Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  I have a theory about why journalists find it so difficult to evaluate risk accurately. They are hard-wired to try to make their stories as dramatic as they can: they want to be on the front page of the newspaper, or at the top of the news bulletin. So rather than asking a scientist: ‘Tell us what you think the risk is…’, they would much rather ask: ‘Worst case scenario, how serious could this risk be?’ The headline then becomes not ‘Scientists say eating beef might carry some risk in certain circumstances’, but ‘Scientists warn hundreds of thousands could die’. Note the word ‘could’: it is the journalistic equivalent of those Sales signs in shop windows: ‘Up to 80 per cent off’. The key words are ‘up to’.

  After a natural disaster – an earthquake, or flash floods – the first question on a journalist’s lips is ‘How many dead?’ The higher the number, the bigger the story. So if the response is: ‘Well, we don’t know yet, but it could be in four figures’, the headline becomes: ‘Thousands feared dead…’ And because journalists always want to be first with the news, they will press for answers long before officials are ready to give them.

  Why did the plane fall out of the sky? ‘It’s too early to say’ is never good enough. Much better to find someone to say ‘We can’t rule anything out’ and make the headline ‘Terrorist bomb fear after plane disaster’.

  In my perfect world, every schoolchild would take a compulsory course in journalese. They would learn that in journalese, ‘row’ means ‘difference of opinion’; ‘gaffe’ means ‘honest answer’; and any headline that ends with a question mark should automatically be answered with the word No. They would also learn that the reason headline writers will always go for short, punchy words – ‘row’, ‘crisis’, ‘killer’ – is that they fit across the top of a tabloid-size front page. No one ever called Margaret Thatcher ‘Maggie’ in real life – they would never have dared – but ‘Margaret’ is far too long for a front-page headline and ‘Thatcher’ is not much better. Never underestimate the tyranny of the layout man.

  Two of the biggest dangers for journalists are succumbing to the temptation to feed their readers’ or listeners’ fears, and grasping hungrily at any new angle on a long-running story. Ask a provocative question and no one can accuse you of making stuff up. Search online for a Daily Mail random headline generator, and you will soon see where this can lead: ‘Has the internet turned property prices gay?’, ‘Are the Germans giving British people cancer?’, ‘Have the Poles had sex with taxpayers?’, ‘Could the unions give the royal family cancer?’

  It would be funnier if it was not also so contagious. Journalists feed off each other shamelessly, and what may have started out as a desperate attempt to fill a page on a quiet Tuesday in mid-August can easily end up as a ten-minute discussion on the Today programme. I remember a BBC producer once suggesting that we follow up a story in The Times about how climate change was enabling British farmers to start growing tropical fruit. I thought I had heard the story before and, when I checked, I discovered that exactly the same story had appeared the previous year, based on the same quotes from the same single farmer. It was not news; it was a press release.

  The award-winning investigative reporter Nick Davies of The Guardian calls this ‘churnalism’, the process by which reporters churn out press releases or news agency stories with little or no original work of their own.151 Real news is expensive to gather and can now often be obtained from non-newspaper providers. The spread of online and social media – and the resulting collapse in advertising revenue for traditional print media – has vastly increased the pressure on traditional news providers to reduce the number of journalists they employ and, at the same time, find something more than just ‘facts’ to offer to their customers. If news events can be covered in real time, readers have little incentive to spend money on a newspaper a day later that simply tells them what they have already learned from the phone in their pocket. If, on the other hand, it offers a slant on the news that confirms their world view and reassures them that they are not alone in blaming foreigners/Tories/bankers/socialists for all that is wrong with the world, then they might still be prepared to pay for that comfort. Hence the plethora of columnists, commentators and controversialists, who are much cheaper to hire and fire.

  When I started writing my post-BBC blog, I soon discovered that the angrier I sounded, the more widely read my blogposts were. People tend not to share with their friends a calmly considered, dispassionate analysis of the latest events in central Asia, but the ‘Have you seen this?’ messages will flood the digisphere as soon as you launch a furious attack on a politician or public figure. The temptations are obvious: if you want to be noticed in this increasingly raucous multimedia world, you have to shout ever louder. Long gone are the days when the advice to aspiring young journalists was: ‘Be angry, but don’t shout.’

  Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell has written of ‘a post-factual, post-reason age … born in the fusion of news and comment in most newspapers as they adapted to TV, developed in the sound and fury of 24/7 TV news, and ventilated by the howling rage of social media’.152 In the US, where broadcasters are not bound by notions of impartiality, the rabidly right-wing – and often post-factual – Fox News quickly overtook CNN by offering more strident, opinionated coverage that found a ready market among viewers who felt that no one else was reflecting their views. It offers a salutary lesson to those in the UK who argue for less impartiality in British broadcasting.

  So where does all this leave the poor old BBC? Is it now an anachronism that needs to be put out of its misery in our brave new digital world? How can the same organisation be responsible for both the triumph of the London Olympics coverage, Doctor Who, Wolf Hall, EastEnders, Strictly Come Dancing, Countryfile and The Great British Bake Off and also the appalling mishandling of the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal and what used to be the grotesquely inflated salaries of its top executives? How can it possibly defend levying a compulsory tax on every TV owner, regardless of whether they ever watch a BBC programme?

  My answer is simply that it works. For barely forty pence a day, British TV owners are still provided with a uniquely rich mix of output, ranging from Chris Evans, Ken Bruce and Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 to newly commissioned contemporary music on Radio 3 and subtitled Scandinavian police dramas on BBC4. In 2015/16, 96 per cent of UK adults used a BBC service on radio, TV or online each week, and a record 320 million people accessed the BBC’s global news services.153

  By any standards, this makes the BBC one of the most successful institutions in the world. It is also extraordinarily good value for money. Nevertheless, as long as the licence fee is set by government, and after several years of remorseless squeezing, it is difficult to see how the BBC can survive indefinitely in a digital, multimedia age if it is almost entirely dependent on the licence fee for its income. The reality is that it no longer has to compete only with fellow broadcasters like ITV or Channel 4, but also with global digital giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Netflix. (Amazon’s annual net revenue is more than $100 billion; the BBC’s gross revenue is about $6 billion). Far from being a Goliath in the contemporary media world, the BBC is now a minnow.

  The conclusion is inescapable: if the BBC is to survive, it needs more money, not less. It needs to be able to invest in new technologies, so that it can deliver content to mobile phones and tablets as smoothly as to TV sets and car radios. It also needs to be able to compete with Amazon and Apple for star names and star formats, as well as for major sports events that generate so much revenue for commercial media organisations. In just one year, it lost Top Gear to Amazon, Bake Off to Channel 4, and it was Netflix, not the BBC, that bought the drama serial The Crown.

  Just as newspapers have had to do, I think the BBC will soon have to start charging subscribers for access to premium products. I believe that the licence fee should stay, as a means of funding BBC core output – news and current affairs, light entertainment and some documentaries – but that,
over the next decade or so, it will have to be supplemented by additional charges for additional content. I envisage a hybrid funding model that would combine the licence fee with paid-for, add-on packages, much as cable providers like Sky and Virgin Media currently offer different content packages at different prices.

  I also think that in developed markets overseas, the BBC should be able to start charging for some of its content. World Service radio output must remain free in poorer countries, but in the US, mainland Europe and parts of Asia, there must surely be substantial revenue opportunities from television viewers who would happily pay to watch David Attenborough wildlife documentaries and endless re-runs of Mr Bean and Fawlty Towers.

  I know from having met many hundreds of BBC World Service devotees in the US over the years that they would happily pay a monthly charge for access to BBC output, over and above what they already pay to support their local public radio station or their cable TV provider. I understand the BBC’s fear: that if it starts charging for its content, UK governments will reduce still further the value of the licence fee and argue that the BBC should make up any shortfall by increasing its commercial revenues. It is a justified fear, but I see only one, unpalatable alternative.

  The BBC could simply stop doing some of the things that it currently does.

  No more local radio, competing head-to-head with local commercial stations.

  No more mass-appeal light entertainment shows like Strictly Come Dancing or Bake Off.

  Slash its funding to the arts: no more Proms, shut down Radio 3, sell off its orchestras.

  Cut back its online presence to just a slimline news service with links to broadcast output.

  It would save many millions of pounds, but it would leave the country incalculably poorer. I cannot believe that an institution that is so widely loved and admired would ever be left to wither away, no matter how revolutionary the changes in the media environment.

  Like journalism, the BBC will survive. It will have to change, but it will not die.

  ‘If he grows up to be an asker of questions, he will be, indeed, one of the rare men who may find an answer here and there. Let him be an asker-of-questions.’

  My uncle’s words, written just days after my birth, still echo in my head. I did grow up to be an asker of questions, but did I find any answers?

  Not many, perhaps, but enough to make it worth the effort.

  I learned that people the world over are remarkably similar: whether they are destitute villagers in South Sudan, or upwardly mobile city-dwellers in China, or unemployed blue-collar workers in the American rust belt, they want exactly the same things for themselves and their families.

  A roof over their head. A job that pays enough to support their family. Access to affordable health care. And an education for their children.

  And I learned that most conflicts stem from fear. Fear that your land is about to be taken from you. Fear that you are about to be killed. Fear that you and your family will starve.

  When I left the BBC, I tried to draw up a tally of all the changes that I had observed and reported on over the course of more than two decades as a broadcaster. The end of the Cold War, the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the 9/11 attacks, followed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The rise of Vladimir Putin, the financial crisis of 2007–08, the quickening process of climate change, the bloody upheavals in much of the Arab world and then the civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria. So much death, so much misery.

  But there was another side of the picture. The Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland, the stunning economic advances in China and India, the communications revolution that brought mobile telephones and the internet to hundreds of millions of people. And the health advances: fewer women dying in childbirth than ever before, and fewer children dying before the age of five.

  Between 1999 and 2005, thanks to the spread of vaccinations, the number of children who died annually from measles dropped by 60 per cent. The proportion of the world’s infants vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus climbed from less than half to more than 80 per cent between 1985 and 2008.

  So, despite all the wars, famines and natural disasters, I concluded that for most of its human inhabitants, the world was a far better place in 2012 than it had been two decades earlier.

  These observations are neither particularly profound nor particularly new. I am, after all, a journalist, not a philosopher or a historian. But they are the best I can come up with, and they help me to explain to myself why the world we live in is the way it is. Perhaps they have also helped me to explain it to a few others as well.

  EPILOGUE

  AT THE END OF Scoop, William Boot returns from the war in Ishmaelia to the tranquillity of his country home, where he resumes writing his rural notes for the Daily Beast. ‘The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves; maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble…’

  During my forty-plus years as a journalist, I don’t think I have ever written about rodents, maternal or otherwise.

  It is time I did.

  ENDNOTES

  1 The Guardian, 3 February 2014.

  2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3996733.stm

  3 https://audioboom.com/boos/717909-is-fiction-the-process-of-turning-fact-into-truth

  4 Growing Up on The Times by Louis Heren (Hamish Hamilton, 1978).

  5 The Last Paragraph: The Journalism of David Blundy (Heinemann, 1990).

  6 The Observer, 18 May 2003.

  7 The Guardian, 22 February 2012.

  8 https://www.channel4.com/news/my-friend-marie-colvin

  9 A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (Methuen, 1926).

  10 The Observer, 20 January 1980.

  11 Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (Chapman & Hall, 1938).

  12 The Observer, 1 April 1984.

  13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZqN-uEgQU

  14 Observer Foreign News Service, 26 February 1987.

  15 Looking for Democracy, BBC World Service, September 2005.

  16 Archipelago, 53 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JJ.

  17 Susan Lustig, Born under a Lucky Star, unpublished memoir.

  18 Lustig, ibid.

  19 Lustig, op. cit.

  20 See Helen Fry, The M Room: Secret Listeners Who Bugged the Nazis (Thistle Publishing, 2012), and Sönke Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals (Frontline Books, 2013).

  21 UPI report, 21 February 1968.

  22 Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad Times (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).

  23 National Archives, Cabinet document ref. 15/22, 12 September 1970.

  24 Quoted in Douglas Stuart, A Very Sheltered Life (Collins, 1970).

  25 Frederick Forsyth, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (Bantam Press, 2015).

  26 Jonathan Fenby, The General, Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

  27 New York Times, 30 January 1976.

  28 Anne Sebba, British Journalism Review, June 2001.

  29 Quoted in Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren, The First Lady of Fleet Street (Biteback, 2012)

  30 http://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/jun/09/

  theobserver.pressandpublishing

  31 Blond, 1961.

  32 The Independent, 28 October 2009

  33 Donald Harman Akenson, Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Vol. 1, Narrative (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 452.

  34 Akenson, ibid., p. 448.

  35 Akenson, ibid., p. 441.

  36 Akenson, ibid., p. 456.

  37 The Guardian, 25 March 2010.

  38 The Observer, 10 July 1977.

  39 Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2010.

  40 Alan King-Hamilton, And Nothing But the Truth (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982).

  41 Although I was present at the event, I no longer have my notes, so this account is taken mainly from Michael Bloch’s invaluable biography of Thorpe, published immediately afte
r his death: Jeremy Thorpe (Little, Brown & Co., 2014).

  42 Dominic Carman, No Ordinary Life: A Life of George Carman (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002).

  43 Bloch, op. cit.

  44 The Observer, 24 June 1979.

  45 New Statesman, 27 July 1979.

  46 The Observer, 23 August 1981.

  47 The Observer, 22 April 1979.

  48 The Guardian, 19 April 2013.

  49 The Guardian, 20 September 2005.

  50 Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, The Authorised Biography: Volume 2 (Allen Lane, 2015), p. 290.

  51 The Observer, 1 April 1984.

  52 Email to author.

  53 Nick Davies, Hack Attack (Chatto & Windus, 2014).

  54 Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (Harper Collins, revised, 1994).

  55 The Observer, 2 September 1979.

  56 The Observer, 20 March 1988.

  57 Irish Times, 23 March 1988.

  58 The Observer, 22 October 1989. The convictions of the Birmingham Six were finally quashed in March 1991. All six were freed and received compensation payments of up to £1.2 million for wrongful imprisonment.

  59 The Observer, 15 April 1984.

  60 The Observer, 17 June 1984.

  61 The Observer, 20 February 1983.

  62 Bill Graham, Break-In (Bodley Head, 1987).

  63 The Observer, 17 July 1988.

  64 Patrick Bishop and John Witherow, The Winter War: The Falklands (Quartet Books, 1982).

  65 The Times, 26 February 1981.

  66 Tom Bower, Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon (Heinemann, 1993).

  67 Bower, ibid.

  68 http://www.webofstories.com/play/anthony.howard/16

  69 Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2010.

  70 The Guardian, 3 July 1989.

  71 Andrew Marr, My Trade: A Short History of Journalism (Macmillan, 2004).

  72 The Guardian, 3 July 1989.