Culture Wars in the Media

Culture Wars in the Media Mr Dean, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your kind introduction and your invitation to join such an august line of guest speakers. What a pleasure it is to be here this evening, though it is a pleasure tinged with trepidation. I worry that those who work in the media have quite enough opportunity to be heard without being granted this storied platform further to inflict their views on others. I’m conscious – as we meet here this evening in a forum of ethical discussion - that journalists tend to rush for the story rather than pause too long to consider its ramifications. And, amid this accelerated news cycle, I am slightly worried that we may be losing another prime minister as we sit here. But as I stared at the big quote in a Guardian article, I was reminded that there is a conversation that needs to be addressed. “I’ve given up watching the news,” said a 60-something man in the Guardian piece. “It’s all lies.” Oh, come on. Given up? Really? Stopped when we have moved from all that theoretical stuff to pure theatrical drama? Stopped in the middle of the fallout from the Supreme Court decision. Stopped with a beleaguered prime minister on both the wrong side of the Atlantic and the wrong side of the law? We’ve always had room for different interpretations of the news. A divergence of political view is manifest in the reaction to almost every news story. Observers have always interpreted things in accordance with their underlying philosophy. Once we had left and right. Today we have leave and remain. The reaction to yesterday’s extraordinary events at the Supreme Court encapsulated the issue. To one side the court was properly responding to outrageous hubris, to an arrogant insult to an important debate, to an attempt to silence the Commons, an insult to ride roughshod over the wishes who wanted to remain. The prime minister had shown contempt for democracy. Hail to Lady Hale. To the other the resort to unelected lawyers – who ARE these 11 judges? - was further evidence of Establishment conspiracy, of a denial of the will of the people, frustration of an elected government, a blatant move to frustrate the result of the Referendum. The judges had shown contempt for democracy. Thought for the Day’s own Giles Fraser tweeted: “The establishment will do everything in its power to frustrate the will of the people. These are dark days indeed." Those reactions, the manner in which two warring tribes interpreted a court judgement in different ways to support their view of the world, demonstrated a polarization of opinion that has gone far beyond a traditional political divide. We are engaged in a war of rival cultures in which each side no longer merely takes a different view, but also refuses to believe a word coming from the other. It’s not that old left right divide. It’s Brexit. And somehow it has sucked humanity, goodwill and kindness from exchanges. That is the culture war I would like to discuss this evening…and how it has affected our media. …in particular, whether the media have reported this war, encouraged this war or actually started this war. …whether the media have forfeited any role as guardians of democratic society… …and - on a day to day practical level - how those of us who work in media respond to audiences that no longer trust a word we say. There is a question attributed to the late Louis Heren, a foreign correspondent for The Times, talking about a journalist’s proper reaction on being told something by a politician: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Now the question is being turned round: “Why are the lying media lying to us?” Let us pause to define culture war. The American sociologist James Hunter used the phrase when wrote in 1991 about the issues that divided America into two warring groups. They were split not by older attitudes such as social class but – most obviously - between liberal and traditionalist points of view. In the United States we see that war continue between the supporters and the opponents of the polarizing President Trump. Here we have Brexit, encouraging a new level of anger that is directed not merely at politicians, but also at the media. At best, we the media have failed to unmask the villains of the piece – naturally the two sides of the debate identify different villains – at worst we are in collusion with the villains. At this point, because the media world is expanding so rapidly, I guess we should also define what we mean by media. Print, both on paper and online. Broadcast, on screen, on radio and online. And, increasingly, the medium that threatens to run away with everything: social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. I was a journalist for 30 years in newspapers before joining the BBC. The thing about newspapers is that – unless you do something so wicked that it breaks the law - what you publish is nobody’s business but yours and your readers. The thing about working for the BBC is that what you broadcast is EVERYBODY’S business. Newspapers have agendas. Newspapers are biased. Left, right, upmarket, down-market. Readers are self- selecting. They come to a title knowing what to expect and wanting it. The BBC is not biased. What I reckon it DOES have is a slightly wistful impulse towards social cohesion. It desperately wants to do the right thing. It likes community rather than sowing division. This can mean a wish to police language. Mischief makes papers happy. Mischief makes the BBC anxious. And what goes for the BBC pretty much goes for the other broadcasters. They attract less attention – and much less opprobrium – because we don’t have to buy a licence to watch. One or two of those broadcasters – notably the new radio talk shows – do promise greater misbehavior, but it comes in patches. They are regulated. And they are expected, over each day of broadcasting, to present with balance. Then clever tech people threw some big rocks in the pond. The ripples are still spreading out. The internet world has rewritten the economics of the entire news industry. Newspapers were already having a tough time because old readers were dying and young readers didn’t seem to exist. Then they began losing ad revenue to the internet giants. Now many are nearly broke. The digital world promised to usher in a new world of citizen journalism, where stories could be told free of the influence of governments, businesses, proprietors and pressure groups. There has indeed been some pure reporting… …along with much writing that appears to offer an original piece of news but then refers for its source to a piece in longer established media… …and a huge amount of rumour, invention, mischief and bile. Here’s a good example of the Twitter debate, from a former listener to the Today programme. He is discussing the departure of the long-standing broadcaster John Humphrys, who tended to raise hackles among remainers. I suspect this Twitter commentator is from the left: “So long as he isn’t replaced ‘like for like’, I might, albeit an infinitesimally tiny might, consider tuning in again. But wait, silly me, that vile Tory plant Sarah Sands will still be editing (controlling the whole shaboodle) so that will still be a big NO to tuning in again.” Now when you work for a newspaper you can tell from the postbag whether you are giving the readers what they want. You can have a look too at the comments that appear under the pieces online. When you work in broadcasting you have the great pleasure of feedback IN REAL TIME. EVEN AS YOU ARE PUTTING OUT THE PROGRAMME. Some of the criticism is political convention. The Today programme plays for three hours every weekday morning and for a couple of hours on a Saturday. If I did not have a constant stream of texts from 10 Downing Street and from the Labour press office I would think something was wrong. Their comments usually end in exclamation marks. “Outrageous!” “A travesty!” “This is a joke!” “We demand an on air correction!” And sometimes in question marks. “Why don’t you say that the Gov is increasing police numbers?” “No mention of our work for entrepreneurs?” “You need to mention the support we are giving fisherman…young people…OLD people.” Or my personal favourite. “This is NOT a story.” Which almost always means it is a really good story. The last time I had the “this is NOT a story” text it was over the rights of EU nationals. We had foreign nationals coming on the programme to say they had been turned down for residents’ status. The government back-pedalled once it realized the foreign nationals were telling a compelling story. Those are the quasi-official moans, coming from party campaign officers. They are usually escalated to letters of complaint to the BBC director general and the complaints department. This being the BBC, the complaints department is bound to open an investigation. And then there are the trolls. The trolls are different. The trolls go public on Twitter. Some of it is what lawyers call “vulgar abuse”. Some is presented with the patina of journalistic investigation. I have, for instance, an accountant following me. Or at least she suggests on her Twitter profile that she is an accountant. Her premise is that I am a spider sitting at the centre of a conspiracy into which I have dragged the Today programme.

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