Many reporters have found their licence revoked, as a result of their independence of mind embarrassing the powers that be. The UK media are very keen on systems of self-regulation,
in which companies are encouraged to police and censor their own, under threat of more severe sanctions. This sometimes puts managements in the position of backing good reportage only at cost to their own future. Thames TV paid the ultimate price when a This Week film in 1988, in which Julian Manyon reported on alleged SAS executions of IRA suspects in Gibraltar,21 so infuriated the Thatcher government that the rules governing Independent Television contracts due for renewal in 1991 were changed. This led to Thames losing its long-running, lucrative franchise to supply London and southeast England with its weekday independent television. This Week editor Roger Bolton was no stranger to such controversy over Ireland stories, having already had run-ins with the government when editing the BBC’s Tonight and Panorama programmes, but the scale of the reaction orchestrated in the right-wing press made sure that the fallout was far greater this time.22The story and its political impact is told at length in Pat Holland’s Angry Buzz:
Margaret Thatcher was deeply outraged by the audacity of This Week’s journalism. For her it was, quite literally, treachery to question the actions of the security services. An eminent Conservative peer told Roger Bolton that he hoped the experience of the Inquiry
‘would put us and other television teams off making such programmes’. He was also told by a vocal critic of the programme, ‘Of course there was a shoot to kill policy in Gibraltar, just as there was in the Far East and Aden . . . But it is none of your business. There are certain areas of the British national interest you shouldn’t get involved in.’
(Observer, 4 March 1990)23 Political pressures have constrained editorial freedoms on both sides of the Atlantic. Award-winning investigations producer Charles Lewis left his well-paid job at CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1989, to set up the Center for Public Integrity in his back room. We shall return to his subsequent successes in the next chapter, but the need he felt at the end of the Reagan era (1981–9) to escape an increasingly stifling corporate world more than justified the financial sacrifice. ‘My colleagues thought me mad,’ he says, ‘but it was the sanest thing I ever did.’24 Other reporters at that time found the political climate and its tentacles harder to escape.
Five leading UK environment correspondents, in both newspapers and broadcast, lost their portfolios within one year during the Major era (1990–7). Some believe undue govern-ment pressure was exerted on all the major news organisations to reconsider their commitgovern-ment to what the Tories thought their Achilles heel – the environment – and which they cynically denigrated as ‘muck-raking’ journalism. As a result of that pressure those leading environment correspondent portfolios were largely subsumed within more anodyne responsibilities and
‘difficult’ reporters were paid off. It is not a story that has ever been pursued, not least because it reflects so badly on the very organisations that might be expected to resist such pressure.
A generation later, the environment has become the story of the era and every organisation and politician is scrambling to establish their environmental credentials.
The other key pressure to impact upon serious reportage is commercial: the broadcasters’
constant fight for audience share in an increasingly fragmented marketplace and, for many, a corresponding dependence on dwindling advertising revenues. Commissioners are under constant demand to refresh their product in every genre, even where news and current affairs are central planks in their public service licence obligations. Many serious reporters feel that they have been squeezed out in favour of younger, more attractive, less challenging television models. Panorama’s downsizing and rebranding is only the latest in a long line of BBC efforts
to bring a younger, hipper audience to current affairs. They sent rock bassist Alex James, of Blur fame, to Colombia to investigate the local effects of the cocaine trade of which he had once been such an enthusiastic consumer.25Unequipped with the critical detachment of a good reporter, he interviewed the country’s right-wing, CIA-supported President Uribe as if he was a global guru in the ‘war on drugs’, leaving this viewer wondering whether the BBC had finally mislaid its marbles. The programme even persisted in captioning the country as
‘Columbia’.
Reportage was the name given to the first attempt to produce a current affairs magazine for a young audience, running on BBC2 from 1988 to 1994 under the aegis of the then Head of Youth Programming, Janet Street-Porter. Stylish young presenters, such as Sanka Guha and Magenta Devine, fronted fast-moving programmes about youth-friendly topics such as music and investigative exposés of issues like football hooliganism. It was all a bit amateurish, and famous for cutting off interviewees before they had said anything, but it did introduce an early sense of interactivity by running phone-ins and conducting phone polls. Guha and Devine became most closely associated with the long-running Rough Guide travel shows, which inserted some cultural and political awareness into the travel genre, but youth current affairs fell by the wayside, to be occasionally resuscitated in increasingly short-lived shows such as 2003’s Weekend with Rod Liddle and Katie Silverton. Then producer Ben Rich set out his stall on the BBC website:
We want to cover politics and current affairs in the way we talk about it amongst ourselves (most of our team scrape in under 45 too), sometimes serious, sometimes passionate and sometimes mocking. For whatever reason, people in our age group watch less television news and current affairs than older people, and we want to see if it is the style that is putting many of us off. Our presenters, former Today programme editor, Rod Liddle, and Kate Silverton, presenter of numerous BBC current affairs documentaries, and host of Sky News’ 3D programme, will, we hope, offer a sharp and occasionally humorous take on the week’s events.26
Apart from the inadvisability of attempting to attract a young audience by assuring them that the programme-makers mostly ‘scrape in under 45 too’, airing this show at 9 am on a Saturday morning, when most of the target audience would be safely in bed nursing the hangover or conquest of the night before, raises questions about the sanity of those BBC chiefs. This traditionally is a programme slot reserved for children’s programmes aimed at entertaining the kids while their parents sleep it off. Yet this was not some casual decision, but the outcome of a £100,000 year-long review to find out why the under-45s were not watching political programmes. It was a review undertaken because the BBC was approaching another of its regular jousts with the government over its licence fee renewal, and politicians were increasingly unhappy at their fall from favour in the public eye, instanced by collapsing electoral turnouts. So it was an important attempt to reinvigorate the democratic process.
Bizarrely, it chose to scrap relatively successful shows such as BBC1’s On the Record, with the authoritative, if silver-haired, John Humphreys at the helm, and introduce embarrassments like Weekend, with the curly-haired maverick Rod Liddle, 43, strangely at sea. Stephen Pile in The Daily Telegraph enthusiastically skewered this effort:
What has changed is that the firm but liberal Dimbleby-style interview has been replaced by the truculent, retarded adolescent, Liddle-style. In last week’s programme they did an
item examining why British youth lead the world in sexually transmitted diseases. Liddle was on absolutely top form. Always keen to advance his youth credentials, he said: ‘Young people have become more and more promiscuous, which on the face of it seems like a good thing to me.’ Cool, Rod . . . they are pretending to be hip, but the mask keeps slipping.
Why does the BBC not just employ a bona fide young person?27
Rod Liddle, it should be acknowledged, had been a successful editor of the flagship BBC Radio 4 Today programme, deft at behind-the-scenes manipulation of reporters and stories to keep this establishment water-pump refreshingly novel and challenging. But the skills of a good editor are very different from a good reporter, just as you wouldn’t expect a top notch football manager to return to the pitch as a promising striker. Exposing him in this way left Liddle ‘pouting at the camera like a moody teenager’,28in Pile’s phrase, and the show faced an early bath.
I have run this story at length not just for its entertainment value but for the light it throws on the snakepit in which reporters are trying to practise and hone their craft. The snares of the celebrity culture that has come to dominate so much of popular discourse in the twenty-first century make it all the harder for a good reporter to go about their serious business undistracted by the bright lights and blandishments on offer. Reporters such as Rageh Omaar have the very double-edged success of being catapulted from the relative obscurity of the newsroom to international celebrity overnight. The man they dubbed the ‘Scud Stud’ for his frontline Iraq war despatches was delivering the Huw Wheldon lecture within a few weeks and now shows up as one of the subjects on photographer Samir Hussein’s ‘Celebrities’
website, just below Tom Cruise.29In terms of the BBC’s diversity objectives, having a black reporter who is also a practising Muslim certainly helps diminish the perception of the corporation as being, in Greg Dyke’s words, ‘hideously white’. But it is a lot of pressure to place on one man’s shoulders, especially as his Baghdad dispatches inevitably attracted charges of bias from right-wing politicians and pundits. Rapidly headhunted by the nascent Al-Jazeera English channel in 2006, Omaar continues to front major documentaries for the BBC, but often I feel for the appeal of his name rather than the depth of his knowledge. His This World: Child Slavery (BBC2, March 2007) took him on an epic journey around a gigantic subject, involving an estimated 8.4 million children worldwide, but failed to mount a more effective critique than saying this was a bad thing. This was not reportage in depth.