Deception in Television
Posted on September 23, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
For a while now I’ve been of the view that it is the irrelevance of much television that hits audience ratings hardest. The fact that an organisation like the BBC is in crisis because it deceives viewers adds spice to the debate but it’s not necessarily what the debate should be about. By the way I found no evidence of the debate on the BBC blogs this morning though I did find this on Mark Thompson’s page. No mention of it today at Richard Sambrook’s site which is a shame (Richard has gone into links mode).
Television is a construction. It pertains to life but doesn’t really reflect it. When video technology was introduced in the early 1980s the amount of footage shot to footage used for TV programmes went up to about 20:1. That means 1/20th of an interview will be used.
The degree of selectivitiy this involves is a problem in the hands of ruthlessly conscientious people. When I was involved in editing that type of material I know I used it in ways that were biased towards my interpretation of events. Still, I would call myself an unbiased journalist. And I’d claim my view of life was objective. I just thought I had a superior way of processing bias.
In the hands of people who see their role as “creatives” it becomes more problematic and it seems to me part of the problem with television lies here. Twenty years ago it was just about possible to claim that people involved in reportage and analysis on the box were possessed by the kind of political motivation that kept them in check. A lot of us wanted to see political changes but because those changes involved evolving society towards a fairer system, it was hard not to acknowledge when we were being unfair - though I should add none of this was clear cut and as many people abused the editing process then as do now.
Television has lost its moral, political purpose. When it does the moral thing it is self-referencing. Jeremy Paxman quizzes people because he suspects they are lying to him. I would venture the view that you ask people questions for a larger good than that. It is not personal. It is about trying to uncover some truth that might not be apparent to the person you are interviewing nor to yourself as the interviewer.
The question why is TV less moral than it should be wasn’t asked for the twenty years when it became more about being a creative industry. There’s been a generation in charge of places like the BBC and Channel 4 that don’t have a outlook on life that takes the idea of a higher moral good seriously. They have a pragmatic outlook. They are by and large from Britain’s upper middle class and for them and their families television is a route to a job they can talk about at family weddings without upsetting the grandparents. They have gone socially sideways rather than down.
Television in Britain therefore fits into a system that sees the families of the wealthy hold themselves together and maintain their social position over generations. Television is what the merchant banks, the barristers’ Inns and Lloyds of London used to be. It’s where you place the kids. The consequence also has been that you now have to work for nothing to get into the business and work for very little as you make your way up the ladder like the barrister does before becoming a QC. it is replete with the sense of sacrifice that satisfies wealthy people that they are earning their place in society. The downside is people stitch together a version of reality and society that is composed entirely through a sequence of pragmatic decisions where idealism and a search for the higher moral ground are irrelevant, embarrassing and unwanted.
At the same time television has evolved its own internal power structure that reads something like: all creative decisions are taken by two people. There is the executive producer and the commissioning editor. take a look through the credits of UK programmes and you’ll see the repetition of the names of a small group - the exec producer. Behind the scenes the exec producer is busy interpreting the desires of the commissioning editor. Truth, bias, relevance is largely a matter of how well or badly those desires are second-guessed and because commissioning editors see themselves as barometers of the creative mood this can be a difficult process, one which independent production companies will only entrust to their execs (though recently there’s been a new breed of exec - the creative director through whom all creativity must pass). What drives programming content is also this whimsical moment. I know it drives producers crazy and it makes them entirely pragmatic.
In short there is a system there that makes pragmatism more important than morality which is why many people with a moral outlook left British TV in the 1990s, sadly leaving the field to their pragmatist enemies to create a system that is ever more resistant to ideals.
So there’s been talk about sacking people who cheat the viewers where the debate should really focus is on how you transform systems that do not prize higher values and are overly staffed with people for whom values are an irrelevance. It is no surprise to me that the alternative structure of news that’s now growing – like the blogging world – talks about authenticity. It seems to be in demand but the creative media haven’t been able to understand it. That is no surprise.
What to do about it? I think it’s a ten year project to put it right and it starts with getting people like the CEO at Channel 4 back into the job he is best fitted for – marketing - chiseling away at the commissioning editor structure by replacing the incumbents with people whose motivation is making a difference to society, making more programmes in house to offset the impact of commercialisation in the creative sector, and directing people’s attention at what is a right, good, just society.
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