News and current affairs used to form a central part of the output of television companies. Even where business people without any experience of news-gathering or broadcasting ran these companies, they were deferential to the moral seriousness of news and current affairs.
No longer. ITN's recent announcement that it would axe its head of foreign news and shed 200 jobs led to speculation that the balance of coverage would shift further from politics and foreign affairs to lifestyle and entertainment. Meanwhile, Andy Duncan, the BBC's relatively new head of marketing and communications, released shocking research about viewer "apathy and antipathy" to the political process.
Greg Dyke, the director general of the BBC, began his television career in current affairs; both by temperament and by appointment, he is inclined to give news and current affairs their full due. But Duncan's research tells Dyke that such areas are no longer popular; nor do they even attract the recognition vice pays to virtue - that of people saying: "I really ought to watch Panorama . . ." Now people are proud not to watch Panorama.
The research, indeed, tells a horrible story. It says that it is not only teenagers and twentysomethings who switch over or switch off when news and current affairs appear on screen. Older viewers, those in their thirties and forties, are just as likely to give Newsnight and On the Record a miss. The received wisdom had it that young people have better things to do than worry about the world - but as soon as they marry and settle down, they begin to do so. Nowadays, this is no longer the case: as they get older, they carry on not caring about the world - at least, not in the way that the BBC has long thought they should.
Focus groups, polls and individual interviews with the young show that they think politics boring and irrelevant; that they see politicians as corrupt, self-seeking and, above all, dishonest, mouthing insincerities in the hope of gaining or keeping office. They do not see politicians as playing a democratic, civic or mediating role: the much-touted "lack of deference" to politicians is more a matter of self-enclosed and self-perpetuating ignorance about their function, limits and indispensability.
Modern business people - the kind who run television companies - do not judge, but woo, their customers. (And it should be remembered that Greg Dyke, too, likes to call himself a businessman.) They look at research which shows that, as the graphs of "trust" in politicians and of attachment to TV political coverage zip down to single percentage figures, "trust" in brands - Heinz, Gap, Nike - ranges consistently in the seventies or eighties. Indeed, one-to-one research and focus groups show that younger folk think that brands and the corporations that make them have more of a social conscience than politicians do, because they use social-conscience projects in their advertising. Some also believe that Bob Geldof and Paul McCartney, who put on charity benefits, are much more honest, decent and moral than any politician.
The independent television companies have taken the straightforward view that if that is what the public wants, that is what it should get. The BBC is different, however. It is now embarking on a quest to recapture the lost boys and girls - the people who now, indeed, are the lost middle-aged men and women - who no longer believe that a knowledge of current affairs is a citizen's right and responsibility.
In this quest, the BBC should bear in mind the following:
1. many commentators believe that politics has moved from Westminster to the streets - and that this is where to find youth. This is wrong: global protests are sometimes well attended, and people do flock to political meetings, but they are a far less numerous minority than those who care about "straight" politics - and they probably don't watch TV much;
2. when people say "politics is irrelevant" they don't necessarily believe precisely that. Pollsters should consider the possibility that young people say such things as a kind of fashion statement, and probe further;
3. by forfeiting the space accorded to news and current affairs, the BBC risks losing the older audience, who are heavy TV-watchers;
4. the BBC would have no reason to exist in its present form if it did not believe that it should treat its audience as rational people for whom political knowledge is useful. As Michael Schudson puts it (in The Power of News): "Much can be done if news organisations assume a rational, intelligent, interested citizenry eager to inform itself . . . This sometimes is a fair description of the public, perhaps more often than we suspect."
The largest mistake of all is to assume that the people "out there" have another agenda than television. The agenda of the people "out there" is TV, to a huge extent. All generations watch several hours of TV every day; it structures lives as no other medium or institution. It also structures politics: from the interview to the soundbite, to the insight it can offer into the private life of the public figure, television determines the scope, nature and content of politics probably more than does the electorate.
The media are us. They must possess an adequate account of themselves before they attempt to "reach" the people.
Amanda Platell, page 24
