Alan Yentob, BBC Creative Director and self-basting arts turkey, uses an Observer diary piece to bury his contribution to the cut-away crisis. Yentob is in the dock for being filmed nodding approvingly to contributions from people he hadn’t actually interviewed. The impression being given to viewers that he had actually interviewed them.
…on occasion, I have done ‘noddies’ because the constrictions and conventions of TV demand one from time to time. Are we not losing our heads in this debate? Isn’t it important to acknowledge that there can be artifice without deception? Television is a medium and programmes are constructed; there needs to be a narrative flow.
This is not to argue in favour of laziness and slack programme making. And of course there have been abuses. But there’s a line to be drawn between serious breaches of trust and the ordinary business, the ordinary mechanics of television. The debate is too serious to be diminished.
There can be artifice without deception, but only by negotiation with the audience. And in Yentob’s case there is none, it is simply a convenience – his schedule! – which makes it a patronizing and pointless fraud, and therefore unforgivable.
5 responses to “Alan Yentob: unforgivable”
Don’t you think “unforegivable” is a bit of a stretch to this “cut-away crisis”? The crisis, frankly, seems largely one manufactured entirely within the media itself, with members of the viewing public more-or-less assuming that such behavior was pretty standard practice. It’s certainly done widely over in the U.S. as well.
As a general viewer, I find the practice kind of tacky, in that it claims to help “narritive flow”, but serves to promote well-established news celebs at the expense of those who aren’t well known. But scandalous? That’s a reach. Frankly, it doesn’t even seem partucularly deceptive, in that nobody is denying the use of this practice.
So, what does the media do that *IS* scandalous, then? How about the fact that it blindly reports military claims of dead Taleban as fact, without pointing out that huge numbers of these so-called Taleban are Afghani civilian, or, simply, the Afghanis themselves.
Or maybe it’s when they parrot Bush administration reports about weapons and fighters coming into Iraq from Iran, when, infact, far more of these fighters have been shows to come from Saudi Arabia.
Or maybe they fail to point out the hypocrisy involved in accusing the Iranians and Syrians of letting weapons and enemies come through their borders, when the U.S. can’t even secure their own far smaller border between California and Mexico, which is a haven for trafficking drugs north, and, oftentimes, guns south.
Or perhaps it’s scandalous when the media fails to note that the IAEA generally accepts that Iran is fully in compliance with all of its required obligations, and, infact, has every legal right to refine uranium to generate electricity, despite what the U.S. government says.
To me, it’s far more scandalous when the media routinely “noddies” the world towards future military confrontations and sometimes lethal sanctions, while ignoring the fact that we’re leveling and largely depopulating entire cities in the Middle East. That, to me, truely is something unforgiveable.
All these horrors within the system, and what the media latches on to are “noddies”?! Clearly, it’s time for a reality check.
You’re right, Mark. Yentob makes arts programmes, which are basically just a celebration of purchasing power.
For something more interesting, check out http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Military_Equipment_in_Afghanistan_(2007)
Yentob’s elliding two different things to disguise the fact that in his case, he’s totally in the wrong. Noddies recorded just after you’ve conducted an interview – ok. Noddies pretending you could be bothered to turn up and interview someone you’ve never met in your life – not ok. Just run the interviewee’s side of the interview, for god’s sake! It’s such a pathetic and unneccessary bit of deception, and an excuse to get the bearded goon’s face on our screens even more than it is already!
I would love to see what the “peripheral” people make of it…i.e. the people he couldn’t turn up for.
Any fraud no matter how small is wrong as for yentob he was done for this before and told not to let it happen again!.once it starts it gets out of control like the phone in scams etc in the end the public don’t belive anything the bbc tell them.