{"id":576,"date":"2007-08-30T01:48:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-30T07:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=576"},"modified":"2007-08-30T01:48:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-30T07:48:00","slug":"british-tv%e2%80%99s-phoney-trust-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/08\/british-tv%e2%80%99s-phoney-trust-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"British TV\u2019s phoney trust crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he campaign to restore trust<\/span> in TV<\/span> is a phoney crusade \u2013 less to do with concern for the audience than about protecting brands and reputation.<\/p>\n

When my dad was in the Military Police, he would caution errant squaddies with the words: \u201canything you say will be taken down, screwed around with, and used to convict you.\u201d That cogent modus operandi is, in a nutshell, what West Midlands Police say<\/a> was employed in the making of Channel 4<\/span>\u2019s Undercover Mosque<\/a><\/span>. The force alleges dodgy editing \u2013 have they never seen Life on Mars<\/a><\/span>?<\/p>\n

Even progressive thinker DCI Sam Tyler<\/a> never suggested that his Seventies colleagues<\/a> become television critics. Still, Dispatches<\/a><\/span>, despite a robust defence, is in danger of being labelled as the latest victim of television\u2019s crisis of trust.<\/p>\n

We know there\u2019s a crisis of trust because Michael Grade<\/span><\/a>, the industry\u2019s current cheerleader, publicly admits it, as does everyone else who’s made a career out of never having to say they were sorry.<\/p>\n

But Grade\u2019s trust campaign has nothing to do with the word as you or I understand it. It\u2019s a phoney crusade.<\/p>\n

It is about brands and reputational risk, the language that Michael Grade employs when he\u2019s not blaming young people for destroying broadcasting.<\/p>\n

Remember, by the way, that Grade\u2019s own appointment as ITV executive chairman goes against the best-practice recommendations of the Financial Services Authority<\/a>. (Those recommendations in turn stemmed from the Higgs Report<\/a>, prompted by another crisis of \u201ctrust\u201d caused by companies such as Enron<\/span> and WorldCom<\/span>.)<\/p>\n

They, of course, weren\u2019t British television companies. They were just multi-billion-pound multinationals.<\/p>\n

Of course, Grade\u2019s not concerned about securing the trust of a bunch of financial regulators or City types \u2013 they\u2019re just suits! He\u2019s worried about the audience, about you and me. He may have plenty of tolerance when it comes to flexing the FSA\u2019s code of conduct, but he has zero tolerance for death scenes.<\/p>\n

What, then, is really behind Grade\u2019s trust talk? If you want the nearest commercial example of television’s trust crisis look at the company that\u2019s pulling out of ITV<\/span><\/a>\u2019s biggest sponsorship deal at the end of the year, Cadburys<\/span><\/a>. A court fined<\/a> the Coronation Street<\/span><\/a> sponsor \u00a31m in July 2007 for salmonella contamination in a factory.<\/p>\n

The salmonella scare involved a massive product recall; throw in legal fees and a small dent in market share (hot weather hit it harder than potential stomach trouble \u2013 Cadburys couldn’t capitalise on the opportunity to shed unwanted pounds as you consumed them) and the whole sorry experience totalled about \u00a340m.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a fair-size chunk of the fat \u00a3150m profit it made supplying unneeded calories to Britons last year.<\/p>\n

The company that the chocolate manufacturer is leaving, ITV, has its small trust issues with Paul Watson<\/span>\u2019s death-or-no-death documentary<\/a> on Alzheimer\u2019s, but contested current affairs shows that lose ratings aren\u2019t going to have TV execs losing sleep. No, losing sleep comes when, like ITV, you lose \u00a320m in six months from putting your gaming operations on hold, or pay lawyers<\/a> like Olswang<\/span> to carry out expensive investigations \u2013 all to avoid the nightmare from which you would never wake up: increased regulation.<\/p>\n

Because when you put aside all the dull, old, insider arguments that pass for table talk among television types, the word \u201ctrust\u201d is simply a disguise. It means: before analogue completely disappears, before the rules that govern us are completely rewritten \u2013 don\u2019t do any more to us; we can look after ourselves, we can put it right. The silent shriek that\u2019s audible only to broadcasters is public service<\/span>.<\/p>\n

And while the notion of public service remains an anachronistic embarrassment for politicians and executives \u2013 as outdated a notion as professional soldiers dying for their country rather than in pursuit of a goal-oriented foreign policy \u2013 it still can\u2019t be ignored, any more than you can hide the bodies of dead guardsmen with a copy of a UN resolution.<\/p>\n

Grade is the popular, public face of television\u2019s anachronistic embarrassment.<\/p>\n

Unlike Five<\/span>\u2019s Jane Lighting<\/span>, he\u2019s old enough to be able to use the words trust and television without sounding like he’s reading from a script. He\u2019s charming and well-liked enough for people to let him get away with it.<\/p>\n

And as for the potential casualties?<\/p>\n

Curmudgeonly old buffers such as Falstaffian \u201cmanipulator\u201d Paul Watson.<\/p>\n

Paper millionaires like David Frank<\/span> and Stephen Lambert<\/span>, forced to buy back their own stock to prop up RDF<\/span>\u2019s share price. Peter Fincham<\/span>, not short of a bob or two himself, slumming it at the BBC. Stand or fall, they\u2019re not exactly prime candidates for public sympathy.<\/p>\n

Trust is a sham. It has no impact on viewers. Academic studies are overwhelmingly conclusive on one key point: no one ever lost readers, or viewers, or listeners because they weren\u2019t trusted.<\/p>\n

The word is brandished to persuade the world outside that the costs of losing programme revenues or advertising, or \u2013 in the case of the BBC \u2013 the privilege of self-governance, are taken seriously not because of their commercial or political impact, but because they have moral significance. At least Cadburys didn\u2019t bother to pretend there was morality lurking behind chocolate production.<\/p>\n

So no one stands to benefit from the trust crisis, not even broadcasting\u2019s bonus-winners. Except\u2026erm, ironically, me. I\u2019m writing a book called Can You Trust the Media?<\/span> It\u2019s 60,000 words, out next April, in all good book stores. Friends who are not in the media have a joke: \u201cThe first word\u2019s NO<\/span>,\u201d they smirk. \u201cWhat are the other 59,999?\u201d<\/p>\n

[Press Gazette<\/a>]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The campaign to restore trust in TV is a phoney crusade \u2013 less to do with concern for the audience than about protecting brands and reputation. When my dad was in the Military Police, he would caution errant squaddies with the words: \u201canything you say will be taken down, screwed around with, and used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[54,61,275],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-five","tag-tv","tag-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}