Speeches

Broadcasting: A Question of Trust

The Case for Zero Tolerance

1. This morning I want to look at the issue of trust in broadcasting.
   
   
   • Why it matters.
   • Why it is in jeopardy.
   • What we can do about it.

   It's not a subject that is usually at the front of our minds. We spend a great deal of time wrestling with the big digital changes that are re-shaping our industry. We also engage routinely in running debates about dumbing down, about the shows that cause shock and awe across the leader columns of our more respectable journals like the Daily Mail.

   
   
2. But behind all this there is an equally significant issue that is going to be critical as waves of new video content providers jostle with us in the new digital environment. It is the principle that has turned British broadcasting into such an admired and civilised national asset: the trust of the audience; the knowledge that what you see on the screen is what it says it is.
   
   
   
3. I am going to suggest this morning that trust is not sufficiently valued by all today's programme makers across all of the programme genres. I sometimes doubt there is even a basic understanding of its importance and value. I want to sound a wake up call to my fellow professionals with a reminder that viewers' trust is the most precious commodity in the old media armoury as we move into the digital world of plenty.As our different screens are increasingly invaded by new unlicensed video services of variable authenticity, trust and integrity must be one of the crucial distinguishing features of what we have to offer. Earlier this year we were confronted with serious allegations concerning the operation of premium rate phone services across the industry. I have made it clear – and others have too - that I do not intend to tolerate any breach of trust within ITV's output, whether it comes from in house producers or independent suppliers.
   
   
   
4. Television is not a run-of-the-mill manufacturing industry. Our challenges are not the same as working out the future for an old smokestack business, or deciding how to apply the latest technology in a car factory. Television is an intimate, narrative medium. Its programmes - both fact and fiction - tell stories that inform and shape people's knowledge and their views of the world around them. It is a creative business, and it has effects and expectations, responsibilities and resonances, that go far beyond the simple manufacture of programmes and the sale of airtime. At the core of British broadcasting there is that highly sensitive relationship with audiences – I prefer to call it a contract.
   
   
5. This morning I want to take a hard look at how we regard that relationship as we start the white knuckle journey, shooting the digital rapids. Above all I want to consider how we can enhance and sustain our historic reputation for trust and honest-dealing in a world of increasing complexity and financial pressure within our own operations, and increasing pressure outside from new competitors with different value systems.
   
   
6. The most obvious area of course is the future of impartiality in news broadcasting in the digital world. The arguments here at the sharp end are well- rehearsed, so I'll just sketch the outlines. The end of analogue transmission will mark the final end of spectrum scarcity, and with it the death knell of regulation and licensing based on the privilege to broadcast. There will undoubtedly be a move on new services to much more of the editorialised content we are already seeing in the US: Fox News, shock jocks, stations espousing particular religious beliefs. The internet is also pushing electronic communication more toward the expectations we have of print, where democracy is celebrated in the freedom to let a thousand opinions flourish and contend.
   
   
7. At the same time I think it is clear that there is enormous value in the trust which audiences place in the present concept and practices of impartiality. The idea, based originally in the power and scarcity of the airwaves, is that the public is well served by broadcast news and information that strives to present factual information without an editorial slant, in as comprehensive manner as possible. Viewers and listeners are thus left sufficiently and – hopefully objectively - informed to form their own judgements.
   
   
8. The evidence continues to show that audiences still value this approach, and that they believe that its promises are largely fulfilled, which is good news. Let a thousand opinions contend elsewhere: but let them be properly signposted, and let's ensure that the gold standards of impartiality are maintained where they are expected and where they are valued.
   
   
9. Those are of course the high level, sharp end issues. They are familiar, and they are indeed very important. but they are by no means the only areas and issues in which the relationship of trust between broadcasters and their audiences is crucial. I think we can all agree that integrity and trust are indivisible. Taking the bows for impeccably professional, impartial and authoritative news programmes is not enough if the integrity of other parts of the output is being questioned and found wanting. The BBC Trust recently published its Report on Impartiality, rightly placing the issue centre stage. But its scope also extended to cover programmes like The Vicar of Dibley, recognising that fair-dealing and transparency matters across all genres. In the highly competitive world of broadcasting brands and reputations are increasingly important. If we want to stand out as beacons of objectivity and probity in a world of increasing editorialisation, then we have to be honest and trustworthy through the whole 360 degrees of our output, not just in our flagship news bulletins.
   
   
10. That is why the recent issues concerning premium phone lines have serious implications for us all. It was, frankly, an unexpected, shocking, but very necessary wake-up call. Despite the commercial implications, I called an immediate halt to ITV's PRTS services while a rigorous independent review examined the scope and implications of the problem. Swift action was necessary, and swift action was taken. Other broadcasters have also acted to end the abuses and malpractices that have been revealed. But it doesn't end there. The discovery of these problems calls for a pretty fundamental re-examination of two key issues. First, how economic, technical and organisational changes have strained our ability to ensure the highest standards throughout the whole production chain. And second, what it has highlighted in our attitudes to our audiences: how – in some of the cases - was such a casual contempt for audience allowed to develop?
    
    
11. On the question of the production chain, we have been vividly reminded of how the world has changed since the early days of the BBC and then ITV, when almost everyone was on the company payroll, and when people stayed in the same jobs, even on the same programmes, for large parts of their entire careers. Production teams knew each other very well. The editorial chain of command was short, clear and effective. Organisations had their own internal ethos, their own collective memory, of what was and what was not good form and good practice.
    
    
12. Of course the old duopoly had a significant downside in terms of poor job mobility, glacially slow promotion prospects, claustrophobia and a disinclination to accept ideas from outside the company. The subsequent growth of the independent sector has been invigorating not only for those individuals with the skills and the initiative to set up their businesses, but also in refreshing the pool of creativity. It has stimulated a vigorous market for talent and for ideas, and it finally broke the antediluvian industrial practices of the old system.
    
    
13. But it has also presented new challenges. The freedoms of independent production were mirrored by an increasing casualisation of employment in-house as well, with many more short-term contracts and much less individual security of employment. The editorial ethos is no longer created and sustained by the broadcaster alone: it is shared with the producer who has won the commission, and by the people he or she pays to execute it. There are inevitable commercial pressures: Many in the workforce – in house and out – face short term pressures on professional survival – the temptation to take short cuts may not always chime with the over-arching editorial values of the broadcaster, and may not be easily spotted. greater mobility means less company loyalty, and less time or inclination to attend to abstract corporate values that may seem irrelevant in the immediate heat of a production crisis.
    
    
14. There is ever increasing pressure on time and resources to ‘get it right now', and sort out the consequences later. Producers are always under pressure to come up with what the commissioning editors – their paying customers - want: it is not hard to imagine a producer tempted to cut corners to deliver the over-hyped promise that won the commission, but which couldn't actually be delivered without cutting corners. Cutting corners is another way of saying cheating. I say this not as a comment specific to the independent sector alone, but as an acknowledgment of the very different world we are all now operating in. It's not a problem with one sector, or limited to those who work at the coalface. We all need to understand and to deal with the industry as it is, not as it was. And that is as true for senior managers and commissioners as it is for producers and researchers.
    
    
15. The PRTS problems highlight another consequence of the increasingly complex chain of inputs into modern television. Contracting out technical services is not just a technical matter. Mistakes that are made – and then in some instances inexcusably covered up – have a profound effect on trust. To pretend on air that lines are still open when they are not isn't a technical matter: it's cheating the viewer, however small and unidentifiable any individual viewer's actual loss may be. We've had a very sharp reminder of the breadth and complexity of our responsibilities. It's not just about our increasing dependence on the growing range of technical skills now needed to service our output. It's also about the catastrophic potential of misjudgements made in broadcaster's names, but without their knowledge, let alone their consent. Bridging that information gap is a serious and pressing question for us all.
    
    
16. And we have also learned - yet again - what we should always have remembered. The truth will usually get out, somehow. Simple self preservation tells us that we have to get our house in order. More important: it is the right thing to do.
    
    
17. So what do I propose? Well, first of all, we must continually remind ourselves that the trust which our audiences have in our fair dealing as broadcasters is not negotiable, whatever the pressures, editorial or financial. That involves understanding that audiences and ratings are not the same thing. Ratings are numbers. They are very important numbers. They are a key to revenue generation in the commercial sector, and part of the justification for the licence fee at the BBC. Intelligently used, as servants not masters, they are excellent guides and a good currency.
    
    
18. But audiences are people. The ratings say five million – that is simple arithmetic: but it is an audience of five million individuals, each one of whom judges our output as a whole, each one of whom has some degree of trust in our brand, in everything we do. There are some who think differently. A senior BBC News executive wrote recently in Broadcast that respect for news is unaffected by editorial manipulation in other genres. He wrote: "GMTV, Richard and Judy and Blue Peter may have been found wanting, but I don't think that this means people will trust the news less". That, if I may say so, is a very big assumption. If the Vicar of Dibley impacts on overall perceptions of impartiality, then any of those examples undermines wider trust in the broadcaster.
    
    
19. Long before the recent case of Blue Peter picking a supposed phone-in winner from children who happened to be on a studio visit - back in 1962 in fact - it probably seemed a good idea for the then producers of the programme to conceal the fact that Petra the dog had died, and substitute a lookalike puppy. Why upset the children? Why have the bother of explaining? But those children are today's adult viewers, who now know that something they implicitly trusted from the BBC was not true, and that by extension what you see on television broadcasting can be a deception. A trivial example? You could argue that point. But in broadcasting any deliberate untruth is a dangerous step, and one fraught with unknown consequences, of which discovery is only the first problem. And I cannot go along with the further assertion by the writer in Broadcast that concern about manipulation in certain formats is no more than dinner party chatter among ‘media literate' groups of people. How very patronising! How very revealing.
    
    
20. I am similarly offended by the recent response of one broadcaster's public statement in response to a press story that actors being hired by a popular late night show to pretend to be members of the public. The statement claimed that "viewers understand entertainment shows sometimes contain elements of choreography". In other words, you can't be sure that whether you are seeing is what you are being told it is, or whether it is some deceitful sleight of hand. I remember a comment on this by someone on the Today show a while back, saying that it was outrageous that there were people going on television pretending to be real people! [pause]. Quite funny as a soundbite, but also a deadly serious point.
    
    
21. The publicly known examples of blatant editorial dishonesty in the UK have been mercifully few over the years, though we have all surely heard the stories which over the years have become have become industry folk myths. My favourite is that of the famous news reporter in the 1960's, who used to send back reports from the world's trouble spots with instructions to "dub on gunfire". One day his long-suffering cameraman sent back rushes including a sequence which began with the reporter lying in a gutter, describing in urgent tones the fire-fight that had just started close by. The cameraman had had enough. The frame slowly widened to show behind him on the pavement a white-coated waiter, carrying a tray of drinks, looking down on the breathless hero in some bemusement. [pause]. We may laugh, but it was not a joke that was shared by the viewing millions, who had accepted the apparent validity of his earlier reports.
    
    
22. More recently a few cases of deliberate deceit have become public knowledge. in 1996 Carlton's documentary The Connection was found to have included supposedly undercover filming which had been fabricated. The ITC rightly levied a substantial fine for this major breach of editorial trust - £2million. The invention of evidence seems rare, though unlabelled reconstructions may be more common. In 1999 Channel 4 was fined £150,000 after emerged that members of a film crew had posed as clients in the documentary Too Much, Too Young, about rent boys. And in 2003 the ITC fined Sky News £50,000 for a faked report from Iraq. It's not an extensive catalogue of serious systemic failure, but it is enough to show that it can and does happen, and – like the folk myths I mentioned - suggests perhaps that it may have happened more often than we might care to imagine.
    
    
23. All human activity is of course fallible. that is why we try so hard to set up the right structures, and to develop the right cultures to guard against mistakes and misjudgements. But I am arguing today that the structures that largely worked in the past have come under increasing strain. The editorial cultures that they were designed to protect sometimes seem to have worn a little thin. In the near future, the very volume of output being produced, and the character of some of the new suppliers, are going to add exponentially to the challenge.
    
    
24. Part of the solution is of course to bring our procedures right up to date. It's not enough to regret the lapses that have come to light, to issue apologies and to warn staff and suppliers that they must not be repeated. We must also be pro-active to ensure that the lengthening chains of production are effectively supervised to guarantee that at every step the interests of viewers are properly and transparently addressed. That is a clear and pressing responsibility. As I'm sure you know, ITV has appointed Deloitte to conduct a review of PRTS in all relevant ITV programmes over the past two years. I don't know yet what the report will it contain, but on present form, it could make uncomfortable reading. In the meantime I have been pleased to hear that Deloitte has received detailed responses from production companies, and most particularly from ITV Productions, where many of the production teams are our own staff. Whatever the contents of the report, we will act on it, and do everything in our power to prevent any further systems failures or misguided editorial responses.
    
    
25. But we need to go much further. We need to recognise that this is not a little local difficulty, a short but manageable crisis. It's not just a problem of systems, or technical malfunctions. Nor is it just a question of bad judgements made in the heat of the moment. There is the more fundamental question of how we think of our relationship with our audiences. What we – and everyone in PSB television production – need to understand is that it can never, ever, be right to deceive viewers. I do not accept that the public is happy with concept of "choreography" where fiction is presented as truth, where deceit is condoned as one of the producer's professional skills. I do not accept the moral relativism implicit in the idea that there is a sliding scale of honesty in broadcasting, with the news at one end and entertainment at the other. I do not accept that truth and transparency are more important in some programmes than in others. If it was wrong for Carlton to transmit a documentary which faked undercover filming, it is equally wrong for actors to be hired to pretend that they are members of the public in talk shows. Deceit is deceit, and it is corrosive of trust in whichever genre it appears.
    
    
26. Please understand that I am not talking about the accepted grammatical devices of television, of the cutaways that shorten time, or re-constructions that are properly labelled as such. Similarly, if the audience is in on the act, then I have no problem. No one thinks that the illusionist is actually going to saw the lady in half. Fiction is understood for what it is, though I have been regularly astounded -from the death of Grace Archer onwards – by the evidence that some fans apparently feel real grief when their favourite soap characters are killed off! No, what I am concerned with is deliberately misleading audiences. It should never happen. And what I am advocating is a ‘zero tolerance' approach to it.
    
    
27. I was Director of Programmes at LWT during the heyday of televised wrestling. It purported to be a sport, albeit one with outrageous and colourful contestants. In fact it was highly rehearsed, and we casually assumed an open secret with the audience: not real sport, but entertainment. Nearly thirty years on, and I'm not quite so sure about that. I don't know, looking back through the mists of time whether the readings on Hughie Green's "clapometer" had any factual basis at all. Some years later it was alleged that when contestants on Blind Date were offered envelopes which apparently offered them a choice of three or four different holiday destinations there were at most only two, so the second couple had no choice at all. If that is true (and I don't know if it was) then it was a fix, or to put it bluntly, a deceit perpetrated on the contestants, and on the audience.
    
    
28. Deceit is not only embarrassing when it is revealed. It is also corrosive of attitudes to the public. It holds viewers in contempt. It sees them – as I have already suggested – merely aggregated as ratings, not as individuals. And for goodness sake, it's not as if the zero tolerance approach is somehow too difficult to understand or to implement. It's the easiest thing in the world. I'm told that in the past wildlife programmes sometimes succumbed to the temptation to shoot rare animals in a zoo, then pass them off as living in the wild. How much more honest – and fascinating – to watch the "diary" piece at the end of each edition of Life on Earth, where David Attenborough's producers thrilled us by revealing how their amazing sequences were actually shot in the wild.
    
    
29. And if the problem is money, honesty still works. The tabloids ran a story recently alleging that Graham Norton announced during his show that they were cutting over from the studio to a pub ‘somewhere in London' for a wine-tasting event. The report said that the pub in question was in fact an adjacent set, where some hired help was enjoying a tipple? But why not just make a gag of that transition, and come clean with the viewers? If the computers have crashed, it may look more professional to continue smoothly and effortlessly on air as if nothing has happened, but it is in fact the very opposite of professionalism. If it seems to be a good idea at the time, try this test: how would it look on the front pages of tomorrow's newspapers? As President Nixon famously discovered, manufacturing and sustaining lies is much harder than telling the truth. So if in 2007, the puppy does die, why not tell the truth instead of finding a ringer?
    
    
30. The other compelling practical argument for zero tolerance is that you don't have to draw any artificial lines between genres. If you think it's OK to have unidentified actors in a chat show, is it OK in a property show? If it's OK in a property show, what about a gentle life-style documentary? Then what about a more serious documentary? And so on and so on. If you believe in harmless ‘choreography' then there has to be a line somewhere where it stops being harmless. But who draws it? Who polices it? Who bends it? If deliberate deceit is tacitly condoned in some areas, the danger is that the bad coin starts to drive out the good. It leads to a temptation to take short cuts with research, and to play fiction as fact, rationalised by arguments of ‘telling the greater truth' more effectively. You simply cannot alternate between treating audiences with respect, and treating them with what is effectively contempt.
    
    
31. Zero tolerance of deceit really isn't a difficult concept. The key is transparency. If you can't be straight with the audience without the item or the programme collapsing, then you should ask whether you should be doing it at all. Commercially, being straight obviously applies to advertising, which has rigorous codes, and to newer areas like product placement. What matters is not that particular products are appear on screen, but that their presence should be flagged and acknowledged for what it is. In the end, it is about trust. If you want the audience to trust you as a broadcaster, then the quid pro quo is the broadcaster MUST trust its audiences with the truth – at all times.
    
    
32. At the end of Robert Redford's wonderful film Quiz Show, (about the quiz show scandals of the 50's and 60's on US network TV) the producer of hugely popular programme in question Twenty One explains to a Congressional Committee that the fixing of the questions and answers did no one any harm. The contestants made lots of money; the public loved it; and in consequence the ratings were terrific, to the great satisfaction of the advertisers and the network bosses and the shareholders. It was, he told the committee, "a victimless crime", and everyone knew that it was ‘just' entertainment. Well, I don't think so. There was a victim in that affair: it was the reputation of the broadcaster, and the price it paid was the trust of the viewer. You simply cannot bend the truth in any part of the output, with a nod and a wink, and joking that it's ‘just entertainment'. It matters more than we sometimes seem to realise these days.
    
    
33. In conclusion, let me state the core case for zero tolerance of deceit one last time. The trust that the public has generally shown for British broadcasting in the past is going to be one of our key assets in the cacophony of images and noises that is going to characterise the maturing digital world. it's not always going to be as easy as it was to deliver, but we would be crazy to start cutting corners now, and debase that asset. My argument is that we should be doing the exact opposite, and cleaning up our act now. it's the clever thing to do. it's also the right thing to do. It's time we re-established the primacy of that "contract of trust" with our audiences – and stick to it. Thank you.
    
    

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