The Great Global Switch-Off
International Coverage in UK Public
Service Broadcasting
A Report by Phil Harding
1
THE GREAT GLOBAL SWITCH-OFF
Contents
Preface ....................................................................................... 3
1.0
Executive Summary .......................................................................................... 5
2.0
Introduction ................................................................................ 9
3.0
Why International Coverage Matters ........................................ 11
4.0
The Present Day ........................................................................ 13
5.0
Audience ................................................................................... 19
6.0
The Future of International News ............................................. 23
7.0
International Coverage Today ................................................... 26
8.0
Pressures and Structures .......................................................... 30
9.0
On the Horizon ......................................................................... 36
10.0 Recommendations ......................................................................................... 40
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………..43
About the author………………………………………………………………..43
2
Preface
“There’s a very ‘purist’ view of what international coverage should be.
Our critics have got to remember that the competition for audiences is
very fierce out there.” Senior Executive
International coverage is commonly agreed to be a vital test of the value of any
public service broadcasting system. We all seem to think that showing people the
world is a Good Thing. Yet, no one seems to have defined why bringing the world
to people in Britain is important or even what this kind of Public Service
Broadcasting looks like in the digital age.
International coverage is a bit like broccoli. It may not be particularly appetising
but it is good for us. Yet, no one has done the research to work out the real
nutritional value or the correct measures to ensure that it is retained as a staple
within the national media diet. This report attempts to do just that.
This is a critical moment for international coverage in Public Service Broadcasting.
Understanding the world and taking an active interest in it has never been more
important to our political, cultural, economic and environmental health. Public
Service Broadcasting, with television at its heart, is still the predominant way that
people can know about their world and what it means to them. At the same time,
that public service broadcasting system in the UK faces momentous upheavals.
The quality and breadth of British television is still enviously regarded by those
outside of the UK. However, there is a real danger that we are sleep-walking into
a broadcasting future that is virtually free of international coverage.
A great global switch off looms as the review of Public Service Broadcasting
moves forward. Commitments to international coverage sit quietly in charters of
the broadcasters with no strategy, measures or accountability to ensure that
these promises are fulfilled.
It would be an act of cultural vandalism that would replace the prospect of a
cosmopolitan and interconnected view of the world with a parochial, passport-free
version of reality. All too soon our PSB landscape could resemble the narrow
scope of mainstream American TV.
The mapping in this report shows that we already suffer from a grossly distorted
view of the world where international coverage means wildlife or travel TV. This
needs rebalancing. This report is not just a call to broadcasters but to all those
people who claim to value international coverage.
Without urgent action, there is a very real threat that the international agenda
could fade from our mainstream channels. This future is not the outcome of
design or a result of malicious intent but benign apathy as those that should
champion it stay quiet.
We believe it is vital that a serious and imaginative debate around international
coverage is held as part of shaping our public service media. This paper written
by Phil Harding with the support of Oxfam, Polis and the International
Broadcasting Trust is a way of starting that conversation with the media world,
the policy-makers and the public.
3
•
Oxfam believes that people in Britain benefit from knowing about the
world so that they can contribute towards Britain making a significant
impact on the big global issues that affect us all.
•
IBT believes that TV producers have a critical role to play in portraying the
world and engaging the public in an active response to international news,
documentaries, drama or entertainment.
•
Polis believes that we live in an increasingly interconnected world where
the media must be more reflexive and responsible about the part it plays
in witnessing and engaging people around the globe.
This year the Ofcom review and the Digital Britain process show clearly how the
PSB system is facing radical change. If we do not get this right then there is the
prospect of a period of depletion and disintegration.
Phil Harding argues in this paper that, given the right understanding of
international value and given the knowledge about why it matters to citizens, it is
possible to argue from a position of strength, that international coverage must be
enhanced, not just safeguarded.
International coverage must also be re-imagined as we begin to embrace the
digital dividends of new technology but with television as the central driving
force.
To achieve this means coming up with a framework to define the value of
international coverage. We cannot put it into pounds and pence or a table of
social indicators. Media effects on society are notoriously hard to pin down.
However, we can go beyond the instinctive and subjective and self-serving vague
measures of the past.
There has long been a patronising assumption that international coverage was an
elitist taste, a minority pursuit. Foreign news was seen as up market, foreign
drama or documentaries were for a select few. Phil Harding argues that
international coverage is important for everyone and that a wide range of the
public demands it for a diverse set of reasons. Public Service Broadcasting does
not have the luxury of complacent assumptions about international coverage. It
must justify itself.
We hope this report and the imaginative recommendations it makes are the start
of a serious dialogue. Instead of seeing international coverage as a moral fig leaf
or an onerous obligation, we hope that future PSB systems put it at the heart of
programme strategies and public priorities. That way public service broadcasting
can continue to inform future generations of the world around them.
Sam Barratt, Oxfam
Charlie Beckett, Polis
Mark Galloway, IBT
4
THE GREAT GLOBAL SWITCH-OFF
By Phil Harding
1.0 Executive Summary
1. Up until now much of the debate about the future of public broadcasting
has concentrated on money and structures. With the exception of regional
news, very little has been about content. Yet what matters most to the
public is content, the programmes they are going to be able to see and
hear in the future.
2. This report by Phil Harding, a former senior editor and executive at the
BBC, focuses on one of the crucial areas that make British public service
broadcasting distinctive: its coverage of the world outside the United
Kingdom. Against the background of the current debate on the future of
public broadcasting it looks at what the role of international programming
could and should be in any future system.
3. In the course of compiling this report, the author undertook extensive
research which included in-depth interviews with a large number of senior
people – executives, producers, commissioners and controllers - working
across the broadcast and media industries as well as with those with an
interest in international coverage and/or broadcast policy.
4. The report argues that, while there is currently much good
coverage and some exceptional programming about the wider
world, this key area of public service broadcasting is under serious
threat.
5. At a time when globalization is making our planet an ever more inter-
dependant place, the need for an understanding of the cultural forces, the
migratory forces and the environmental forces that are shaping the world
has never been greater. Britons need to know about these trends and to
understand the part they are playing in shaping their everyday lives.
Public service broadcasting has a vital role to play in that process.
(Chapter Three)
6. The report concentrates on television as it is the most important and
influential medium in this country and is likely to remain so for some time
to come. (Chapter Four)
7. The two most immediate areas of threat are to the prominence of
what is broadcast and to its quality. In quality there is an over-
reliance on certain formats, too much caution in commissioning
and a lack of innovation and risk-taking. In terms of prominence
there has been a sharp migration of internationally-based factual
content from the mainstream channels to the digital channels in
recent years. Since the digital channels have lower audiences this
has
had
the
inevitable
consequence
that
international
programming is now seen by fewer viewers. Thus such
programming is already becoming marginalized in the schedules.
The risk is that it will be pushed further to the edge of the
5
schedules and then disappear altogether. This wouldn’t happen by
design, no one would have actually wanted it to happen, but the
end result would be a global switch-off on British television.
(Chapter Two).
8. The report makes ten recommendations. These include the
requirement that each public service broadcaster should draw up
an explicit international strategy to shape and inform its
programme and content commissioning and should appoint a
senior executive at Board level as international champion to
oversee that strategy; that public service broadcasters should
draw up measures of success which are more wide-ranging than
just audience ratings; that there should be a new Importance
Index ; that the BBC World News Channel should be available in
the UK; that if there is to be contestable public funding in the
future, some of that should be ear-marked for international
content; that the BBC iPlayer should be expanded to include more
international non-BBC content; that there should be new combined
international portal for video and information from non-broadcast
organizations and NGO’s. (Chapter Ten)
9. Commitments to cover the wider world form an important part of the
public service definitions of Ofcom, the BBC and Channel 4. ITV and
Channel Five’s Ofcom licences contain specific commitments for
international material in their news and current affairs programmes.
(Chapter Four).
10. Audience research shows that the public think international news on
television is important. Audiences believe an understanding what is going
on in the world is a critical element of public service broadcasting. People
think public service broadcasting has important functions to fulfill over and
beyond audience ratings and competitive market pressures. (Chapter
Five).
11. There is little hard data about the sorts of audience ratings international
programmes get. But what is beyond doubt is that
there is a near-
universal belief among those working in the industry that
international programmes get lower ratings than domestic ones.
This has a major impact on the way commissioners behave and on
which programmes do and don’t get commissioned. (Chapter Five)
12. In-depth group research suggests that audiences come to international
programming with different attitudes and expectations and find different
types of international programming attractive and interesting. There is a
core audience that is interested in international affairs. There is another
audience that, while not possessing such a high degree of interest or
knowledge, is interested in programming which contains good story-telling
combined with strong central characters and which explains the relevance
of the subject matter. A third group is attracted by international themes
when they are contained in established formats and series, such as
dramas and soaps, or when they are presented by a well-liked presenter.
(Chapter Five)
13. International news is seen by the audience as being an important source
of information about the wider world. But there are increasing pressures
6
on international newsgathering budgets with considerable risks to original
on-the-spot reporting. (Chapter Six)
14. Channel 4 News might be one of the areas vulnerable to Channel 4’s
financial difficulties but removing money from the BBC licence fee to
preserve things such as Channel 4 News could have consequences for the
BBC’s overseas newsgathering presence - one of the things that makes
the BBC’s foreign coverage distinctive. (Chapter Six)
15. The report argues that the BBC World News Channel should now be made
available in the UK. (Chapter Six)
16. Tracking studies on the amount of international factual programming on
British television show that there has been a big reduction on ITV and
Channel Five and a move away from the mainstream channels to digital
platforms.
This has led to a marginalisation of such coverage as
programmes on the digital-only channels are seen by far fewer
viewers. (Chapter Seven)
17. The report looks at the parts of world covered by British television in
factual programming and draws up maps of the world as it is seen by the
British viewer. The maps show that
British viewers are given a
distorted view of the world. There is an overwhelming
concentration on coverage of the United States and Europe and the
English speaking world. By comparison Africa is tiny and heavily
skewed. Only three countries out of the 52 on the continent are normally
ever seen because coverage of Africa is almost entirely about wildlife.
South America is also virtually ignored. (Chapter Seven)
18.
In terms of programming quality, while there are still many very
good and some outstanding programmes being shown, too many
are of the same type. Two formats seem to predominate at the moment
– various forms of television anthropology, usually involving remote tribes,
and the celebrity-led guided tour. While many of these are very good and
are successful in reaching out to a wider audience, the concentration on
them has been to the exclusion of much else.
In the view of many in
the industry – producers and executives - there is a cautiousness
and a fear of risk-taking in television commissioning at the
moment. (Chapter Eight)
19. The present commissioning system has become too cumbersome and
multi-layered with too many people able to say no and too few able to say
yes. (Chapter Eight)
20. This combined with the over-riding importance attached to audience
ratings and the belief that internationally themed programmes get lower
ratings has led to a marked reluctance on the part of many commissioners
to commit to international programmes that are either innovative, risky or
do not involve a ratings-banker celebrity. (Chapter Eight)
21.
Public service broadcasters must take a much broader view of
what is to be regarded as a successful programme. Programmes
which get lower ratings but which are highly valued by their audience are
as important as those large audience programmes which do not make
much of an impact on their audience. More priority should be given to
measures of success such as the Appreciation Index and feedback from
7
devices such as the BBC’s Pulse rating system. The report also argues that
there should be a totally new measure of success, the Importance Index,
which would measure how important an audience thought it was that such
a programme had been made and shown. (Chapter Eight)
22.
There is a fundamental gap in the present programming processes
of public service broadcasters. There is a lack of a coherent
strategy for international content. While the broadcasters – especially
the BBC and Channel 4 – proudly proclaim coverage of the wider world as
being one of their key purposes and the BBC details how these purposes
are to be met in its Channel Service Licences, it is clear that there is then
a large gulf between those strategic imperatives and the individual
commissioning decisions which determine which actual programmes and
content get made and shown.
There is an urgent need for each of the
public service broadcasters to draw up a coherent overall
international strategy to shape and inform its commissioning. It
should be ‘owned’ by one senior executive for each broadcaster at
Board level who would be responsible for overseeing the strategy
and for its delivery. Such a strategy would be able to look at the totality
of what is being commissioned, would stop a glut of particular types of
programmes, identify any gaps in coverage in terms of significant issues
uncovered and spot any parts of the world which are being unjustifiably
ignored. (Chapter Eight)
23. The’ Real World’ seminars which have been successfully staged by the
International Broadcasting Trust and the BBC have made a real difference
to the perceptions of broadcasters. This idea should be extended to other
broadcasters. (Chapter Eight)
24. The report looks at some of the likely future trends for the media in the
next few years and argues that several of them, such as the growth of
social networking and international virtual friendship groups, could be
beneficial for international coverage in the sense of making such content
feel much more relevant and ‘real’ for the British audience in the future.
(Chapter Nine)
25. The report concludes by making ten recommendations for the future.
(Chapter Ten)
8
2.0 INTRODUCTION
“I do not advocate that we turn television into a 27-inch wailing wall,
where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our
defense. But I would just like to see it reflect occasionally the hard,
unyielding realities of the world in which we live. I would like to see it
done inside the existing framework, and I would like to see the doing of
it redound to the credit of those who finance and program it……This
instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But
it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to
those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”
Ed Murrow
Speech to U.S. Radio & Television News Directors Conference 1958.
For most people, public service broadcasting (PSB) is not some lofty concept
debated at conferences and in pamphlets like this. It is quite simply what they,
the public, see on their screens and hear on their speakers and earphones. It is
about programmes. In the jargon of today, it is about content. Yet so far
astonishingly little of the debate about public service broadcasting has been about
content. Up until now it has been a largely one-dimensional argument about
money – who gets it and who should get it in the future – and about shared
facilities and structures. Apart from the debate about regional news and an odd
too-brief excursion into the future of children’s television, there has been precious
little discussion about what the public will actually see and hear in the future. If
the debate continues in this truncated form, it will be a massive missed
opportunity. For the most part there will have been little or no discussion about
what sorts of programmes we will be offered in the future or what they will be
about or about the tone and approach we expect public service broadcasters to
adopt.
This report is an attempt to redress some of that balance by focussing on one
area of content which is one of the most distinctive aspects of public service
broadcasting: the coverage of the world outside Britain. It is an area that is under
serious threat. British television faces the serious risk of a global switch-off. At
such a critical time this report offers an opportunity to rethink current
international coverage, to take stock of what has been offered so far, what has
worked and what hasn’t and to offer some practical ideas about how to refresh
and re-energize it in the future. It will examine programming across the full range
of genres: news, documentaries, drama, comedy and entertainment and ask what
part such output could and should play in the public broadcasting of the future.
On the face of it the commitment to international coverage in public service
broadcasting appears clear. The mission to bring the wider world to British
audiences is clearly identified by both the regulator and the broadcasters. Ofcom
lists “Informing our understanding of the world” as one of the key roles of public
broadcasting in Britain today. One of the BBC’s six key purposes is that of
‘bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK”. Channel 4’s recent
document, redefining its role in the digital era, listed a quartet of purposes
prominent among them ‘to challenge people to see the world differently’.
Thus both the main public broadcasters and the regulator see the international
dimension of content as being key to the current and future roles of public service
broadcasting. This importance is further highlighted in their Annual Reports and
performance reviews. But beyond the official sweet reassurances there are some
hard questions to be asked about the reality of what is currently on offer.
9
There are some even harder questions to be asked about the future. How well will
the fine words and good intentions hold up against the ever harsher realities of
the media world of the next few years ? The risk is that Britain could go the way
of the United States. Some see the danger signs here already. In America market
fragmentation and commercial pressures have caused an already conservative
broadcasting system to retract even further into its domestic shell. Programmes
about countries and cultures outside the United States are rare, few risks are
taken with documentaries (with some occasional exceptions on PBS). After a brief
post-9/11 spurt, American news has slumped back into introspection and most
America news organizations now operate with a skeletal staff outside the U.S.
Even CNN, which does maintain a sizable foreign bureau network, shows little of
that on its two domestic news networks.
The risk for British audiences is clear. It is about prominence and quality. In
terms of quality, much of what is already shown is very good. There are some
really excellent programmes. But too much of it is too similar. One of British
television's great failings is that once something is shown to have worked,
everyone rushes to copy it. The end result is not only large clusters of
programmes all aping the same format or style but everywhere else a real lack of
diversity of approach and often a lack innovation and risk-taking with large gaps
in the output in terms of the issues and the parts of the globe covered. As the
maps of the world - as seen through the eyes of British television - in Chapter
Seven show, British viewers get a distorted view of the world. Overwhelmingly
British factual television concentrates on the United States and Europe and on the
English-speaking world. African people almost never appear on our screens
outside of news – where coverage is often about natural disasters and famine –
because almost all of the non-news programming from Africa is about animals
and wildlife. South America is also largely ignored.
In terms of quantity, it’s not that there isn’t enough – at least at the moment. I
am not advocating more or endless hours of programming. The issue is about the
amount of programming that gets shown
prominently. It is about where the
broadcasters place those programmes that do get shown. As I show in Chapter
Seven there has been a big shift in the scheduling of international programming
away from two of the mainstream channels – ITV and Channel Five - and towards
the digital channels. The end result of this is that international programming is
now seen by far fewer viewers than it would have been a few years ago. If this
marginalisation continues then such programming will progressively retreat to the
outer edges of even the digital channels and then will begin to disappear
altogether. That is why the American model is quoted by many as a warning of
what could happen here.
Without a continued commitment, backed by actions and resources, and without
a systematic plan to protect and nurture such coverage, programming about the
wider world on British television will become first marginalised and then disappear
altogether. As I explain in later Chapters, it wouldn’t happen because anybody
wanted it to; it would happen because the financial and competitive pressures
overwhelmed even the best of intentions. But by the time anyone realised it had
gone, it would be too late. The world would have disappeared from our screens.
The global switch-off would have happened. The risk is plain. The time for debate,
followed closely by action is now.
10
3.0 WHY INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE MATTERS
“It’s becoming a smaller world. We all need to know each other better.
It’s becoming ever more important that we know who our neighbours
are, where they come from and their backgrounds. Television can allow
you to get to know someone better.” Journalist and Producer
The Globalised World
It has become one of the truisms of our times that we are living in a globalised
world. The world is becoming smaller, flatter, ever closer, ever more intimate.
We are seeing the death of distance.
All of the reasons for this, the increasing ease and interconnectedness of
information technology and media, the greater wealth of and travel from the
developed world, the poverty and inequality in the developing world and the
speed of development of the in-between countries such China and India, are all
likely to accelerate this century. The present economic crisis may affect the short-
term rate of change but it will not affect the long-term trends.
The everyday lives of Britons are increasingly affected by this inter-connected
world. Contracts are won, jobs are lost, families’ standards of living are
determined by decisions made or shaped thousands of miles away. British
investors queue outside their bank to safeguard their savings as a result of
reckless sale pitches made on the porches of houses in California and Arkansas.
Others are left potentially bereft after they see their savings frozen when
Iceland’s banking bubble bursts. Large communities of refugees and asylum
seekers come to our cities and grow up in our midst because of wars and conflicts
in Somalia and Congo. The price of food in our supermarkets goes up because of
the failure of the rice crop in Indonesia or the fact that China has bought up most
of Argentina’s soya crop – soya which our farmers had previously bought as feed
for British beef. When a farmer in the Amazon rain forest clears another thousand
acres or when an Indian planning committee decides to build another coal-fired
power station they affect the future path of climate change not only in Brazil or
India but in Bradford and Inverness too.
But Britons can often be ignorant of the causes of these social changes. In a
recent survey for the British Red Cross asking respondents to name countries
currently experiencing conflict, 69% and 65% of those questioned identified Iraq
and Afghanistan respectively, but fewer than 1% of respondents were able to
identify other countries including Sudan, Somalia and the Central African
Republic
.
Perhaps if broadcasters had spent a little more time examining the economy and
the culture of the people of Afghanistan rather than concentrating so much on
spending time with the British troops, the British public might understand more
about why the Taleban are proving so hard to defeat and hence the reasons why
so many British troops are dying in that fighting.
This globalised world is also a world in which our first-hand personal experiences
of other cultures are being extended. The British holidaymaker is now as likely to
reach for the Lonely Planet guide as the Spanish phrase book. A Thai political
crisis also becomes one in which six thousand Britons find themselves trapped at
Bangkok airport.
11
In London schools more than 300 languages are spoken, in Glasgow schools 138
languages, the figure for Manchester schools is 72. This mix of languages has
made London and our other large cities ideal globally for the recruitment of multi-
lingual staff. This, together with the high rate of entrepreneurship among recent
immigrants, has given this country a distinct edge over others. Diversity brings
many advantages to this country but it also brings issues of social cohesion. An
understanding of your child’s friends’ background and that of your neighbours –
of their country and their culture - is an important part of life in modern Britain
today. In a world of increasing global migration to know the world is to know your
street.
A Rounded World
The informational role of television is vital but the medium can and should do
more than that. At its best it can also enthuse, move and inspire. In reflecting the
wider world public service television should do all those things. Viewers need to
have a well-rounded view of the world – one that is about portrayal as well as
reportage. A rounded view is one that contains comedy as well as tragedy,
drama as well as crisis. It portrays a world in which people appear as more than
victims. International programming is not just about news or factual
programmes, it is about drama and entertainment and comedy too.
Television should encourage people in this country to feel that they are a part of
this globe, that alongside the things that make us different there is also much
that we have in common: that we all share a common humanity and we all have
a stake in the world, that we share a global citizenship.
The Electronic World
This is a world in which the electronic horizons are shrinking too. Satellite
television brings worldwide media into every living room; live coverage of the
Mumbai bombings came to British homes not only from the international news
channels but from the Indian news channel NDTV too. Internet users can scour
the worldwide web for millions of pages of international news; mobile services
such as Twitter bring instant networks of global information. Where once
worldwide networks of friends and family were based on emigration and
immigration, today social networking sites enable any user to build up a network
of close virtual friends anywhere in the world.
For Britons to understand and have control over their lives in today’s changing
world they need to know about and understand the forces across the globe that
are crucially shaping events here in Britain and elsewhere: the economic forces,
the cultural forces, the migratory forces, the environmental forces. To do that
they need to be able to access sufficient information to understand the world and
its connections. They need to know about the cultures and peoples of the world.
In a vibrant democracy people need to have enough reliable information to be
able to make political choices about those who will exercise power on their behalf.
The media, especially the broadcast media and in particular video and television,
have a crucial role to play in this.
12
4.0 THE PRESENT DAY
“International programming is more expensive than domestic
programming, obviously, and it doesn’t rate as well, so without some
form of compulsion from Ofcom and the DCMS then broadcasters will
commission more programmes about freaks in Fishguard than they will
films like China’s Stolen Children, The Transplant Trade and Dying for
Drugs.” Executive Producer
Television Still Matters
Much of the present day debate about broadcasting is driven by technological
innovation and the changes that brings in audience and user behaviour.
Digitalisation, the internet, Web 2.0, the increasing use of mobile devices, all
these, together with changes in the flows of advertising spend are raising
enormous questions about the future of public service broadcasting. Doubtless
there will be more momentous changes to come.
Yet the fact remains that at the moment television remains the dominant medium
for most people in this country and is likely to remain so for some time to come.
In the UK we still spend more than three times as long watching television as we
do in front of a computer screen. As the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham,
pointed out in a recent speech, despite all the changes, television viewing in
Britain has decreased by only six minutes over the last five years and recently
has actually increased. Though audience shares (the percentage of the audience
watching at any one time) for its main channels have dropped markedly over the
past decade, the audience reach for BBC television (the number of people who
watch at some time during the week) is still at 85% and went up slightly last
year.
As well as being widely watched, television is an important source of information
for the public. A recent Ofcom survey showed that 67% of respondents said that
television was their main source of news about the UK and 68% said it was their
main source of news about the world. The respective figures for the internet were
4% and 6%, behind newspapers (13% and 11%) and radio (8% and 6%). It is
likely that the present balance of media will change in the next few years and
work done by the Pew Foundation and others in the US suggest that the figures in
the UK for reliance on the internet will rise. But nevertheless television is going to
remain the most important source of information in Britain for quite some time
ahead.
It is also going to continue to be an important place for audiences to watch big
events – national live events and the entertainment spectaculars. The finals of
Strictly Come Dancing and
The X Factor drew record audiences this year.
The X
Factor final drew an audience of 14 million – the highest audience for a television
entertainment programme since a Christmas edition of
Only Fools and Horses five
years ago.
Some people have talked about the internet replacing television. Some of that
may happen with the growth of internet TV to which I will return to later. But in a
converged world the definitions start to blur anyway. What is BBC1 or ITV1 when
it is streamed and watched live over the web – is that television or the internet?
But those who talk about one medium replacing another often misunderstand the
very different roles those media play in peoples’ lives. Certainly what some of the
13
recent Ofcom research has suggested is that even those people with a full
repertoire of media choices see television and the internet as performing different
but complementary roles and that they value the social functions of television for
things that they think the internet cannot provide.
The Public Service Broadcasting Context
“To be honest our remit in this area has not been interrogated very
hard since it was published. What do we actually mean by those
words ?” Senior Executive
If words alone – and the prominence given to those words - were to be the
barometer, there is little doubt that coverage of international issues would play a
major part in what we see and hear on our airwaves. When asked to define what
they are about, why they exist, both the regulator and the two main public
broadcasters – the BBC and Channel Four - give a very prominent place to the
importance of international coverage and issues. But the current schizophrenic
nature of public broadcasting is sharply illustrated when one compares those
commitments with the more limited one of ITV and Channel Five.
Ofcom
At the start of its public broadcasting consultation, Ofcom tried to define public
service broadcasting. It came up with what it called four purposes and six
characteristics. First among the purposes was ’informing understanding of the
world’. Here are Ofcom’s four purposes in full:
1. Informing our understanding of the world - To inform ourselves and others
and to increase our understanding of the world through news, information
and analysis of current events and ideas
2. Stimulating knowledge and learning -To stimulate our interest in and
knowledge of arts, science, history and other topics, through content that
is accessible and can encourage informal learning
3. Reflecting UK cultural identity - To reflect and strengthen our cultural
identity through original programming at UK, national and regional level,
on occasion bringing audiences together for shared experiences
4. Representing diversity and alternative viewpoints - To make us aware of
different cultures and alternative viewpoints, through programmes that
reflect the lives of other people and other communities, both within the UK
and elsewhere
So for Ofcom coverage of the world is defined as a key component of public
service broadcasting.
The BBC
The BBC, when it started to redefine its role for its Charter Review in 2006,
produced six key purposes. Prominent among them was international coverage
both from the BBC to the world and by ‘bringing…the world to the UK’
Those six key purposes were defined by the BBC as:
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1. Sustaining citizenship and civil society
2. Promoting education and learning
3. Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence
4. Representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities
5. Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
6. In promoting its other Purposes, help to deliver to the public the benefit of
emerging communications technologies and services and take a leading role in
the switchover to digital television
BBC Service Licences
The importance for the BBC of an international focus is further reflected in the
more detailed Service Licences which have been drawn up by the BBC Trust as
part of its new governance structure for the various Channels. I list here those
commitments that specifically apply against the international purpose:
BBC1
5.5 Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
BBC One should play its part in contributing to this purpose amongst its
audience, primarily by bringing the world to the UK, by covering
international events and issues.
Its news bulletins should reflect a global as well as national agenda, its
factual and documentary output should include global topics, and its arts
and music programmes should also feature non-UK artists.
BBC One should acquire and co-produce some high quality international
content with broad audience appeal.
BBC2
5.5 Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
BBC Two should contribute to this purpose amongst its audience, primarily
by
bringing the world to the UK, by following a broad international agenda in
its current
affairs and by regularly covering international stories in its news analysis.
BBC Two should ensure that its factual, music and arts output reflect
international
themes and the channel should show high quality non-UK output across a
range of
genres, including feature films, sport, children’s, drama and comedy, when
available at reasonable cost.
Interestingly there is no “Statutory Requirement” for international subject matter
on BBC2 in terms of the minimum hours to be broadcast. But there is for arts
programming (a minimum of 200 hours of arts and music programming) and for
religious programming (together with BBC1, at least 110 hours each year).
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BBC3’s remit is thinner (more with
Gavin and Stacey in mind perhaps than Ghana
and Somalia, though with programmes such as
Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts the
channel has shown some innovative international programmes).
BBC3
5.5 Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
BBC Three should play its part in supporting this purpose amongst its
audience,
primarily by bringing the world to the UK, through its coverage of
international
issues, including in its news and current affairs output.
Of all the BBC television channels it is BBC4 which is given the meatiest and most
explicit international role (Note the words “very important contribution” below):
5.2 Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
BBC Four should make a very important contribution to this purpose
amongst its audience, primarily by bringing the world to the UK.
It should offer a secure home for the best international and foreign
language feature films, programming and documentaries. In documentary,
BBC Four should contribute to the BBC’s ambition to co-produce or acquire
the best programming from around the world by frequently broadcasting
new documentaries from around the world.
As part of the channel’s commitment to cinema it should acquire first run
and classic international and foreign language feature films, help to
support their distribution and appreciation in the UK and should provide
context and review on screen and online.
Foreign language output should regularly be subtitled, including in
peaktime, to allow people from around the world to be heard in their own
voices.
BBC Four’s nightly news and regular current affairs programming should
demonstrate a distinctively international perspective. Within its own
commissions, BBC Four should include UK perspectives on international
culture and life.
But BBC4’s only statutory commitment is to “Premiere at least 20 new
international film titles each year”.
Channel 4
Channel 4 is equally clear about the importance of its international remit. In its
recent document Next On 4, in which it redefined its public broadcasting role in
the digital age, it put forward four “distinct core purposes”. Again with the third of
these the international focus was explicit and prominent:
More than any other broadcaster, Channel 4 aims to:1. Nurture new talent
and original ideas
2. Champion alternative voices and fresh perspectives
3. Challenge people to see the world differently
4. Inspire change in people’s lives.
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Channel 4 also publishes a statement of Programme Policy every year which, as
well as highlighting individual programmes with an international theme, also
contains a separate international cross-genre section highlighting forthcoming
seasons and productions.
In Channel 4’s Licence with Ofcom the only specific mentions of ‘international’ are
in connection with its news and current affairs output:
The Corporation shall include news programmes and current affairs
programmes in the Channel 4 Service that are of high quality and deal
with both national and international matters.
The most specific references are in the Annex to the Licence:
News
(a) News programmes shall be provided at intervals throughout the
period for which the Channel 4 Service is provided, with at least
one programme at lunchtimes each weekday and one in the
early evening each weekday and a programme in the early
evening at weekends on both Saturday and Sunday.
(b) Not less than 208 hours in each calendar year of the Licensing
Period of news programmes in peak viewing time shall be
included in the Channel 4 Service. Such news programmes
shall be of high quality and deal with both national and
international matters. Coverage shall be accurate, impartial,
authoritative and comprehensive, in terms both of geography
and subject matter. Live coverage of important, fast-moving
events shall be provided, with news flashes outside regular
bulletins as appropriate.
Current affairs
The Corporation shall ensure that there are not less than 208 hours in
each calendar year of the Licensing Period of current affairs
programmes included in the Channel 4 Service which are of high
quality and deal with both national and international matters, of which
80 hours shall be in peak viewing time.
ITV
ITV, under considerable financial pressure, has spent a large part of the last year
trying to move away from as many of its public service commitments as it can
negotiate with Ofcom. At one point its executive chairman, Michael Grade,
wondered out loud whether ITV would move away from being a public service
broadcaster altogether.
ITV’s current licence with Ofcom mentions international coverage only in terms of
news and currents affairs. The most specific commitment is in the Annex to the
Licence which says:
News
The Licensee must broadcast a total of at least 365 hours per calendar
year of high quality national and international news programmes
between 9.25 am and midnight of which at least 125 hours must be
shown in peak viewing time. Programmes must be shown at intervals
throughout the day and appropriate news programmes must be shown
at weekends in peak viewing time and out of peak viewing time and
during public holiday periods.
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Current affairs
The Licensee must broadcast a total of at least 78 hours per calendar year
of high quality national and international current affairs
programmes between 9.25 am and midnight of which at least 35 hours
must be shown in peak viewing time.
In its Programme Review for 2007 and statement of Programme Promises for
2008, ITV is able to point to some occasional international documentaries such as
John Pilger’s War on Democracy (a rare examination of South America on British
television as we shall see in Chapter Seven) and
21 Up South Africa.
But overall from the document, it is clear that for ITV, outside of news,
international content is not a key priority.
Channel Five
Channel Five’s Ofcom Licence and Annex also talks about international content in
terms of news and current affairs:
News
Not less than 408 hours in each calendar year of the Licensing Period of
news programmes shall be included in the Channel 5 service between 6
am and midnight and 100 hours in each calendar year in peak viewing
time. Such news programmes shall be of high quality and deal with both
national and international matters. News programmes shall be provided
at intervals during the day – at least one programme at lunchtimes, one
in the early evening, one in the mid-evening and headlines at other times
each day except on Sunday when no mid-evening programme is
required.
Current affairs
Not less than 130 hours in each calendar year of the Licensing Period of
current affairs programmes which are of high quality and deal with
national and international matters shall be included in the Channel 5
service of which 10 hours in each calendar year shall be in peak viewing.
In terms of broader international programming in its statement of Programme
Promises, Channel Five points to the
Paul Merton in… series but, set alongside
Britain’s Bravest and
The Kate Moss Years, I think it is fair to say that this does
not appear to be a major priority for the channel.
The Public Contract
Why do all these fine words matter ? They matter because they are in essence
the contract between the public and the public service broadcaster. In return for
public money and/or access to a public asset, in this case the electromagnetic
spectrum, the public service broadcaster undertakes to do certain things, to show
certain types of programme, to the public. But words can only go so far; what
matters to the viewing public is to what extent and how well those promises are
carried out on the screen.
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5.0 AUDIENCES
“People can sometimes get very worthy about the wider world and what
they expect television to do. On the mainstream channels there is a need
for strong elements of escapism. Audiences don’t want too much reality
rammed down their throats.” Senior Commissioner
This section looks at what audiences say they want, what they watch and what
they think of what they watch. As any television researcher will tell you, what
audiences say they want and what they actually do can sometimes be two totally
different things.
What Audiences Expect
Recent YouGov research for Channel 4 has underlined the importance of
international news in public expectations. 91% of those surveyed rated
international news on television as ‘important’, 63% rated it as ‘very important’.
Ofcom has also been doing a lot of research for its public broadcasting review
asking the public what they expect from a public service broadcaster. According
to this research, audiences believe understanding what is going on in the world is
a critical element of public broadcasting. Faced with a series of 12 statements
about what is important to public broadcasting, ranging from “trustworthy news”
to “high quality soaps and dramas”, 84% of those questioned chose “helps me
understand what is going on in the world” as a key element. That made it
second in importance only to “trustworthy news” (86%). By comparison, soaps
and dramas rated 56%.
This suggests – as indeed do most of the answers to the Ofcom research - that
people are pretty clear that they think public service broadcasting has important
functions to fulfil over and beyond audience ratings and market pressures. When
they are asked how well public broadcasting is doing in fulfilling this remit of
‘helping me understand the world’, 67% of those asked were satisfied that it did
help them. In such surveys there is usually a gap between perceived importance
and performance. In this survey the gap of 17% (between 84% and 67%) is
smaller than for some other genres such as children’s, where the gap was much
bigger. When asked which channels were best at helping people understand the
world, perhaps unsurprisingly, the news channels BBC News and Sky News
scored highest (89% satisfied), with BBC1 next (79%) followed by BBC2 (73%)
then ITV1 (69%) and Channel 4 on 59%. BBC4 scored quite low with only 53%
which is interesting in the light of its particular international remit.
News is clearly seen as playing an important role in international programming.
Knowing ‘what’s going on in the world’ is the biggest single factor when people
are asked why they watch the news. 70% picked this answer out, 5% more than
those who chose the domestic equivalent answer: ‘to know what’s going on in the
UK’. 40% say they are specifically interested in ‘worldwide politics and current
events’. Interestingly, interest in worldwide politics and current events varies
markedly among the UK audience when the responses are broken down by UK
ethnic group. People of African origin score this attribute highest (53% do so),
people of Caribbean origin score it lowest (36%), with Whites (41%) and Asians
(41%) somewhere in between.
In qualitative research – where people are asked in groups to discuss various
topics in depth – news and current affairs programmes are seen as having a
critical role in reflecting the wider world. The sorts of comments that people make
are that they think news “provides a window on the world” and that it is
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“important that everyone watches news so we are connected to the world around
us”; while current affairs “helps to keep people up to speed with contemporary
global issues” and “could help people to make informed decisions regarding
current global issues”.
What Do People Actually Watch ? So people say they want public service broadcasting to fulfil an important
international role. But do people actually watch television programmes with an
international theme ?
There is a shortage of hard data about this. Television audiences are measured by
a joint industry body, BARB, which uses a panel and an electronic meter. There is
not a separate category for programming with an international theme or location.
It would be possible to go through the schedules and categorise each
programme, individually, as to whether it is domestic or international and then
compare the audience figures. But it would be a gigantic task and no one has
done it yet.
What is absolutely clear, from all my conversations, is that there is a near-
universal belief among those working in television that programmes with
international themes get lower ratings. One or two would put in some caveats
and point out that some formats can get decent audiences. Some also point to
some exceptions such as
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency and from further back
Divorce Iranian Style. But the fact remains that the very widespread view in the
industry is that international equals low audiences. This belief has a major impact
on what does and doesn’t get commissioned. I will examine the far-reaching
consequences of this in Chapter Seven: Pressures and Structures.
Audience Reactions
What do audiences think of those international programmes they do watch ? 3WE, the
International Broadcasting Trust’s former sister organization, carried out some
research on this in 2005 in collaboration with the BBC. The survey tried to
qualitatively assess the impact of international programming on viewers, primarily
using data gathered by the BBC’s online Pulse Panel. Those surveyed were questioned
about the quality of the various programmes they had seen and asked whether or not
they ‘agreed strongly, ‘agreed’ or ‘disagreed’ with a series of statements about the
programmes.
When it came to what were described as the ‘harder’ programmes (and by that they
meant programmes dealing with topics such as Conflict and Disaster; Politics;
Development and the Environment and Human Rights), 64% strongly felt such
programmes were “high quality’”; 56% strongly felt they had learnt a lot from the
programme. 50% strongly agreed that they would talk to others about the
programme. But, perhaps not surprisingly given the subject matter, only 16% found
these programmes very entertaining. Wildlife and History programmes were
considered to have delivered the highest quality: 67% strongly agreed these
programmes were of high quality. But only 49% of viewers strongly agreed that
wildlife programmes were original, and only 41% strongly
agreed that history
programmes were original. Wildlife was considered the most entertaining category of
international programming with 55% describing it as very entertaining.
To compare these results with the reaction to some other programmes, the panel was
also asked to watch and comment on a mixed bag of programmes from the rest of the
output (including
My Family, Wife Swap, Ant & Dec’s Gameshow, Marathon and
X
Factor.) Respondents generally felt this programming was of lesser quality than the
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factual international output, only 47% strongly agreed that it was of high quality
(compared to 64% for the ‘harder’ international programming above, for instance). But
– and again no surprise - they did find it more entertaining.
In general therefore there does seem to a split between those programmes which
audiences think are worthwhile and those they find entertaining. Therefore at those
times when some of the audience wants to sit back and be entertained their viewing
might not include those more demanding programmes. But the Ofcom research about
expectations clearly shows they expect such programmes to be made and shown and
to be an important part of the public television schedule. This question of the right
balance in the public broadcast mix is one we return to in later Chapters.
We can also glean quite a lot about what audiences think of international programmes
from two other pieces of research. In 2003 the BBC carried out quite an extensive
research project into attitudes to world affairs programming on BBC2 at a time when it
was thinking of changing from the format of the
Correspondent programme over to
what became
This World. Six groups of regular viewers of BBC2 or Channel 4 from
across the country, half of them regular viewers of
Correspondent, were shown a
series of clips from various past editions of the programme. The clips ranged in subject
matter from the Euro to Hells Angels to an Abortion Ship. The researchers found there
were important differences between the regular viewers of
Correspondent – the core
audience – and the others who could be regarded as potential viewers. The regular
viewers wanted ‘to be informed’ and ‘to be a part of things’, they were looking for
‘intelligent company and ‘intellectual interest’; whereas the potential viewers wanted
‘human drama’ with an ‘emotional connection’ and a ‘powerful experience’. Importantly
though both groups wanted ‘fascinating stories’.
When the respondents gave their responses to the clips of the programmes they had
been shown, the researchers found that the ‘core’ and potential’ viewers each split into
two further groups. The core viewers divided into the ‘engaged’ – those who were well-
informed and keen on international issues and applied a ‘sense of morality’ to what
they saw - and what the researchers described as the ‘sceptics’ – who though not
cynical felt they had ‘seen it all before’ and became impatient with such programmes.
The so-called potential viewers (i.e. those who were not regular viewers of
Correspondent but did watch BBC2 and/or Channel 4) again could be split into two
further groups. There were the ‘insular’ who were described as having limited horizons,
didn’t like to be challenged and ‘put their world first’. They were mostly younger
males. Set against them was a largely female group who were described as the
‘emotionals’. This group felt alienated by politics but loved 'involving documentaries’,
liked ‘real stories’ and were eager for facts when they were combined with ‘powerful
human interest’. The ‘emotionals’ were felt to represent the best bet for the new
programme to be able to reach out to a wider audience.
In 2005, the International Broadcasting Trust carried out another piece of audience
research for its report
Reflecting The Real World. In this survey groups of viewers,
deliberately chosen because they had differing attitudes to the developing world, took
part in in-depth discussion groups. As one might expect, those with a more positive
attitude to the developing world were relatively well informed, and more widely
travelled. Their favourite types of programme often included news and documentaries,
serious drama and wildlife programmes. Those with more negative attitudes towards
the developing world were very absorbed in their domestic lives and felt they were
right to be so. Their favourite programmes were light escapism such as soaps,
comedies and reality TV. All the groups were then shown a series of clips from a
variety of programmes about the developing world, mostly about Africa. The
programmes which had the strongest appeal and impact with all the groups were
Living with Aids, a Sorious
Samora documentary for Channel 4, and
African School from BBC 4. Both programmes were felt to show life in the developing world in a clear
21
and personal way. All the viewer groups felt the presence of strong characters was
important for building interest. Done in the right way, some serious international
programmes clearly can reach out to wider audiences, something commissioners and
schedulers should note carefully.
But there were important differences between the two groups in their reactions to
other clips. The tone of
Sex Traffic, a Channel 4 programme about the illegal
trafficking of prostitutes was very popular among the ‘positive’ respondents who liked
the fact that it was hard-hitting and shocking, yet still educational. The ‘negative’
respondents much preferred the special African edition of the BBC drama
Holby City
made as part of BBC1’s Africa season
. It was a programme many of them watched
anyway and they said they felt engaged by this kind treatment. Many of the ‘negative’
respondents felt stories of this kind could feature more in soaps in the future. This
research about
Holby City is an important reminder that when it comes to reaching
that section of the audience who do not normally watch news and the heavier
documentaries, drama and humour can be very important avenues for programming
about the developing world.
In all of the clips, elements of light-heartedness and humour were especially helpful in
engaging the more negative respondents.
None of the groups liked the BBC2 documentary
Battle for the Amazon. They disliked
the fact that it was entirely issued based with no characters they could relate to.
Furthermore the ‘negatives’ felt that the issues were not directly relevant to their lives.
For them programme makers need to ensure that their programmes make clear how
issues relate to viewers and their lives. This is something that all programme makers
need to take to heart no matter who their target audience. Too often the connections
and therefore the relevance are taken for granted or are insufficiently explained.
Some Conclusions
So what can we learn from all this ? First is the overwhelming view across the industry
that international programmes do not get good audiences. But what comes across
from the actual audience research is a much more complex and nuanced picture. It
suggests that different sections of the audience will come to international issues and
programmes with differing attitudes and expectations. Different programmes and
different formats will appeal to different sections of the audience. Controllers and
commissioners are well aware of this complexity but set against their other priorities
they often do not act on it.
There clearly is a core foreign affairs audience that is pre-inclined to want to watch
such programmes and to find them engaging. They come to their television watching
with a relatively positive set of attitudes to the world outside the UK and often come
with a higher level of knowledge about the world than the rest of the population. They
are more interested in international issues and appreciate relatively straightforward
treatments of these issues. They watch the news and international documentaries.
Sometimes this group is thought of as being a tiny minority but that may be an under-
estimate of their size and importance. A million people give to Oxfam every year.
In a
world of fragmenting audiences these sorts of figures start to seem more sizable.
Importantly in terms of audience impact this group highly values such programming.
Another audience group are those who do not have a high degree of knowledge about
the rest of the world but who will be grabbed by well-told powerful stories, will be
attracted by strong and sympathetic central characters and welcome having the
relevance of international stories clearly explained to them.
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Finally, there is another group who are initially resistant to international themes in
programmes and think such programming has ‘nothing to do with me or my family’.
Again explaining the relevance of international stories is very important, as is human
interest. But what comes across most strongly from the research into this group is
they can be more easily reached by introducing international themes into popular
drama and by extending familiar formats. That is why both fiction programmes –
especially soaps and long-running dramas - and the use of well-know popular
celebrities as guides to unfamiliar subjects and places can be powerful tools in
reaching out to these viewers and beyond the straightforward foreign affairs audience.
6.0 THE FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS
“Everything has to be successful, there is no longer any room for failure.
Commissioners feel they need to be able to trust the people who are
making the programme. They only know a small circle therefore they
only commission from a small circle.” Independent Executive
The Pressures on International News Gathering
The shape of news provision has changed in recent years and is likely to change a
lot more in the future. This chapter looks at the future pressures on international
news and international news organizations.
News, as we have seen, is a crucial element in what audiences want in terms of
getting an international perspective. The figures from the research by Ofcom and
others on this are compelling. Television remains the most important source.
Though internet use is increasing at the moment this is mostly used as a
supplement to television news rather than as replacement for it.
At the moment most viewers seem fairly happy with what they are getting in
terms of international news. The gap between perceived importance and
performance is relatively small. The news channels are seen as doing a
reasonable job in terms of providing a mixed diet of national and international
news. An Ofcom study called
New News, Future News in 2007
showed that
international content in the major news bulletins had gone up over a 4 year
period. But there are significant issues for television news about its overall
performance with two sections of the audience: younger viewers and viewers
from British ethnic minority populations. In terms of international news
specifically, it’s interesting to note that interest in world events is higher among
ethnic minorities than it is among young white people.
BBC News
BBC News is the most important news provider in Britain today. Across all its
services, its news content regularly reaches more of the UK population than any
other news provider. It is also
the largest broadcast newsgathering organization
in the world. The BBC has some 200 foreign correspondents and sponsored staff
spread across the world with another 400-plus correspondents doing some work
for the BBC, mostly for the World Service but available to all BBC outlets when
needed. They produce some outstanding coverage. This network is one of the
things that make BBC News distinctive and highly valued. A recent study by
Leeds University pointed out that across the world it’s now only Reuters, AFP and
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the BBC that have an extensive international news gathering network anymore.
Increasingly others have cut back. So the bigger picture worldwide for news has
been one of an explosion of outlets combined with an implosion of the journalistic
networks needed to sustain those outlets. The reasons for this are of course
economic. Foreign newsgathering is expensive.
The BBC is not immune from these pressures either. So far its international
newsgathering network has emerged relatively, though not totally, unscathed
from the recent rounds of savings. But faced with a property slump and the
falling pound, it’s clear there will be further savings to be found at the BBC and
BBC News is likely to face a call for a share of cuts. Its precious foreign network
will be under serious threat.
Any future top-slicing of the licence fee could threaten it further. Channel 4 says
it will not able to sustain programmes like Channel 4 News or its future
commissioning of international programmes without public subsidy.
Ofcom says it is convinced by most of 4’s figures. Since the total amount of
money for public service broadcasting is highly unlikely to expand, this will be a
zero-sum game. If there are winners there will be losers. This is not to take sides
in this particular argument, only to point out that there are likely to be
consequences for international coverage either way if this does become a
financial tug-of-war.
The main BBC News programmes do a good job in reporting foreign news. The
balance between domestic and international stories is not always an easy one to
maintain. Different programmes have different briefs; on the whole the BBC News
at Ten does more foreign than the Six. It is imporant that the difference in
international coverage between the two programmes does not become
unbalanced.
The relatively new 8pm BBC1 short bulletin has, according to internal BBC
research, been effective at reaching viewers who do not normally watch its main
news programmes. Thus far this bulletin has done a good job of keeping a
reasonable balance between domestic and international agendas. It is important
that it continues to do so and does not fall into the populist trap of thinking ‘this
is news for people who don’t like news therefore we won’t put much news in it’.
Newsnight which has had an impressive record of foreign reporting in the past
has been subject to the recent round of savings and certainly to my eyes – and to
those of others – is doing less original foreign reporting. The cuts there do seem
to have had visible consequences.
Of the digital channels BBC4 News has a specific international brief in line with
that of the channel. It is broadcast jointly on the BBC World News channel (more
about BBC World News below). The great shame is that its transmission slot was
moved to 7pm so it now clashes directly with Channel Four News.
ITN
ITN, the provider of ITV News and Channel 4 News, has rightly won its fair share
of international reporting awards over the years. In the last two years it has
opened a new bureau in Beijing which went some way to compensate for the
earlier closure of Moscow. But ITN, especially ITV News, remains under great
financial pressure from its shareholders. This means that ITV News has to work
harder than ever to find resources for big international stories such as Burma and
to maintain its reputation for first-hand foreign reporting.
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Of the terrestrial channel programmes, Channel 4 News, also produced by ITN,
carries a wider range of foreign stories than any other. Its foreign coverage is
impressive. A crucial part of the reason Channel 4 News is able to do this, as well
as the commitment of its editorial team, is the greater length of the programme.
At just under an hour it is able to do all the main news of the day and still have
time to report from places and on significant stories that have not pushed their
way to the top of the daily editorial agenda. Its foreign coverage overall is less
event-driven and its coverage of developing countries is less often about natural
disasters. The length of Channel 4 News matters a lot to its ability to pursue this
broader agenda. It is to Channel 4’s credit that it has kept the programme at that
length since its inception. From the perspective of international news, it is vital
that Channel 4 keeps it at that length no matter what future guise as a public
broadcaster it adopts.
Future Pressures on Foreign News
Foreign news is going to become both more important and more expensive. In
order to sustain levels of foreign coverage, news organizations are going to have
to rethink their methods. They will have to do so in imaginative ways which cut
costs while at the same time identifying and maintaining the essential elements
of good reporting and analysis. They will have to rethink the cost base of the big
fixed bureau and the foreign-based correspondent. Smaller crewing, self-
operating, multi-skilling and the drop in satellite and transmissions costs will all
help. It will become ever more important to decide where the foreign
correspondent can really add value in judgement, context and analysis and where
the more straightforward reporting can be done by locally based reporters. There
will be more sponsored “stringers”, more reporters from the country concerned
and fewer “fly-ins”.
News organizations will have to embrace the opportunities of citizen-based
journalism across the world but ensure they maintain the core values of accuracy
and impartiality. With care and ingenuity it can be done. It will have to be.
Sky News
Though it is not a public broadcaster in the sense of receiving public money or
using public assets and therefore strictly outside the terms of reference of this
report, Sky News is an important provider of international news in the UK and
should be acknowledged as such. Research for the BBC has shown that the
audience think it does a good job in providing foreign coverage. It is at its best
with breaking news and has won several awards for its coverage in the last few
years.
The BBC World News Channel
A sizable chunk of the BBC’s foreign reporting goes unseen in this country. That is
because it is on the BBC World News channel. World News is normally unavailable
in this country as a stand-alone channel though it does share some programming
overnight with the domestic BBC News channel and the half-hour BBC4 News is a
joint production. Most Britons only see the channel when they go abroad in their
hotel rooms. It is not funded by the licence fee. Alone of the BBC’s news channels
it is commercially funded and takes advertising. The reason for this is that when
in 1990 the Thatcher government turned down a request for public funding, the
BBC decided a global news channel was too important an asset not to have one
and launched it as a commercial operation. Along with most other international
25
news channels BBC World has never made a profit though the losses are
decreasing (it is subsidised by BBC Worldwide) – or at least were decreasing until
the global credit crisis hit.
BBC World News has never been shown in the UK because it is advertising funded
and up until now the BBC has not wanted to open that particular Pandora’s Box.
It is now time to re-examine this particular embargo. It does not make sense any
longer to deny British viewers access to this important BBC service. It would offer
an important domestic outlet for some of the BBC’s international reports that do
not find an outlet elsewhere and would give British audiences an additional
international perspective. It would sit alongside other international news channels
such as CNN International and Al Jazeera. If British viewers can see these
international channels, why not the BBC’s ?
The arguments within the BBC about allowing a commercially funded channel
such a BBC World News into the UK and whether that would undermine the whole
idea of the licence fee are much less powerful than they were a decade ago. BBC
programmes are now shown alongside adverts every day of the week on various
channels on the Sky EPG and on Freeview. In any case the BBC could strip out
the adverts from BBC World News for the UK.
The BBC’s competitors might complain about another rival channel – though it
would only be one more among dozens of news channels. The BBC Trust should
decide that the public service arguments for showing it in the UK strongly
outweigh such considerations. (
See Chapter Ten: Recommendations).
7.0 INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE TODAY
“Increasingly, on telly, international programming is getting either
ghettoised into a curious ‘oh, look at that’ kind of fare where Stephen Fry
or somebody walks around and finds the world’s smallest strongman; or,
it’s into the news and current affairs sector. The problem with that is that
current affairs by its very nature doesn’t let you get to know people. It’s
not about understanding people and getting into their heads and their
reality.” Independent Executive Producer
This chapter examines the amount of international coverage on British television
and the geographical spread of that coverage.
How Much Gets Shown?
Since 1989, a series of studies have tracked the amount of international factual
programming on UK television. These quantitative studies, run by the
International Broadcasting Trust (IBT) count the numbers of hours of
programming and plot the trends. Having been on the receiving end of the some
of their criticisms, I know that broadcasters think there are severe limitations to
this approach – and there are. Definitions of what constitutes ‘international’ can
be open to different interpretations and the numbers can fluctuate for all sorts of
superficial reasons. But nevertheless this is a highly important and useful study
26
and the findings are revealing. Here are their figures for this decade by channel
for international coverage broken down into developed and developing world:
Table 4: International and developing country factual programme hours
by channel, 2000/01 – 2007
2000/01
2003
2005
2007
Developing
Developed
Developing
Developed
Developing
Developed
Developing
Developed
BBC1
38.6
94.8
19.8
79.6
56.8
100.7
52.6
64.4
BBC2
70.3
144
63.4
115.0
117.9
179.9
103.7
116.2
ITV1
52.0
83.5
14.9
126.4
49.6
81.2
5.1
30.2
C4
95.3
206.8
70.6
151.7
35.8
171.5
66.0
143.2
FIVE
41.2
199
29.5
111.1
31.3
176.4
54.4
97.5
Digital
Channels
0.0
0.0
64.9
66.7
68.9
101.3
90.0
128.9
These figures tell an interesting story. As you can see, the total number of hours
on all channels has remained remarkably constant. (And despite a big drop in the
1990’s, the figures today are pretty close to the totals for 1989/90). But within
that overall total a lot has changed.
BBC1 and BBC2 have stayed pretty consistent in terms of the hours of
international programming transmitted. Channel 4 has dropped from its high
point of 2001 but since then has stayed pretty constant too. The dramatic change
is at ITV where international coverage has dropped by 73% in the last two years
and where coverage of the developing world has practically disappeared (5 hours
for the whole year). This means that, with the exception of its news coverage,
most of the world outside Britain has disappeared from one of the country’s most
watched broadcasters. Although, from what I have heard recently about some
future projects at ITV, I would expect this very low figure to rise a bit soon,
nevertheless the trend is unmistakable.
The other main commercial terrestrial broadcaster Channel Five has also dropped
in volume too, though it has maintained some international presence.
So if there is such a big drop-off among the two commercial broadcasters, why
has the overall total stayed the same ? The answer is that the digital channels
have taken up the shortfall. BBC3 and 4 and More 4, which didn’t exist at the
start of the decade, are together showing considerable numbers of hours of
international material. But these channels have much lower viewing figures than
ITV or Channel Five therefore the inevitable result of this switch is that
international programming is now being seen by far fewer people.
What is clear from this research is that by the actions of the broadcasters and the
inaction of the regulator the marginalisation of international content – the first
step to the ‘global switch-off’ is well under way.
Where Gets Shown?
For this report, we decided to commission some world maps to give a simple view
of how British television views the world. In these maps (reproduced below) the
relative size of each country is proportionate to the amount of coverage that
country received. The maps are based on the figures for factual television from
the 2007 IBT research.
The first map shows the world based on coverage by the terrestrial channels only.
The second map shows the word through the prism of the terrestrial and digital
27
channels together. (Neither map includes the UK as they are about coverage of
the world outside the UK). For comparison, we also reproduce two other maps:
map 3 is based on land mass, and map 4 based on the relative populations of
each country.
Map 1: New Factual programming in the UK Terrestrial
Channels
Map 2: New Factual programming in the UK Terrestrial
and digital channels
Map 3: Land Mass
28
Map 4: Country Populations
What stand outs from the television maps is the overwhelming dominance of
coverage of the United States. (Remember this was British factual television so
without any Hollywood feature films). Western Europe looms large too especially
Ireland and Spain. Europe and North America together make up 47% of all
international factual output. Australia is also very large – especially given its
population.
Overall, there is an enormous bias towards the English–speaking world.
Certain parts of the globe seem to have been effectively ignored or ‘switched off’.
South America gets very little coverage. Africa is small and distorted because it
consists almost entirely of three countries – South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.
This is because almost all most coverage of Africa on British television outside of
news programmes is wildlife programming.
Iraq and Afghanistan stand out, as one might expect. In Asia, India gets a lot of
coverage but China is tiny proportionate to its size and population. This was the
year before the Beijing Olympics. The map for 2008 will obviously look different,
but will the map for 2009?
The two television maps, terrestrial-only and terrestrial-plus-digital, are strikingly
similar. When you include the digital elements there is a bit more Cuba ( is that
world music?), a bit more Japan and proportionately less Africa (there is not
much wildlife on the digital channels). But overall what the comparison between
the two television maps shows is that the digital channels are following the same
geographical trends as their terrestrial cousins. This is a shame. The digital
channels, with less of a need to attract a mainstream audience, could do a lot
more to spread the global range of their coverage.
The maps show that television takes a very limited view of the world. The range
of subject matter is also very restricted. As noted above, Africa is almost entirely
about animals, while most coverage of Europe is about travel with some property
programming added in. Coverage of the United States is mostly about crime.
What sort of picture of the world does the British viewer get from this ?
Commissioners and regulators should take a long hard look at these maps and
ask themselves whether they feel British television really is reflecting the world.
8.0 PRESSURES AND STRUCTURES
“In the end the only way you will get people to do things is if they have it
written down and it is included in the objectives. Too many controllers
and commissioners are still judged by audience size, share and reach.”
Senior Executive.
This chapter looks at
the processes that lead to international programme
proposals being commissioned or rejected. How are decisions arrived at and
29
subsequently signed off? What are the pressures on the decision-makers ? What
are the consequences for international programming ? Do the structures in place
help or hinder?
The Overall Picture
The first thing to say is that a lot of very good international programmes and
reports get commissioned, get produced and get shown. From long-form
documentaries like
China’s Stolen Children and
Sisters In Law to series like
Amazon and
Indian School to regular reports on
Dispatches and
Panorama to
dramas such as
The Death of Thomas Hurndall and
The No.1 Ladies Detective
Agency, at its best, the quality is impressive. On the digital channels,
Storyville and
True Stories can delight and surprise. Quality international content is one the
features that makes British broadcasting good. As we saw from previous
chapters, it is highly valued by the audience, though not always widely watched.
International dramas are rarer and they are expensive but the
The No.1 Ladies
Detective Agency got a good audience in its BBC1 slot. Nor should the important
role of Channel 4 with Film 4 and feature films like
The Last King of Scotland or
Slumdog Millionaire be overlooked. Audience research suggests that for many
feature films are an important window on the developing world.
It’s also worth noting that, from all the conversations I’ve had with many people
across the broadcast and media industry, it is clear that that there are a lot of
people working in the industry who are highly committed to and excited by
international content. Many of them have fought good fights to get such stuff on
the air. Sometimes – some might even say often - they have succeeded.
What Gets Commissioned
As we saw from the previous chapter the amount of international content on
British television has remained relatively constant in terms of the numbers of
hours transmitted. But where it gets shown has shifted sharply towards the digital
channels and away from ITV and Channel Five. That means that fewer people
see it. But that is only half the story. The other half is what those hours of
television actually consist of. What do we get to see?
Having watched a great deal of output recently certain things stand out. I was
interested to discover how widely my impressions were shared across the
television industry.
Television is very good at copying itself. Once one type of programme is seen to
succeed, then before you can say ‘Jack Flash’ a succession of very similar
programmes appear on our screens. With the explosion of channels, this trend
seems to be even more pronounced. At the moment there appear to be two
prevailing types of international programme.
Anthropological
Type One is what might loosely be called the anthropological programme. Some
are participatory, some are observational. In varying guises, a presenter or a
team of contestants go out to some far-flung place and discover or take part in
some aspect of tribal or folk life. As one of my interviewees said with a certain
amount of sardonic wit: “There cannot be a remote tribe left in the world who
have not been filmed or at least put forward in a commissioning proposal in the
last twelve months.” That is not to denigrate this genre. In the right hands it can
be genuinely revealing and insightful and introduce you to cultures and people
30
you would never have known about otherwise. Some of the competition and team
programmes have been innovative. But in the wrong hands they can be guileless
and trite, telling you more about your guide than perhaps you ever wanted to
know and leaving the host people as little more than silent or patronised
backdrops to the overbearing personality or unrestrained angst of the guide. In
these bad programmes, despite the location, you learn more about Surrey than
Sarawak.
Personality
The second type of international programme that dominates at the moment is the
personality-celebrity led travel documentary. It started some time back with the
highly watchable Michael Palin programmes but now we have a real spate of such
programmes with Stephen Fry speeding through every American state, Griff Rhys
Jones leading ITV’s charge through the cities of the world and Channel Five’s Paul
Merton in India and China. Such programmes can certainly be entertaining,
sometimes amusing and from time to time with the right host and producer
insightful. With a combination of a big name and less demanding content they will
find a decent wider audience on the main channels, given the right slot.
What both these types of programme have in common is that they depend upon a
western, usually British, guide (or team of participants) to introduce you to and
take you through the country or region in question. Sometimes the local people
get to speak for themselves but usually only in short bursts; mostly they stand
around while the presenter talks to the camera or sit silently at the side of a
camp fire. All is mediated though our host or guide. The desire of commissioners
to commit to such programmes is understandable. Foreign languages and
subtitles can be more demanding; a big name will get instant recognition on the
listings and the EPG and good foreign documentary reporting and using an expert
interpreter as a guide for the audience can be a good and valuable device for
making the unfamiliar accessible. But it does mean that the people of the
country visited are more often seen as objects rather than subjects.
I am not knocking either of these types of programme. They can get substantial
audiences. When done well, they do a very good job on the mainstream channels
in reaching audiences who not want to sit through heavier fare. Both have an
important part to play in a mixed schedule of international programming. The
problem at the moment, thanks to the cloning instincts of the commissioning
process, is that there is a glut of them. There are just too many of them. They
are dominating what gets shown and crowding out much else.
What’s Missing
With the schedules so full of anthropology and celebrity what is largely missing –
certainly in prominence and quantity – is the harder end of foreign reporting.
Again of course there are major exceptions – some of the programmes listed at
the top of this chapter have done this brilliantly as have BBC2’s
This World and
Channel 4’s
Unreported World. (Though if Channel 4 are so committed to
Unreported World why is it not shown in a more prominent slot?)
Questioning
Part of the range of programming currently under-represented is that which asks
the harder questions: the more journalistically challenging programmes. Now of
course, as we have seen, audiences may find such programmes less ‘entertaining’
and those seeking diversion may not watch. But if public broadcasting is to be a
rich mix of content it needs to transmit the uncomfortable as well as the
31
comfortable. At the moment there don’t seem to be many slots available for, in
the words of one producer “difficult challenging films about parts of the of the
world you don’t normally hear much about”. Have we got the mix right at the
moment?
Connections
Another example of what is missing: where in this globalised world that is talked
about so much are the programmes that make the connections between the
different parts of the world and explain how our lives are affected by the actions
and decisions taken thousands of miles away? Where was the programme
examining why and how Iceland had managed to become such a financial centre
as to be able to sustain such a large banking sector? A proper examination of
this on television would have been a real public service. In fact I did hear a radio
documentary on this and it was very revealing. Programmes about global
connections also meet that test of audience relevance for commissioners. If the
sceptical commissioner asks what has this got to do with the British viewer, the
answer in this case would be a lot.
We hear a lot of talk about a globalised world and the connections across it but it
seems much of our television output has yet to fully grasp this important idea.
Some of this critique applies to news as well as to the long-form areas of factual
output. But some programmes and reports have made the connections. BBC3’s
Blood Sweat and T-shirts did it very well, as did a recent clever report on BBC
News showing how the collapse in the market for waste paper in the UK could be
tracked back though the recyclers in China to the declining sales in the big box
stores in the US.
Risk taking
Above all what is missing from the mix is the innovation and the risk-taking. The
whole commissioning process has become risk-adverse. When different
approaches are tried but are not altogether successful, such as Channel 4’s
Millionaires’ Mission, the reaction seems to be not what can we learn from that
but to run a million miles from attempting anything like it ever again.
To take another example, where in the BBC1 mix are the occasional schedule-
busting international big-takes to match domestic investigations like
The
Undercover Soldier or
The Secret Policeman?
Pressures
The experience of most producers I spoke to is that it is often hard to get this
sort of international material commissioned. Now some of this could be put down
to the disgruntlement of people naturally disappointed by pitches not green-lit but
it seems to me the malaise is more widespread and goes further and deeper than
that.
So what are the pressures that are keeping this material off our screens?
Chief among them is the competitive pressure for ratings
and the widespread
belief that programmes with an international theme do not get good audiences.
Scheduling and commissioning is a sophisticated process. Not every programme
will be commissioned because it is expected to get a mass audience. But it
appears to be the view of most commissioners – at least as judged by their
32
behaviour - that channel for channel, slot for slot international programmes will
get lower ratings than domestic ones.
Ratings are still the biggest factor for broadcasters in judging whether a
programme has been successful. In the commercial media sector the
broadcasters need to be able to sell their air-time to advertisers and advertisers
need audience size (and occasionally demographics) in order to be persuaded to
buy that air-time. In the BBC there has been a long-standing culture of
competitiveness where success is measured by audience size. In both public and
commercial television ratings have become the only currency that matters.
Added to the ratings disincentive for international content is the question of cost.
Programmes made outside the UK are almost by definition more expensive. They
involve flights, they usually involve more complicated production schedules. At a
time when commercial companies like ITV now have a sophisticated Return on
Investment analysis which looks at the revenue earned by a programme against
its costs, lower ratings plus higher cost is a big disincentive for commissioners.
Other Measures of Success
In recent years the BBC has shown some signs of moving away from judging
success solely by ratings, although the extent of that is disputed by those outside
the BBC. For a long time the BBC faced a big strategic problem. It said it wasn’t
only interested in ratings but the only measurable index of the success of a
programme was its audience rating. As in many businesses, in the BBC there
was a strong tendency to value most that which it could measure. There was a
separate index of audience appreciation but it wasn’t taken that seriously.
But in recent years in its public pronouncements the BBC has placed a greater
emphasis on other measures of success. The BBC Trust has now laid down four
criteria against which it will judge the success of BBC channels. These are: total
reach (i.e. the number who watch in a week), quality, impact and value for
money. As part of this new approach, the BBC has devised ways of attempting to
measure all of these including the less immediately quantifiable characteristics of
quality and impact.
Channel 4 is now looking at devising something similar though obviously, as a
commercially funded organization, ratings are always going to play a sizable part
in its decision-making.
Has this made a difference at the BBC? The answer appears to be some
difference. The Appreciation Index of a programme – a measure of how much an
audience liked a programme – does now play a bigger part in judging the success
of a programme, though not enough of a part according to many. And the BBC’s
Pulse survey, a nationwide online panel of 15,000 viewers who are asked to rate
and comment on the programmes they have seen, is also playing a bigger role in
judging the success of programmes. Thus a programme which scored a relatively
low audience but rated high on other attributes may be deemed to be very
successful. This combined with the Appreciation Index (which is now measured in
a couple of days rather than weeks) means that for the first time there is a
method of measuring the relative success of a programme apart from its
audience size.
A more sophisticated approach to judging the success of programmes has to play
a far bigger part in commissioning decisions. This is an essential part of a good
public broadcasting system. It has to be built into the managerial processes and
33
structures of each broadcaster. Commissioners and controllers have got to pay
more than lip service to other measures of success if the international elements
of public broadcasting – and indeed public broadcasting more generally - is to be
distinctive. At the moment, when it comes to commissioning decisions, as we
have seen, the ratings argument still predominates too much. This must change.
The Boards of the BBC and Channel 4 must ensure that in future the fine words in
their remits translate more readily into actions. One of the most effective ways
of doing this would be to ensure that a sufficiently wide basket of measures of
success, in addition to audience reach, are built into each individual executive’s
performance objectives and that this is reflected in their pay and bonuses.
(See
Chapter Ten: Recommendations).
The Importance of Programmes
It is clear from the audience research referred to in Chapter Five that the public
have a quite sophisticated view about what they think public broadcasting should
offer. They have a view about what it should offer them as individuals but they
also have a view about what it should offer viewers and society as a whole. They
understand that, among other things, it is about diversity and scope – providing a
wider range of programmes than just the most popular – and that it is about a
range of programmes and subjects that they think it is important for the public to
be able to see. This measure of the
importance of a programme – how much the
audience says that it matters that such a programme gets made and shown –
needs to be captured as part of the overall measurement of success, discussed
above. What I have called an Importance Index needs to be added to the mix.
(See Chapter Ten: Recommendations).
Structures & the Centralization of Commissioning
Most people I talked to thought that most of the current commissioning processes
for programmes were cumbersome, over-centralised and micro-managed. The
BBC and Channel Four were seen as being the worst offenders.
This applied to all output not just international programmes but I think it may be
having a particular effect on international output. Again one has to aim off for the
natural unhappiness of producers who do not get all their programme ideas
commissioned but again I think there is something deeper and more problematic
lying behind a lot of these comments. The critics say this over-centralisation is
leading to a very conservative approach to commissioning. In the words of one
producer: “the layers involved in commissioning these days mean that there are
far too many people who can say ‘no’ and too few who can say ‘yes’“. Another
said: “The system means they [the commissioners] are institutionally risk-
averse”.
If international programming is considered riskier, costlier and less audience-
friendly in the first place, then under a risk-averse system it is even less likely to
get commissioned. Hence the over-reliance on safe and tried formats. The big
loser under this system is the viewer in search of something less predictable.
Public broadcasting has to be about risk-taking and trying new things. It needs to
move more in that direction. The respective Boards and Trusts of the public
broadcasters need to give it a firm shove in that direction. One big step they
could take to do that would be to insist on a proper international strategy for each
broadcaster.
34
The Need for Strategy
Judging from all my conversations the single biggest thing that seems to be
missing and one that could address many of the weaknesses identified above is
the lack of any sort of international strategy by the main broadcasters. Given
their stated remits, this is especially noticeable at the BBC and Channel 4.
International programming is given such a prominent role in their public purposes
and this is further reflected in the BBC Channel Licences. But below this there is a
big gap when it comes deciding which programmes do and don’t get made.
Rightly commissioning decisions are made on the merits of the proposal. But this
also means that commissioning decisions about international content are made on
an ad-hoc basis. At the moment little or no thought seems to be given to the net
effect of all of these individual decisions.
None of the public broadcasters is asking themselves hard enough questions
about whether, across the full range of their programmes, genres and services,
they have got the right spread of subjects, whether they are over-investing in
certain formats, whether there are certain issues that are getting over-looked,
whether there are important parts of world that are being ignored. An
international strategy for each broadcaster would ensure that these essential
questions are asked and addressed. This would not replace the individual
commissioning decisions – and nor should it, commissioning must be based on
the merit of the proposals and the quality of the programmes – but it would
shape and mould it. It should also produce a wider and more innovative variety of
commissions and of pitches from producers. Above all, it would ensure a more
coherent offer to the viewing public. If the BBC can have a Learning Strategy,
why not an International one ?
(See Chapter Ten: Recommendations) Each broadcaster should also identify one senior executive who would be in
charge of this strategy and would be responsible for delivering it. At the moment
when you ask who is responsible across the whole organization for delivering this
remit you either get the answer ‘no one is’ or you get the answer ‘everyone is’,
which in the end also means no one is.
(See Chapter Ten: Recommendations) Real World Seminars
One recent positive initiative has been the recent series of ‘Real World’ seminars
which the BBC has run in conjunction with the International Broadcasting Trust.
These day-long events have been practical and story-led. During our discussions,
several people at the BBC praised them highly. They seem to have given a clear
message from the top that this sort of programming is valued. They have reached
out to executives who might otherwise have been more oblivious to these sorts of
topics. Commissioners and producers came from all genres including non-factual
areas such as comedy and drama.
One executive said to me that while
The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency project
would have been a strong candidate for commissioning anyway, given the
success of the books and the involvement of Anthony Minghella, but what the
seminar had done was to give the commissioners the extra confidence to go
ahead with it.
The success of these seminars could be repeated with other broadcasters.
Channel 4 has not yet done something similar. They could and should. From all
that I have heard from the BBC, they would profit from it greatly in terms of
generating new perspectives and ideas. ITV and Channel Five – though less
obviously fertile ground – should also experiment with such an initiative.
(See
Chapter Ten: Recommendations).
35
9.0 ON THE HORIZON
“Those of us who use online a lot are a lot more used to diversity and
that will affect audience expectations in the future.” Online journalist
and commentator
This section looks forward to the future and how the media picture might look in
a few years time and how that, in turn, might affect international coverage.
There are a couple of important caveats to be entered right at the start. I don’t
have a crystal ball but neither for that matter do a lot of people a lot smarter
than me. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian and part of one of the more
far-sighted media groups, described their digital strategy as “invest and hope”.
Even that wily old fox Rupert Murdoch is reported to have said that he can’t see
further than two years ahead. So I will leave the big predictions and the
sketching of scenarios to the futurologists and the wizards of Ofcom and
elsewhere. Instead what I am going to do here is point to some of the possible
developments which could have an impact on the development of international
coverage.
Linear Media and the Mainstream Channels
Much has been written about the death of conventional television channels; much
of it is over-apocalyptic. At Davos two years ago Bill Gates prophesied that the
internet would revolutionize television in five years. He might be partly right
about that. He was certainly wrong when in 2004 he predicted the death of the
linear TV schedule. I don’t see any sign of it dying yet and certainly not any time
soon. The big live events – be it the
X Factor or
Strictly Come Dancing or their
successors – and the big news and sporting events will draw sizable audiences for
some time to come. But there are also some big disruptive factors at work, such
as on-demand television, which are changing viewing habits thanks to Sky Plus
and the recent success of the BBC’s iPlayer. Internet television will obviously have
an impact too and an even bigger one when it is standard to have a pc. facility
wired into the TV. But these various ways of watching time-shifted television are
for the most part substitutes for one another. It is unlikely that the introduction
of internet television will have as radical an effect as it would have done if it had
been the first device to time-shift traditional viewing. There is growing evidence
too that the web will not supplant television but supplement it. Lean-back and
lean-to viewing are different activities to suit different moods. There will still be
times when audiences will want to leave their viewing priorities to a scheduler.
The devices may converge, the viewing habits may not.
Therefore my view - and that of most of the people I have talked to - is that the
mainstream channels will be around for some time to come. Furthermore where
viewing does shift away from the linear schedules, these channels or their host
broadcaster will still be the principal originators of the content that draws in
viewers. It’s worth noting that in the United States, though the last US election
was described as being the ‘internet election’ – and indeed the Obama campaign
made stunning use of the internet for campaigning and fund-raising – the big
campaign-changing media moments all started their lives on television. They may
have been watched subsequently many times over on websites and on YouTube
but all – ranging from the vice-presidential debate (70m. live viewers) to Sarah
36
Palin with Katie Couric on CBS and John McCain not on David Letterman to Tina
Fey uncannily as Sarah Palin on
Saturday Night Live – aired first on network
television.
The mainstream channels are likely to be important both as broadcasters and as
providers of content for quite some time to come. More and more content will be
commissioned for multi-platform use but most of what this report has talked
about in terms of commissioning processes and culture is likely to apply for some
time to come.
Catch-Up and On-Demand Media
Clearly on-demand viewing will become more important in the future; the
uncertainty is how quickly and to what extent. In the future viewing is likely to
polarize between time-shifting those programmes that are relatively timeless –
the dramas, the soaps, the documentaries – and those in which the content is felt
by the audience to be time-critical - where you feel you have missed out if you
have not seen it – the sporting events, the big news events and the big live
contests.
The technical success of the BBC iPlayer has been quickly adopted by sections of
the audience. The BBC has now proposed sharing this with other broadcasters.
This notion of extending the scope of the iPlayer could easily be extended further.
It could be used to offer international content that has not already been
broadcast in the UK. It could also be used as an important archive for previously
broadcast material which is not otherwise available because it is not sufficiently
attractive commercially. (Where for example can you currently watch many
award-winning documentary programmes such as recent BAFTA winners ?) This
could offer audiences an extraordinary range of choice for international material
and could exploit a ‘long tail’ of programmes. There will of course be rights and
other issues to be resolved. As a first step, the BBC should offer on an
experimental basis the best international factual material from one or two of this
year’s film festivals such as the Sheffield Documentary Festival. (
see Chapter 10:
Recommendations).
The Long-Tail Audience
The growth of on-demand viewing will alter the way we think about programme
ratings in the future. The importance of the scheduled “first night” audience will
decrease and the importance of the cumulative audience will grow as
programmes are watched days and weeks after their premiere.
This should benefit international programming. The existence of a strong
programme archive readily available on demand will mean that more and more
people will have the chance to view such programming over a longer period of
time. It’s the long tail principle: a programme may only attract a small niche
audience at first but with repeated opportunities to watch the total audience could
grow into a sizable total.
But there are two important caveats to this broad welcome.
The first is about how audiences are measured. Unless the “long tail” of the
catch-up audience is measured properly and, as importantly, is valued properly
by the broadcasters then it will have little impact on the culture of commissioning
in these organizations.
37
The second is that any large-scale growth in on-demand viewing is likely to lead
to a decrease in serendipitous viewing i.e. the chance that the viewer will come
across a programme by chance and discover they like it, even though they didn’t
know they would beforehand. According to Ofcom research this serendipitous
viewing is one of the things that people value about public service broadcasting.
The paradox of choice is that the more choice that is available to people, the
more they are likely to seek out that with which they are already familiar. This
drift to the familiar will be accentuated in the on-demand world if the marketing
and promotions priorities on devices such as the iPlayer concentrate only on the
already established rating busters. If the front page only features
Eastenders and
Spooks then a big opportunity will have been missed to encourage the viewer to
try the unfamiliar and the surprising.
Citizen Journalism and User Generated Content
The old model of access to broadcasting, confined to a few organisations with the
money and resources to send people around the world, was based on limited
access to technology. Whoever had that power was in a great position. Now,
almost anybody anywhere can do the same thing with an Internet connection and
a laptop. The basic model has been totally undercut by the internet and
technology.
All sorts of producers of international content will now be able to ‘broadcast’ their
content without the need for any sort of conventional broadcaster. The old model
of ‘one to many’ becomes ‘many to many’. The only drawback to this utopian
vision is that the ‘many to many’ may not actually reach that many. While some
of the videos on YouTube and other sites are viewed by millions, most are seen
by few. Broadcasting is “push”; the web is “pull”. In other words with the web
you have to go and seek out the content and have some idea of what you are
looking for in the first place. While producers of international content will now
have limitless access (there were a trillion web pages at the last count) the
impact of most material on the web will be limited, most of the web will remain
niche. In terms of getting more international content seen by more people the
web is not the panacea that some seem to think it is.
Partnerships
This means that partnerships will matter a lot more in the new media world. Two
of the most important tools of the internet are search and aggregation. People
usually find content either by search engine or by bookmarking a site. For a
producer looking to post material on the web the key is not access but getting the
material known about and seen. If you put it up on the web how are people going
to find it? Getting it on a site that lots of people routinely use is going to be
important. Partnerships will be crucial in this. Thus when the BBC and Save The
Children co-operated on a project about the Sierra Leone coastal slum of Kroo
Bay for the BBC website, the result was a much wider audience for Save The
Children than it would have achieved on its own website, while the BBC had
access to material that it would never have had the time to generate on its own.
Such partnerships point a way for the future.
(See Chapter Ten:
Recommendations) At the moment a lot of good international material is widely spread across a lot of
different websites. You never know where to find it. As well as establishing more
partnerships with existing media sites, non-broadcast organizations and NGO’s
(and anyone else with an interest) should set up a joint portal where you could
easily access international material from across the world. It may be that a site
such as Global Voices Online could be a model for such a site or maybe even a
38
partner. The International Broadcasting Trust should take on the facilitation of the
first steps of this project.
(See Chapter Ten: Recommendations)
Editors and Journalists
Some people have forecast that the explosion of user generated material –
sometimes called citizen journalism – means the end of the professional
journalist. Again this is so much hyperbole and again an over-reaction to an
important development. In the media world of the future there will still be
journalists and there will still be editors. Yes there will be a lot more material that
will have been gathered by non-professionals, but there will still be a big need for
people on the ground with the experience and judgment to make sense of events.
The question for the future is where and how can the established journalist really
add value ? It will still be important in the future to establish clear facts in
confusing situations and to be able to interpret them and put events into a fuller
context.
Thanks to the internet the number of available sources has increased
exponentially and will continue to do so. This enables people to become their own
individual newsroom seeking out a whole array of reports and voices. But only a
few people will have the will or the time to do this. There is still going to be a
demand from audiences for a professionally edited digest of what has happened.
Users will want the continued expertise of journalists they feel they can trust.
There will be a role for professional editors in the future.
It was interesting to see that during the aftermath of the recent Mumbai
bombings, when the BBC started an online minute-by-minute log mixing in
reportage from its own correspondents with that from other sources such as
emails and a Twitter strand, this produced a strong hostile reaction from sections
of the audience who said that they looked to the BBC to put out an authoritative
account of what had happened not, as they put it, a stream of garbled reports
and unverified accounts.
Diversity and Audience Expectations
The fact that the internet is such a global phenomenon is slowly but surely having
an impact on audience expectations. People who use online a lot are much more
used to electronically ‘rubbing up’ against different parts of the globe and
therefore are becoming a lot more familiar with global diversity. This is going to
have an effect on user and audience expectations over time. Audiences of the
future will be a lot more willing to accept cultural experiences outside their own.
Longer-term that should make international content become more attractive to
UK audiences both on television and the web.
Social Networking Sites
Similarly, the rapid growth of social networking sites is likely to have a large and
growing impact on the perceptions of UK audiences towards international content.
Facebook, a site which was only launched in February of 2004 now has an
estimated 120 million users worldwide, eight and a half million of them in the UK.
The phenomenon of networks of remote electronic friends, who of course you
may never have met face to face, is proving to be a powerful force with younger
generations. These friends can be anywhere in the world. But thanks to the
various devices such as photos, video and instant messaging on the site they can
39
become very real in a personal sense – nearly as real as your mates round the
corner. Social networking sites will lead to more and more worldwide friendship
networks. This in turn will make more parts of world personally relevant to
increasing numbers of UK viewers and media consumers.
The Future of Search
Search engines – Google in particular – have become central to the internet
experience. But what we have now in terms of search capacity is very
unsophisticated and mechanical. Search will become much more sophisticated in
the future. Some of this will emerge through what has been labeled “the
semantic web”. Others call it Web 3.0. This is how Tim Berners-Lee described the
difference between the present web and the semantic web:
“The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages,
creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can
readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.”
We are also likely to see the search engines becoming more personalised, where
the engine ‘remembers’ what you seemed to like and how long you spent on each
site. Greater sophistication of search, which will include video and audio, will
make all content much easier to find and hence it will enable people to find
international content on the web much more easily and will increase its potential
audience.
10.0 RECOMMENDATIONS
On the basis of my research I list here the actions that would make a
serious difference to the quality of international material available from
public service broadcasters.
•
An International Strategy for each broadcaster. Each public service
broadcaster should draw up an explicit international strategy.
This should go
further and be more detailed than the current generalities of Purposes and
Channel Licences. It should identify and anticipate significant themes and
ensure that important parts of the world are not over-looked. It should be
cross-genre and cross-platform. This strategy would be submitted to and
endorsed by each broadcaster’s board. Commissioning of individual
programmes and series would still be done by individual genre commissioners
on a merit basis but such a strategy would provide a framework for and shape
their decisions. It would also offer producers more of guide as to what might
be looked for in this area and therefore should improve the quality of offers.
Such a strategy should also give commissioners and controllers both the
support and, where necessary, the ‘shove’ to be prepared to take more risks.
Such a strategy should become part of the licensing or regulatory
requirements of each public service broadcaster.
•
International Champions. There should be a named senior executive at
each broadcaster who has overall responsibility for their international content.
This person should be at board level. S/he would be responsible for drawing
40
up and ‘owning’ that broadcaster’s international strategy.
This person would
be responsible to the respective regulators for the delivery of that strategy
and should act as the principal point of contact for outside organizations and
individuals.
This should form a formal part of their individual performance
objectives and of their bonus arrangements.
•
Measures of Success. Broadcasters – especially the BBC and Channel 4 -
should be required by their respective Boards to draw up and use a balanced
basket of measures by which to judge the success of programmes. Controllers
and commissioners should act on those measures and not give the impression
of just paying lip service to them. Where they are not already, such
scorecards should be incorporated into individual commissioner’s and
controller’s performance objectives.
•
An Importance Index. Broadcasters should be encouraged to experiment
with a new measure - an “Importance Index” - which would measure how
important viewers thought it was that a particular programme they had seen
had seen had been made and shown.
•
Seminars. The recent series of joint BBC/IBT seminars do seem to have
made a difference. They seem to have generated lots of good ideas which
have been carried over into output. Cleverly, they have been story-led and
have not degenerated into finger-wagging lectures. They should be continued
at the BBC and they should be spread to other broadcasters. One of the first
priorities of the next seminars should be to concentrate on ways of
discovering great stories and devising formats about the inter-connectedness
of the world which everyone says they know about but which still seems to be
largely missing from our screens.
•
Contestable Funding. At the time of writing there is still a great deal of
debate and uncertainty about the concept of ‘contestable funding’, the idea
that some portion of public broadcast money rather than being assigned to
one broadcaster or another should be more widely available to be competed
for on a merit basis. (Different models have been drawn up at different times
as to how this might be done). This paper does not have the space to discuss
the merits and de-merits of this idea. But were it to happen then there would
be a strong case for at least a portion of such a fund being ear-marked for
international programming as one of the future ‘endangered species’ of
broadcasting.
•
BBC World News into the UK. The
BBC World News channel should be
made available in the UK, probably without advertising. It does not make
sense for British audiences to be denied another important window on the
world. In the same way that British audiences can ‘eavesdrop’ on the BBC
World Service radio network in Britain so they should similarly be able to
watch the World News channel. The BBC has always shied away from this in
the past because the channel is commercially funded and it was thought that
this would open the Pandora’s Box of advertising on the BBC. But the media
landscape has changed dramatically since then. There are BBC programmes
on commercial channels all over the EPG now and, at a time when British
audiences can see CNN International, Al Jazeera and other international
channels, it no longer seems to make sense to deny this BBC service to British
viewers.
•
Expand the international scope of the BBC iPlayer. The BBC has already
proposed expanding the scope of the successful iPlayer to take in other
broadcasters. Thought should be given to taking this much further and
41
expanding it to international material that has not already been broadcast in
the U.K. This could give an opportunity for a wider range of material to be
made available than that which finds its way to air by conventional broadcast
means. However this should not become a way for broadcasters to shunt such
material off their regular channels. There will be issues to be thought through
with such a proposal such as funding – do producers get paid for this? – and
gate-keeping – do the regular commissioners also decide what goes into this
window ? There is not room to resolve these here. But as another window on
the world this could be a valuable device. I would propose initially, perhaps as
a first experiment, that there should be an ‘Electronic International Festival’ in
2009. This would be a showcase – like a large scale film festival - of as yet
untransmitted international material on the iPlayer. It would be available for a
limited period, perhaps a month, and would show the best documentaries
shown at one or two festivals that year - say the ‘Best of the Sheffield
Documentary Festival’. Producers would allow their material to be shown for
that strictly limited period for free – as they would at a festival - and the BBC
would host it and draw in the traffic.
•
Partnerships. Broadcast and non-broadcast organizations should find ways
of working more closely together, collaborating on projects like video and text
diaries to be posted on the web sites of the broadcasters. This would exploit
the possibilities of low-cost production now available to non-broadcast
organizations. The result of this would be a richer range of material for the
broadcasters’ web-sites than would be available to them using only their own
resources, while the non-broadcast organizations get their material seen and
read. There will be issues to be worked out in terms of editorial values such as
impartiality, attribution and branding but the looser architecture of the web –
and the different user/viewer expectations - makes this a lot easier to
achieve.
•
Build and brand an international portal. At the moment the big problem
with the potential of the web for international material is that it is scattered all
over the place and is difficult to find. Those organizations with an interest in
seeing the wider dissemination of international material should consider
pooling their resources and material with a view to building a branded
international internet portal which would host a wealth of international
material. This could carry both material that has already been broadcast and
material which is original and would act as one-stop shop. How such a portal
might be funded would of course need to be worked out but with a strong
international/developing world focus several Foundations might be interested
in joining. Whether such a portal would exist separately from existing sites
like YouTube or whether it should work in collaboration would also need to be
thought through.
Acknowledgements
This report was commissioned by Sam Barratt of Oxfam, Mark Galloway of the
International Broadcasting Trust and Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis at the LSE.
I am grateful to them for the chance to write this but they are not responsible for
the judgments, opinions or recommendations. The authorship and any errors are
mine.
In researching this report I spoke to a large number of producers, commissioners,
controllers, senior executives and regulators across the broadcasting and media
industries as well as to a number of others outside the industry with an interest in
this subject and that of international affairs and development. I interviewed all of
42
them on an off-the-record basis as I felt that way they would be able to speak
more freely. I am grateful to all of them for their time, help, insight and wisdom.
The broadcast world maps were produced by John Pritchard and Worldmapper.org
and are © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark
Newman (University of Michigan). Martin Scott of the University of East Anglia
prepared the data for the maps from the material he compiled for the IBT report
Screening The World. All their help is very much appreciated.
I would also like to thank both the LSE Polis interns, Oli Courtney and Marilena
Manatou, who helped with so much of the research.
This subject covers a big area. I am bound to have over-simplified at times. I am
sure there are important caveats I have left out and shining examples I have not
included but I have tried as hard as I could to give a true overall picture of what I
have seen and been told.
Phil Harding January 2009
About The Author
Philip Harding is a journalist and media consultant. Previously he was a senior
executive and editor at the BBC.
Recently he has undertaken a number of projects including a study of how digital
media will affect coverage of development issues in the U.K. and has worked with
the launch team of the new morning public radio programme on WNYC in New
York. He has worked in Argentina lecturing and conducting workshops on public
broadcasting and political independence.
He has also lectured at Wharton Business School on open media and innovation.
He writes for the Guardian newspaper on the media and on politics. He also
lectures at the BBC's College of Journalism.
He is a Trustee of the Press Association and of the One World Broadcasting Trust.
He is a Fellow of the Society of Editors and sits on their Advisory Committee; he
is also a fellow of the Radio Academy.
Before that, Phil had held a variety of senior editorial jobs in BBC radio and
television. From 2001-7 he was Director of English Networks and News at the
BBC World Service. Before that he had been deputy editor of Panorama, editor of
the Today programme, the founding editor of Five Live News programmes, the
BBC's chief political advisor and Controller of Editorial Policy.
On Panorama he won an Emmy in the U.S. for his investigation into the death of
the Bulgarian broadcaster, Georgi Markov. Phil has also led teams that have won
numerous Sony Gold awards.
43
Contacts
Sam Barratt, Oxfam
e: [email address]
www.oxfam.org.uk/pressoffice
Charlie Beckett, Polis
e: [email address]
www.polismedia.org
www.charliebeckett.org
Mark Galloway, IBT
e: [email address]
www.ibt.org.uk
Phil Harding
e: [email address]
44
