. She says:

"It is never acceptable to lie to - or deliberately mislead - readers, but a sense or proportion about this incident is needed. Monahan is not a trained journalist who falsified news reports; he is a writer who, having pulled himself out of the most dreadful mire, went on to make the mistake of lying about his past to protect an identity he had been concealing for years. He has caused damage to the reputation of the Guardian and given some people reason to doubt his work. He will have to re-earn their trust. I wish him luck."

I think that's fair. The debate about crime and punishment in Britain rarely rises above the Daily Mail's simplistic 'lock them up and throw away the keys' approach. That's why we send more people to prison as a proportion of our population than most other western countries. I'd rather the government and the media focus on whether prison is the right punishment - and how to stop people reoffending after being released. No-one would condone the terrible crimes James committed a generation ago, but we should be pleased that he had the talent and motivation to become a writer and transform his life. Despite his serious lapse of judgement in 2006, I'm glad the Guardian is allowing him to continue to keep us all better informed about life inside.

Living with Teenagers: The Guardian names the author

I was surprised to find my blog had had hundreds of extra visitors over the last couple of days. The mystery deepened when I found they had all arrived at Ertblog via a Google search about The Guardian's Living with Teenagers column, which ended in June last year.

Tonight, I solved the mystery. The Guardian's G2 section revealed the name of the author: Julie Myerson after, it seems, days of speculation. Myerson has been the subject of a barrage of criticism for using her son's drug use as the subject of a book, The Lost Child. Critics described her actions as a betrayal of motherhood. Similar criticisms were made of her Teenagers column. The Guardian has now removed the columns from its website now the author's identity is public.

My Ertblog post about that column ranked fourth in a Google search on the subject - hence all those visitors!

Is the media making it harder for Northern Ireland to overcome the dissident threat to peace?

The murders of two British soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland by dissident republican terrorists have cast a depressing spell over the territory.

It's a curious reflection of the calculating nature of news - and how Northern Ireland has changed dramatically - that the killings would barely have hit the front pages had they happened in Iraq of Afghanistan.

In the days after the atrocities, the British media paid huge attention to the language used by Sinn Féin politicians in their response. Radio 4's Today programme interrogated Sinn Féin leaders on the subject two days running, leading to Gerry Adams accusing John Humphrys of living in the past. The Daily Mail in a leader demanded that Gerry Adams express genuine sorrow for the soldiers' killings. It added that Adams' "callous and ambiguous response makes us all suspect that Adams hasn't really renounced violence at all".

Like many, I found Sinn Féin's words - it said the killings were "counterproductive and a strategic mistake" - chilling. But the Daily Mail's leader writers are the last people to understand or care about the sensitivity of language in Northern Ireland. It simply ignores the fact that the dissidents are at war with Adams rather than the British authorities. We may loathe Gerry Adams, but his painstaking efforts have carried the vast majority of the republican community with him on the road to peace. It's no comfort to the families of the victims, but the fact no British soldier died in Northern Ireland between 1997 and last Saturday reflects that achievement.

Northern Ireland secretary Sean Woodward chastised Today's John Humphrys this morning for imagining worst case scenarios. The people and politicians of Ulster have shown greater maturity than the media in their response to the tragic events of recent days. It's time for journalists to exercise greater responsibility in reporting what we all hope will be an aberration in Ulster's new era of peace.

PS: There's a certain incongruity at the chirpy message: "Hey there! sinnfeinireland is using Twitter"! But Gerry Adams' message via Twitter was clear: "These people [the dissident killers] are traitors to the island of Ireland".. "they don't deserve to be supported by anyone". Time for the Daily Mail to follow Sinn Féin on Twitter!

An apology from Gordon Brown? Just Westminster chatter

The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland today joined the call for Gordon Brown to say sorry.

"It needn't be a sackcloth and ashes apology but an admission that the entire political and financial establishment erred when it believed in the infallibility of the market, and that New Labour's love affair with the City was part of that error."

He goes on to swallow the idea that Labour is simply suffering a communications problem. Tell the story, and Labour is in with a chance at next year's general election, he argues.

I expect a far more perceptive analysis from Freedland, usually one of Britain's best political commentators. The clamour for an apology is a classic Westminster village obsession. It wouldn't make the slightest impression on voters, who regard politicians' apologies as sceptically as their promises. (And it could make matters worse - just look at the reaction to the contrived apologies from disgraced bankers last month.)

Labour's problems are far more serious. It continues to disillusion voters with disastrous policy decisions, such as Peter Mandelson's part privatisation of the Royal Mail. Harriet Harman's empty promise to cut ex RBS chief executive Red Goodwin's promise showed the impotence of ministers who did nothing to stop Goodwin being rewarded for failure when they rescued RBS with billions of our money.

Dying governments often make catastrophic mistakes - wasting taxpayers' money: Margaret Thatcher's was the poll tax. I suspect the Royal Mail sell off will begin to look like Labour's equivalent of John Major's rail privatisation. We're still paying the price of that piece of prime ministerial stupidity 15 years later. 

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Freedland,Gordon Brown,Fred Goodwin,Royal Mail

Our survey said: time for PR people to kick their addiction to research stories

If you hear or read the words 'according to a poll' in a broadcast or newspaper story, it's likely that the story is a result of a news release. All of us working in PR have resorted to research stories to get coverage for our organisations. I'm certainly no exception. When judgement day comes, I'll confess to the Valentine's day story I did for Eagle Star life assurance in 1997, claiming that women would love a pension plan for Valentine's day. The shame.

These non stories are a conspiracy between PR people and the media. They rarely have any substance to them, even though they abide by the rules governing market research. But I sense we are all getting bored by the tactic. My 1997 story was picked up by a stack of radio stations and the national press. Were I to repeat it now, I doubt any national would touch it. In the last week, journalists on Metro and The Observer I've spoken to have agreed with my view, even saying they delete emails from a certain insurance company because of the number of silly surveys.

The tactic can result in ridicule. Two weeks ago, the insurer LV issued a story claiming that inexperienced cyclists taking to the roads had resulted in a 29% increase in the number of road accidents involving cyclists. The Independent's report on the story carried the dramatic headline Credit crunch cyclists causing chaos on roads. The CTC, Britain's national cyclists' organisation, quickly condemned LV's story as Mickey Mouse research. Roger Geffen, CTC's respected campaigns manager, said LV's alarming figures appeared to no more than the difference between casualties in winter, when fewer people cycle, and the summer, when more of us take to our bikes. CTC's rebuttal was widely reported in the cycling press. In the words of Roger Geffen:

"Manipulating statistics for a PR stunt wastes the time of the people who took part in the survey. By demonising cyclists and scaring people into staying in their cars, it also undermines the efforts of charities like CTC to encourage more cycling and improve road safety for all”.

Things got worse for LV's PR team. In last Saturday's Guardian, Ben Goldacre devoted his Bad Science column to LV's story, under the headline Perils on the road to PR-reviewed data. Goldacre began:  "I've always fantasised that the insurance industry must possess a vast repository of useful data: the experience of centuries, carefully tabulated by actuaries into secret commercial databases containing a truth about human behaviour and risk that most epidemiologists and social scientists would kill for." LV's story destroyed that illusion, leading him to add, "I shall not be buying shares in this insurance company". (He couldn't anyway, as LV is actually a mutually owned friendly society, but he got his point across.)

LV achieved some media coverage. But it has alienated a sizeable group of people, and damaged its efforts to establish itself as expert on road safety. Not very smart. The release has now disappeared from LV's media centre but the damage has been done.

Note to BBC boss in Carol Thatcher row: 'fulsome' does not mean 'full'!

Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the former British prime minister, has been fired by the BBC's One show for referring to a tennis player as a 'golliwog'.

The controller of BBC 1, Jay Hunt, took to the corporation's studios this morning to defend the decision. On Radio 4's Today programme, she said the BBC had given Thatcher ample opportunity to make a fulsome apology. Oops! Fulsome does not mean full. According to the Collins dictionary, it means 'excessive or insincere, especially in an offensive or distasteful way'. How ironic that a BBC boss stepping into a row about the use of language should commit a howler herself.

I shouldn't be surprised. It's that old menace, language inflation, that I blogged about a year ago. No one ever calls for an inquiry: it has to be a full inquiry. And too many people worry that short words lack gravitas, which surely explains why Jay Hunt said fulsome rather than full. They're wrong. Back in 1948, Sir Ernest Gowers wrote a wonderful book called Plain Words, which told civil servants to write in everyday language rather than jargon. Over six decades later, it's still available as The Complete Plain Words. Jay Hunt should buy a copy.

BBC's chief destroys the case not to show DEC's Gaza appeal

Humiliating your boss is rarely a good career move. But John Humphrys won't mind. The BBC Today programme's star presenter left the corporation's director-general, Mark Thompson, floundering this morning as he questioned his ultimate boss on the BBC's decision not to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee's appeal video to help the victims of the Gaza conflict.

Thompson's hapless performance exposed the emptiness of the BBC's explanation: that showing the appeal would endanger the BBC's reputation for impartiality. He conceded Humphrys' point that viewers could distinguish between a humanitarian appeal and taking sides in a conflict. He accepted that DEC's appeal was not politically motivated. He kept repeating the words 'complex', 'impartiality' and 'sensitive' as if they themselves explained or justified his stance.

Thompson cited the corporation's decision not to air the Make Poverty History campaign video as a precedent. Yet the two cases are entirely different. Make Poverty History was a political campaign, however worthy its aims. It wanted to change government policy. DEC's Gaza appeal is about helping relieve human suffering. It isn't interested in the rights and wrongs of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Thompson would have been on more solid ground had he said the BBC would not air appeals about current conflicts, rather than natural disasters. But he did not. As Humphrys said, the BBC showed DEC's Darfur appeal, which was just as sensitive by Thompson's argument.

Impartiality is a noble cause, and one the BBC rightly defends, not just because its charter requires it. In a world dominated by propaganda and polemic, I cherish the BBC's approach, as I blogged in this post in 2007 when the Guardian's Emily Bell questioned the corporation's impartiality. But on Gaza, the BBC has made a bad mistake. It feared being attacked for broadcasting the appeal. But as Thompson conceded, viewers are capable of distinguishing between a humanitarian appeal and political propaganda. The BBC should have had the confidence to show the appeal and dismiss the inevitable criticisms from lobbyists who themselves are far from impartial. 

PS: Jonathan Calder in his Liberal England blog questioned whether the BBC was quite as impartial on Make Poverty History as Mark Thompson claimed on Today.