Taking Responsibility in a Chastened World
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Opening presentation at an editorial remit for the Community Channel
Date: 04/12/2008
Venue: BBC, New Broadcasting House, Manchester, UK
Article
One of the basic problems for revolutionaries is that society is fundamentally mimetic; I want what you want. This accounts for the 'hotel effect' in the media: if the BBC had been heterodox enough we would not have needed Channel 4; if local radio, BBC and commercial, had been really local, we would still have needed community radio but it would not have such a massive gap to fill. The second problem for revolutionaries is that the means of securing the end always subvert the end itself; people who are totally in favour of plurality are almost equally incapable of living with it: the Reformation denounced The Pope and got Calvin; the Russian revolution overthrew the Tsar and got Stalin. Power is seldom used to empower.
Both of these strong tendencies do not so much lie in wait for community media, they gnaw at its very vitals.
I think there are two pertinent points about the media in general which we need to put on the table:
- The first is that there is so little innovation and pluralism that we comment on it when we meet it; if it was as commonplace as it should be we wouldn't be talking about it. The prime offender is news coverage which stubbornly refuses to deal with the world we live in but actually deals with a world of press releases, lobbying, sham statistics, the possible rather than the probable, the frightening rather than the rational, tomorrow rather than yesterday, vandalising the fundamental human need for narrative, chopping off stories before they are finished to go onto the next thing.
- Secondly, news is just the most egregious example of the hegemony of middle class obsessions. There has been a lot of talk in the current economic turbulence about unemployed bankers but not office cleaners, a lot about house prices but not much about the plummet in the value of pensions. But the same exercise of intermediary power smears a thick layer of prejudice across all our media. We have taken over where the priests have largely left off and exercise enormous intermediary power; how often do we allow people to tell their own stories?
This is the fundamental challenge to and opportunity for community media. If we can just get our ego out of the way and revert to reporting and facilitating we will be doing our real job.
To be effective, however, we need to work out better financing, production and distribution models and this means getting away from the analogue vertical silo where a corporation commissions, finances, transmits and archives its own product.
Let me take those factors in turn:
- Commissioning is usually based on a set of assumptions which always need to be questioned. Here are two which plague do-gooders, community workers and, yes, community multimedia: first, poor people do not have problems, they are problems; secondly, as such the media they require is based round their problems but they evade this by resorting to escapism which means that they are thought not to be interested in material which is neither of these. How do we know? Well, we know what they consume, left to themselves, but we don't really know how they would behave with better incentives; as a general rule I usually allocate responsibility to the powerful to walk alongside the powerless but our usual assumption is that the alienated have responsibility for overcoming their alienation; up to a point, Lord Copper, up to a point; but is victimhood self indulgence or rational?
- The key factor which everybody cites as an obstacle to achievement is finance. My experience is that this is a device to avoid personal responsibility. I have never yet found a really good proposal that did not, sooner or later, find the backing it needs and, as my wife, a lifelong charity fund raiser once said, if raising money was easy charlatans would do it. It's that degree of difficulty which separates the committed from the dilettante. If you want to do something which most of society does not want to do, or, more likely, is simply indifferent to, it is bound to be difficult. If we don't like the difficulty we can do something else. In life the problem is not getting what we want but knowing what we want and citing financial constraints usually means we haven't sorted out the knowing what we want. But here's the good news. The third sector is stuffed with cash which it is wasting on its own media production silos which has implications for commissioning, finance, distribution and archiving. Most third sector media production is pathetic reportage dressed up as documentary when its only purpose is fund raising. The reason that the third sector has chronically punched below its weight is that it doesn't believe its own rhetoric about innovation and isn't confident to sell itself on the basis of its product; and I don't blame it. But this is where there is a massive symbiotic possibility if both community media and the third sector are prepared to tell each other the truth.
- Distribution in the digital age is totally different from the analogue when material might only be broadcast once and then destroyed. Of course the essence of very local media is that it speaks to local needs through the voices of local people; but nobody writes good social history without aggregating diverse material; one of the phenomena I notice when accessing media from global corporations to community stations is how the same pathetic piece of actuality turns up on so many different channels. It is as if we have unthinkingly picked up the habits of newspapers which coalesce round one or two images of a news story. Of course there is sometimes one news clip that is so stunning that it comes to symbolise a story, becoming iconic; but life isn't usually like that; which brings me back almost to the beginning. The media bore me because it's always the same perspectives, the same people, the same style, the same posture, the same cult. Now you might think that archiving is boring but retrieval is the necessary precondition for living content; if you can't find it, you can't sell it.
So, in summary, we need to think much more about what we really want and commit ourselves to getting it, being flexible about how we achieve our end. I suspect that one of our fundamental problems is that when we say we want community media some of us actually want media which speak to the community; and we are rumbled. I remember when I started out as a BBC Radio 4 journalist that all my colleagues swore that they were committed to radio but they actually saw it as a stepping stone to television.
The stakes are high. I think that in the run-up to 2015 it will be impossible for any political party to justify the BBC monopoly of the flat broadcasting tax which we call the licence fee - why should it be used to pay for Eastenders or Premier League football? - but there is still a healthy public appetite for public service broadcasting. What started as Ofcom's Public Service Publisher proposal will continue to evolve; but I think we have to be careful not to get our priorities the wrong way round. Instead of calling for 'top slicing' as a matter of principle, because we somehow feel we have an entitlement, we should base our claim on the content we make. If we are an orthodox, pallid, timid but lower quality clone of the existing major public service and commercial set-ups, in what does our claim lie? We need to learn from the failure of ITV to get traction on this issue.
The good thing about economic down-turns is that they squeeze self indulgence out of the system. There were many people in the glorious days from the last depression until this who went to the gym to see and be seen; but the actual point is to develop muscle. That is what we need to do now.