Garbage in, garbage out

The revolution in new technologies has brought unprecedented opportunities to the world. But, asks Roger Graef, is our expanding universe a dangerous illusion?

As root-and-branch changes transform public service broadcasting, the government plans to toughen up the boards that regulate the media. But will they know enough to challenge the professionals? Will there be room for public debate before the changes are set in stone? (The passive performance of BBC governors, the Press Complaints Commission and the board of Channel 4 is not encouraging.) In this digital age of exploding information, does the implied social contract between creators, journalists and their audiences still hold up? And what form of ethics will work as a basis for the media in the new century? How will it stand up to the three deadly pressures: deadlines, budgets and ratings?

I learnt my film-making skills from expert crews, and thrashed out many thorny questions with them. These days, desperate for stories to beat the opposition, we rush young graduates - often on their own - into complex environments such as disasters or riots. Thanks to new technology, they can send stories straight on air without a crew to talk to. I have spent the past 20 years filming the police, and so feel confident about my own opinions, but what if you were a sports writer suddenly transferred to the news desk, or if you were to find yourself in a war zone in a country where the people speak four languages, none of which is yours?

In the age of spin, journalistic integrity matters even more. In the Gulf war, both Saddam Hussein and George Bush watched the bombing of Baghdad live on CNN and acted on what they saw. Now there are many 24-hour news channels, all fighting to ensure they have the same story. It's bad enough that the agenda narrows while the channels proliferate. But what if the original report was wrong, as with the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?

We need to rethink our responsibilities to the audience, because many programme-makers fail to keep up with viewing habits. We still craft programmes in a linear way, as if viewers watch films in the same way that they read, from beginning to end, believing that explanations at the top will make sense of scenes later on. That includes introductory warnings about sex or violence. But the randomness of most TV encounters negates such care. Many homes have sets blaring in several rooms. Half of all British children now have a TV set in their bedroom. When people do sit down to watch a programme, the usual interruptions - telephone, food, sex, babies and other calls of nature - interrupt the flow. Zapping between channels is a family blood sport.

As digital households increase, the time people spend watching any one programme will decrease. As terrestrial audiences fragment, pressure grows to win them back. Desperation mounts to hold the centre with an endless stream of identikit "yoof" and leisure programmes. Meanwhile, older, casual viewers with more varied tastes drift away - that's most of us. While schedulers woo the sacred 18-34 audience, are they properly accountable to the several hundred "tribes" of viewers that have been identified by the BBC?

In terms of ethical issues, the same kind of shotgun mentality is at work. And we don't even notice. We hoover up programmes and spit them out so quickly that we are unaware of, or unwilling to recognise, the issues they raise. Sensationalism and exploitation have been with us as long as newspapers. But there are certain "age"-specific casualties in our so-called information explosion. The speed, the fewer people involved in making and delivering "product" (as it is now called), and the new technology have created a genetically modified breed of TV producers and media journalists. They have lost the moral gene. It's not that they don't agree with this kind of conversation: they do not understand it. They are, in effect, morally colour-blind.

Many of them work on "real-life" television, which is both cheap and popular. The confessional talk shows are our equivalent of throwing Christians to lions. Voyeuristic junk docs about ordinary people - cousins of Big Brother - trade on their rows, casual sexual habits or boorish behaviour. I must accept some responsibility, having pioneered, along with others, the style of film-making that has come to be known as fly-on-the-wall. But we have always used a contract that gives participants clear rights that protect the kind of privacy and dignity I would want for myself. These days, people put themselves in unbearable positions, and simply do not realise they are doing it.

New technology confronts all programme-makers with genetic modification in the name of economy and efficiency: as budgets and schedules shrink, we lose vital space for human factors - surprise, and the room to fail, to make mistakes, to rethink and work on them until we get them right. As demand mounts for instant strong results, ethical concerns are inevitably downgraded.

Much fuss has been made about staging in documentaries. However, this misses the point that most factual programmes have been staged since the heyday of great filmmakers such as John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings - but with a great deal more time for research, shooting and editing than we are afforded today. Robert Flaherty found himself having to teach Eskimos to hunt seals and Aran fishermen how to catch sharks like their ancestors, because their traditions had been lost. Flaherty spent years working with his subjects, sympathetic both to their desires and interests. Such care is much harder now, as budgets cut time for the process to the practical minimum. Yet that is the test we should all hope to pass: to protect the bond of trust between ourselves, the subjects of our films and our viewers.

The care and subtlety of the pioneers' work highlights another paradox: as our ability to link to all parts of the globe increases, our interest in doing so seems to be decreasing - unless some place happens to be high on the current news agenda, where foreign subjects are generally taboo. Just as our world is expanding and growing more complex, our conceptual tools for dealing with it are becoming simplified.

"Think global, act local," goes one current cliche. But what is the media relationship to local culture? As cable and satellite wire the world, Thailand gains 10,000 Manchester United supporters. Do they support their local teams as well? Are we actually getting any closer to understanding other countries and cultures? Or are the language and the architecture of this virtual global village homogenising into one, Americanised view of the world? Ironically, in this information age, a living language dies every three weeks.

Travelling through the new media is like walking through a nightmare version of a street market, with everyone shouting at once. As computer buffs used to say: "Garbage in, garbage out." Can we ever sift our way through the junk to something that we could recognise as "true"?

Yet the chance to explore global sources on almost any subject at a click brings a potential cultural diversity and richness previously quite impossible to many parts of the world. The strength of the new media is that they are relatively cheap and accessible, and that they bypass conventional means of control. We can reschedule our own channels to interact with programme-makers, to make video records of our lives or put a webcam in our homes for anyone who cares to watch. Censorship is virtually impossible.

Creatively, the net and digital channels offer us all the chance to break out of conventional modes of reporting and presentation, to realise our wildest dreams both personally and collectively. With the capacity to create any patterns of image and sound we can conceive of - and transmit across the world in seconds - these new tools change our ideas of time, privacy, culture and entertainment. They transform the way we do business, conduct courtship, engage with journalism and politics. We can challenge authority in ways undreamt of before. As governments and multinational corporations become more secretive, the internet challenges the aristocracy of information. This extends at its most extreme to recipes for bomb-making, exchanged by terrorists and neofascists, to positive initiatives that combine democracy with technology to bypass state control.

There is now a website for Palestinian and Israeli scholars to debate their conflicting versions of the past 2,000 years. It is an exchange still possible only on the web, but one that may lead to greater understanding on their contested ground. The savagery in Sierra Leone was brought home most vividly to the rest of the world by a courageous local journalist, Sorious Samura, who was armed only with a small digital camera and the courage to go where the rest of the media would not - on to the streets. Dissident voices now use the net to circumvent authoritarian regimes.

But new technology itself is not enough to keep this momentum going. There has to be the vision, the will and the imagination to use it well. What may seem an unstoppable opening up of global dialogue and debate may be challenged by global commerce. It's another cultural paradox: as technology allows for more communication channels, the market moves in the opposite way. In a grotesque example of economic Darwinism, media barons swallow each other to create ever larger empires, linking mobile-phone companies to net servers to film studios to press and magazine chains to television and radio networks to large independent production companies. It is called vertical integration - and the goal is not diversity but control and profit.

What seems to us an expanding universe is, in fact, circumscribed by a decreasing number of media giants. Like the three-mile nets used by Japanese fishermen, they sweep up all living things in their way. Those who control the manner in which this new technology develops say that they do so in response to their customers. Rupert Murdoch made this argument in an Edinburgh TV Festival lecture a decade ago. He demanded that the BBC be relegated to the status of PBS in the United States and let the market rule. His views were greeted with silence by the assembled producers and executives. Only a handful of us challenged that vision.

Such apparently democratic concern hides the wider frame of the relationship: viewers are still seen largely as passive consumers, not empowered dreamers using this unprecedented opportunity to break the mould. The penurious state of public television in the US offers the best reason to preserve the public service status of both the BBC and Channel 4 against all challengers. We need them more than ever to lead the way in the digital age.

The attempt by both the BBC and Channel 4 to use ratings (rather than wider social and cultural values) as a driver to confirm their value as providers of a public service has the opposite effect: it offers evidence for critics to justify subscription or full-scale privatisation. Those that live by numbers will be judged only by numbers.

Still, despite the uncertainties, this new media age gives me the chance to reinvent myself as a film-maker and journalist yet again. As the agenda of terrestrial television shrinks and curls at the edges like a railway sandwich, many film-makers will seize the chance to use new digital channels and the net to narrowcast to interested viewers. There is the chance to take the audience into a different time-frame, to invite them for a proper meal instead of feeding them instantly forgettable soundbites - junk food for the brain.

On 24-hour news channels, instead of duplicating rivals' coverage, looping the same data hourly, we can cover issues and context all too often left out. We can see far more foreign news not solely linked to disaster or civil war, far more regional and local news, more about the second and third level of agendas - economic, scientific and cultural developments not sexy enough to make it on to terrestrial channels.

I don't see why we should abandon our values in this Brave New World, but we cannot leave its future to market forces. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, then we must be prepared to pay it. The market is not friendly to the kind of creative freedom and journalistic independence that is now available. Nor can we leave it to anonymous regulators often out of their depth and lacking a coherent vision of public service television.

We must value it enough to protect it ourselves.

Roger Graef was a founding director of Channel 4 and is now the News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media and Communication at Oxford University

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