EU Referendum: a cowed BBC, hardly the broadcasters finest hour
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- Category: Broadcasting
Broadcasters, like print journalists, are rightly being challenged by leading figures on the Remain side for the news media’s failure during the EU Referendum campaign to exercise sufficient scrutiny over the claims being made by Leave supporters.
Based on my 30 years as a BBC correspondent, from well before the 1975 referendum, I am in no doubt as to how viewers and listeners were short changed.
During the 1970s and 1980s there was always a clear divide during election campaigns between news stories and campaign reports.
Major announcements and developments were treated on their news value, as self-standing items, and any political ramifications were covered in separate balanced packages on the day’s campaigning, later in the bulletin on programme.
But in the 2016 referendum campaign the BBC’s news value judgement seemed to be totally awry.
Pub regulars hardly a representative sample for European Union referendum vox pops
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- Category: Media Ethics
Seeking political opinions from drinkers in the local pub, or from shoppers in the town centre, is a popular device for television and radio journalists and has always had its limitations, but never more so than during the polarised campaign leading up to the European Referendum.
Having spent many years myself collecting vox pops – a staple ingredient for any broadcaster out on the road – I know how unrepresentative these on-the-spot surveys can be.
Perhaps the greatest drawback is that such straw polls are often conducted in the late morning, or early afternoon, having to be completed ahead of time, ready for editing so as to be included in packaged reports to be transmitted in the early or late evening programmes and bulletins.
A major flaw in the practice is that most day-time shoppers or public house customers tend to be retired or self-employed, local tradesmen and the like, a sample that is invariably unrepresentative of the population at large.
This time constraint tends to exclude most if not all those of working-age who are unlikely to be either day-time shoppers or drinkers. The same problem arises on a general election polling day. Invariably TV crews dispatched to get early footage find that most of the morning voters leaving polling stations are pensioners.
Black and white photographs of Battle of Orgreave saved the day for arrested pickets
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- Category: Trade Union Reporting
Black and white photographs taken by friends, family and supporters at the 1984 Battle of Orgreave helped subsequently to demolish Police prosecutions for rioting that were levelled against 95 striking mineworkers.
But at the time, very few close-up – and potentially incriminating – pictures made it into the news coverage of the mainstream media.
Most press photographers and television camera crews were penned in behind police lines, and therefore kept largely to the perimeter of the eight-hour confrontation between pickets and mounted police.
While newspapers and television news bulletins captured the scale of the conflict – and especially the graphic images of police on horseback charging through the pickets – there was nothing like the visual record of hand-to-hand combat that would be available today as a result of the abundance of camera phone pictures and videos that invariably emerges from demonstrations and protests.
No wonder the iconic photograph taken by John Harris of Lesley Boulton, cowering as a mounted police officer approached her with a raised baton, has become an enduring image of the strike, reproduced repeatedly to illustrate the violent response of the police as the pickets assembled outside the Orgreave coke works on June 18, 1984.
Baiting the media: Donald Trump’s tirades against journalists mirror Arthur Scargill’s tactics in miners’ strike
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- Category: Articles
Publicly pillorying journalists en masse, and using them as a whipping boy to bolster support at rallies and mass meetings, is a risky but potentially rewarding tactic for a politician desperate to grab the news media’s attention.
I learned at first hand during the speeches of Arthur Scargill, the bombastic former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, how his regular ploy of launching a tirade of abuse about the ulterior motives of journalists, photographers and camera crews helped to stiffen the resolve of strikers in the 1984-85 pit dispute.
Thirty years later, newspaper reports of Donald Trump’s rabble-rousing speeches in the US Presidential election primaries – and of his repeated tirades against those inside the cordoned-off media pen – reminded me of comparable behaviour by both Scargill, and a decade earlier, by the late Reverend Ian Paisley, when he was out on the stump in Northern Ireland.
All three realised that one sure-fire way to counter vilification and hostile questioning by journalists was to turn the tables, safe in knowledge that their die-hard supporters would soon be hollering in agreement, banding together in singling out the media as a common enemy.
Memoirs of a celebrated government press supremo revel in the early years of spin
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- Category: The Role of Spin Doctors
Before Spin suggests there was once an age of innocence for government information officers, but Keith McDowall’s insider account of his time with the civil service in the 1960s and 1970s reveals that he was already trying out some of the routines that would later become common place under the likes of Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell.
In McDowall’s day, the “heavies” – i.e. the serious papers – were the only show in town: the highest accolade for a ministerial press officer was to secure a positive comment piece in the leader column of a national daily such as The Times.
By the 1980s, after switching to become the press supremo at the Confederation of British Industry, McDowall recalled the thrill he felt on finding that one of his stories had merited a favourable page one splash in the Sun, an achievement that still excites the spin doctors of today.
Blurb for McDowall’s book castigates his successors in Downing Street and Whitehall for succumbing to the concept of spin, a media strategy that he considers “naïve and lacking in integrity”.
Before Spin captures the era when the national press dominated the news agenda, long before the days of the 24-hour news cycle, rolling television news and the constant reaction, and unpredictable impact, of social media.
