Posted by
Colin Crummy
on 25 August 2007 at 14:44
Tags: Edinburgh 2007, Edinburgh International Television Festival
Jeremy Paxman has used the keynote speech of the Edinburgh TV festival to rally the industry to rediscover its sense of purpose.
The Newsnight presenter, giving the annual James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, attacked placed a particular emphasis on news and current affairs coverage, tackling the trust issue, which has dominated the annual festival’s agenda.
He criticized senior management for not leading with conviction as the crisis in viewers’ trust has grown and said that making money from television had become its driving, destructive force. “People at the top are less concerned with content and a lot more concerned with bottom lines. There are too many people in this industry whose answer to the question what is television for? is to say ‘to make money.”
He said this would inevitably lead to ITV abandoning much of its regional broadcasting and questioned if news and current affairs would survive on Channel 4 in the digital age without a regulator to enforce.
Paxman took the opportunity to tackle his employer, the BBC, on the issues raised. On the BBC Trust he said: “I know the BBC Trust hasn’t been in the job very long. But it does seem a big disappointment that it appears so far to consider its job to be more to do with chastising the senior management than with preaching a higher social purpose for the organisation.”
He criticized too, the budget management at the corporation – saying it had got sidetracked into spending money on things – like digital switchover, the move to Salford – “which have nothing much to do with sole purpose of its existence, which is to produce worthwhile programmes.”
He added: “Even so, quite how these obligations produce a budget crisis in an organisation with an assured income of three and a half billion pounds is still something of a mystery to me.”
Paxman said the cuts expected in news would cut to the heart of its output with at least a further twenty percent savings to be made over five years. “It is unsustainable,” he said, “and I cannot see how the programme can survive in anything like its current form if the cuts are implemented.”
He questioned the future of the BBC – wondering if the corporation could continue to justify a licence fee to make programmes that would never be broadcast on television in a digital age or if watched on a device other than a television – that did not need a license.
He compared the corporation to “a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another.”
He said the corporation would have to justify its existence, not through the buildings its in, but through the programmes it makes.
In an hour-long speech, Paxman attacked what he described as the media’s “pretty pathetic” reaction to Blair’s “feral beast” speech.He challenged the media’s lack of self-analysis in the aftermath of Blair’s critique of media earlier this year.
Paxman, specifically addressing broadcasters’ response, said he found it “pretty depressing”. “Hardly anyone engaged with the substance of the criticisms – of our triviality, our short-sightedness, our preoccupation with conflict. The immediate and almost universal reaction was not to examine the charge sheet, but to utter a blanket plea of ‘not guilty’, usually followed by well, you misled us about WMD, as if that somehow entitles us to say whatever we like.”
He responded to Blair’s accusations of a corrosive media – and specifically the charge that journalists like him have helped destroy the relationship between the industry and politicians.
He said: “I do genuinely believe there ought to be a chasm between journalists and politicians. I intend no criticism of colleagues in the lobby who’ve come to a different conclusion. But that’s what I think.”
Paxman also highlighted what he saw as a “tacit understanding” between media and politics who criticize each other but not the public and said that the media had become “ too close to Westminster politics”.
He attacked the “expectation inflation” that 24-hour rolling news had created in viewers. “But the problem is that all news programmes need to make noise. The need’s got worse, the more crowded the market’s become.”
He criticized the demands that 24 hour news put on journalists to present comment masked as analysis – because of a lack of time to get out and find out things for themselves. “The consequence is that what follows isn’t analysis. It’s simply comment, because analysis takes time, and comment is free.”
Paxman also spoke of “a gnawing anxiety” at the rise of celebrity news. He cited Paris Hilton’s jail time and gossip on Prince William’s relationship to Kate Middleton as examples of the “vaccousness of much news reporting”. He said: “Does exposing people to this ceaseless torrent make them any better off? I have always believed passionately – and continue to believe – in the public’s right to know, that a well-informed democracy is a healthy democracy – but you do begin to wonder when this ceaseless tide of predigested stuff comes at you.
