According to Broadcast, BBC News boss Peter Horrocks (seen left, smiling – unnervingly) is calling for:
“radical” overhaul of the traditional notions of impartiality and believes the corporation should be seeking more interviews with organisations such as the Taliban and the BNP.
Why not just organize a debate between them in southern Afghanistan and supply the guns and free ammo? (Just kidding – but let’s hope its a draw with no survivors.)
Impartiality can only be an ambition, a standard against which we allow ourselves to be judged. But traditionally it means not favouring a particular party, and treating all sides with universal disfavour is a not infrequent journalistic trait.
Should the BBC be impartial to the fictions surrounding the nation state – its pageantry and its process? The BBC is tasked by government with helping us imagine “Britishness” – sustaining civil society. Personally I think the BBC isn’t up for radical anything. It’s beholden to public money and paralysed by its obligations to negotiate the responsibilities that go with that – and if it isn’t, it should be…
Anyhow, that same Oxford talk – Finding TV News’ lost audience – also raised the prospect of reaching ‘under-served’ viewers, a lovely concept in itself.
So who exactly are these ‘under-served’ viewers?
Perhaps they live in Scotland, where they managed to qualify as a nation and elect a Parliament but don’t apparently deserve a national news programme? As Mark Thompson once put it (in true Lord Curzon-style):
I don’t detect any public clamour for it. There are still one or two outposts, media commentators and academics, who want to talk about it, but I don’t get any sense of a clamour for it. [Scotsman]
Perhaps they are analogue set owners forced to choose between BBC1 and BBC2?
No, ‘under-served viewers’ are the undeserving – code for all the people who are interested in Richard Hammond rather than Richard Dawkins.
What the BBC could do is challenge our shrinking interest in the wider world. There are plenty of cheap ways to find out how Richard Hammond is progressing. The Daily Mirror is one, as Mr H pointed out only recently. What manner of news information should a publicly-funded broadcaster be serving up? What if we were talking about school meals? Should kids be fed turkey twizzlers or encouraged to eat their greens?
Perhaps Horrocks is facing pressure from the Controller of BBC1 to make news output a little more Strictly Come Newsing? Nope. Peter Fincham is arguing publicly for a more serious engagement with viewers. He wants telly that is “longer, deeper, more challenging, more involving.” Here’s Fincham at the RTS:
Wall to Wall, who make Who Do You Think You Are?, assume that a mainstream audience will take an interest in the difficulties faced by the Armenian community in Istanbul in the last century, or the genetic make-up of families who emigrated from Jamaica to Cardiff.
And what do you know? They’re right. No over-simplfying, no dumbing down, no stooping to some imaginary level of modern taste.
Perhaps they should talk, hopefully before James May replaces Matt Frei.