Monocle 24- The Big Interview with Lord Puttnam
The independent producer and legend of the UK film industry Lord Puttnam sits down with Robert Bound to discuss playing father to an entire film crew, the lack of integrity today’s media and the role of the documentary as a tool to help the world.
A Future For Public Service Television Content and Platforms in a Digital World
Film producer and Labour Peer David Puttnam brought his Inquiry into the Future of Television to Liverpool on 4th May. The panel, featuring Ken Loach, Phil Redmond CBE, Ruth Fox (Chair, Hansard Society) and Cat Lewis (Nine Lives Media and Nations & Regions rep for indie producers’ association Pact) discussed whether TV reflects the lifestyles and opinions of people across the UK or whether it is more of a mouthpiece for the ‘London bubble’ with the question 'Does Television Represent Us?'.
Media should rethink coverage in wake of Brexit vote, says Justin Webb
BBC presenter Justin Webb has said the media needs to look again at how it covers politics and the way it holds people to account in the wake of the vote to leave the European Union.
Webb, one of the BBC Radio 4 Today team, spoke out after Oscar-winning film producer Lord Puttnam criticised the BBC’s coverage of the European debate as constipated and effectively hamstrung by its own strict rules on impartiality.
TV’s failure to properly scrutinise Boris Johnson’s EU claims a ‘criminal act’
Webb said some people who campaigned to remain in the EU had felt let down by the media’s coverage of the debate before the the historic poll result on 23 June. “A discussion about holding people to account, a discussion about impartiality in the modern era, is one I suspect the broadcasters would rather welcome, if only to sort out their own thinking,” the BBC’s former North America editor, wrote in the Radio Times.
“And it should not be a discussion left to newsrooms and editorial offices and university journalism departments: it really should matter to us all.
“One of the clearest messages during the referendum campaign was that audiences were hungry for real knowledge. People wanted to go beyond claim and counter-claim so that they could work out what was true.”
The aftermath of the vote has been marked by leading leave campaigners backtracking on claims made before the vote, such as the pledge by Vote Leave to spend £350m “sent to the EU every week” on the NHS.
Webb wrote: “Some of those on the losing side think they were let down. The Oscar-winning film producer Lord Puttnam is among those who wonder if impartiality rules torpedoed the search for truth: he accused the BBC in particular of providing ‘constipated’ coverage.
“The impartiality question is a reasonable one to raise – and it is one the BBC has grappled with on subjects such as climate change, where most scientists are on one side of the argument but some very feisty campaigners think they’re wrong. But the question has to be part of a wider debate.”
Puttnam, the former deputy chairman of Channel 4, said last week that media as a whole had failed to tackle the “Monty Pythonesque vision of Europe” which he said had been allowed to go unchallenged for the last 30 or 40 years.
Puttnam himself had been one of the driving forces to change the way the BBC reports on climate change.
The BBC’s former director general Greg Dyke echoed Puttnam’s thoughts at the launch last week of a report into the future of public service broadcasting. “I understand exactly why they ended up reporting it the way they did, because there’s people with stop watches and all the rest of it, but the result I thought … was a little bit dull to be honest,” said Dyke.
Webb said: “We tend to regard campaigning as promising policies or aspirations that can be tested against the facts of the real world. A combination of forensic interviewing and zealous fact-checking strips away the nonsense and allows the public to make a balanced choice.
“Seriously? In the modern world, this is not necessarily what happens. It is a truism to say we’re post-ideological: we don’t vote tribally for ‘the workers’ or ‘toffs’, based on a love for socialism or capitalism. It is equally cliched to talk of post-factual debate, where no one accepts the version of reality presented by anyone but their own side,” he wrote.
“Our real problem might be that we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”
Written by John Plunkett
Source: The Guardian
After Brexit, would you want MPs anywhere near the BBC charter?
You didn’t need great powers of prophecy to guess that Lord Puttnam’s inquiry into the future of public service broadcasting would deliver a thumping defence of C4 (don’t sell it) and the BBC (stop mucking around with it). But long-distance inquiries often have short, sharp relevance to current events: and here we go again. What price a BBC royal charter renewal when we haven’t got a prime minister, and won’t have for months? What price the wisdom of parliament when Westminster is in mid-nervous breakdown?
Puttnam (praying Sir David Normington, the outgoing commissioner for public appointments, in aid) thinks six HMG choices on the new BBC executive board is rotten for corporation independence; he wants an independent panel appointing independent selection teams on the amended Leveson press royal charter model (though he doesn’t actually fancy royal charter status any longer). He definitively doesn’t want sticky political fingers feeling BBC collars.
So far, so good. Politically monitored “truth” doesn’t look very appetising after a Brexit campaign where politicians were quite able to make up their own big lies without media assistance. Prime ministerial approval of appointments may be more problematic than ever in a Gove-Rupert world of business and media chums. But the total independence route – pace Leveson – isn’t working too brilliantly either as that independent panel ponders lengthily and expensively whether there’s any regulator worth approving.
Why not a BBC board that the BBC itself appoints – maybe with one HMG member – and Ofcom regulation in the accustomed manner? That doesn’t sink into a quagmire of complications. It’s a simple division of responsibilities: and simplicity is key here.
Just look at the first 48 hours after Brexit. Suddenly, public service interviewers – casting aside the smothering burden of guidelines and watching enforcers – can ask about that mythic £350m coming back from Europe, and a succession of Brexiters mumble about “possibilities” and “aspirations”. Suddenly, free from contortions of caution, they can bring us the simple truth.
Written by Peter Preston
Source: The Guardian
Lord Puttnam: the BBC must confront a "total" loss of trust
The film producer and chair of a major inquiry into the future of public service broadcasting calls on the BBC to help rebuild trust in Brexit Britain.
Your inquiry launched its report on the future of public service broadcasting today (Wednesday 29th June) but it was put together in the eight months before Britain voted to leave the EU. Is it as relevant now?
I wrote [the forward to the report] on the 22nd June, the day before the referendum, just in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder – and I wouldn’t change a word. Ironically it feels more powerful because it was written beforehand.
What we all have to recognise is that we are living through an era unique in my experience, where the absence of trust is total – it’s not marginal, it’s total. It’s gone. And the process of rebuilding trust is a very very tough process. It has to be done illustratively … so my argument would be with this government, and indeed it would be with a Labour government if it happened to be in power, is that you have to go out of your way to prove that you do not have your fingerprints in any way shape or form on the provision of public information and news. You’ve got to prove to the public you’re nowhere near it. And any steps you can do that will establish that proof are worth taking.
The report warns of a threat to the BBC’s independence, and includes recommendations on how appointments to the proposed new unitary board can be made to avoid this.
But I was also interested to hear you talk today about the impartiality issue. You made the point that the press was largely anti-European, and in this context perhaps the BBC should have looked at the whole media landscape when determining how to do balanced coverage. Do you think that’s something that needs to be looked at in future?
I do think that needs to be looked at. One of the roles (I’ve actually talked to the BBC since the Brexit vote) one of the things I think they should do – and to an extent they're already doing it – is this business of fact-checking. All of us should be one click away from knowing how accurate a statement we’re reading from a politician, or indeed a newspaper, is. I’ll give you an example. This morning’s headline in The Sun says ‘100 MPs back BoJo’. I don’t think for one moment it’s true … that 100 figure should be challenged by somebody, otherwise it’s purely a promotional assertion. The Advertising Standards Authority wouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. How can a newspaper run a front page that’s not placed through the same strictures as if it were an advertisement?… because that’s what it effectively is – an advertisement for Boris Johnson.
In the long run, the most pernicious of all the charges that were made in this ghastly debate was Michael Gove’s trashing of expertise. That’s the one that will be around for a long time. Because once you start to say to people that economists are rubbish, the next thing is that scientists are rubbish… that becomes the sort of commonality that for example Europe being rubbish was. And the BBC now has the interesting opportunity and obligation to become the supporter of expertise.
There’s a lovely term I’ve always enjoyed, which is ‘vexatious litigant’ – that is someone who compulsively litigates. The BBC has got to get smart about understanding that there are quite a number of vexatious litigants out there. They ought not to be giving them a voice. So I would regard Nigel Lawson’s view on climate change – he is merely a vexatious litigant with a view he’s trying to impose on other people. The BBC, to their credit, and it took a long time, eventually did a report on climate change and agreed that there was to all intents and purposes a scientific consensus, and they could support that consensus while giving some space to other views. It didn’t mean 50/50 any more, it’s more like 90/10.
The BBC needs to get more adroit at understanding it has a responsibility to take positions based on known expertise. Now and then an expert may be wrong. But the idea that we can move forward as a society by trashing experts or academics is a nonsense.
In this post-truth era, which we hope we’re not entering, how can we better regulate the BBC? There has been some criticism of the plan to make Ofcom the regulator. There’s a feeling that Ofcom looks at audiences as consumers, not citizens, and if there’s a need to educate the citizenry, do you think Ofcom needs to change its approach?
I think Ofcom – I had a hand in setting it up, and drawing up its remit – is an organisation I’m very proud of. I do think Ofcom is going to have to become more challenging. One of the big debates while setting up Ofcom was this issue of what its responsibilities were. The people running it at the time wanted it to be a purely commercial organisation. We managed to win, in statute, that its primary responsibility is to the citizen. They have to be reminded of that all the time. They also have a responsibility for training – they’ve never done it … So Ofcom has to take a good long, hard look at its responsibilities, and its principle responsibility is to the citizen.
How can pressure be put on Ofcom to live up to that duty?
Probably the most interesting would be a parliamentary report into Ofcom. Take one of the select committees and look at its performance as against its statutory mandate. Actually, that’s very interesting. I might even suggest it.
Your inquiry feeds into a long process around BBC Charter renewal, with the old BBC Charter expiring at the end of this year. Has Brexit thrown a spanner in the works?
Yes I think it has. I think the emergence of the Brexiteers means one or two of the concessions that [Chancellor] Osborne and [Prime Minister] Cameron managed to get might be off the table… you may find an attempt by [Culture Secretary] Whittingdale and people around him, an attempt to as it were ‘re-review’ the White Paper … they may try to get the Charter Review itself debated and amended but I don’t think so though – I’d like to think it’s gone too far.
You’ve talked about market totalitarianism in the past – isn’t this also about the way in which the media has simultaneously embraced the market but also populism across Europe?
I’ll give you a silly example. The first Prime Minister I dealt with in a formal sense was John Major. I worked with Thatcher a little bit and no one would have ever called Thatcher anything else but Prime Minister to her face. I remember John Major once suggested that we call him John. And someone in the room quite sensibly said ‘no no no, you’re Prime Minister’. That may sound like a silly thing, but when The Sun runs a headline about Bo Jo – do they really realise what they’re doing? This is someone you’re promoting to have extraordinary levels of authority over life and death … This may sound like an old man talking, but it’s quite fundamental.
It’s representative of a culture change.
Yes, a culture change that makes authority and trust almost impossible.
Does this relate to what’s going on with the Labour party, and with criticisms that the BBC was slow to recognise Jeremy Corbyn as the elected leader?
What the BBC were reflecting was a complete bemusement… The Labour Party is a broad church. It needs 16, 18 million voting for it. You can get in on that. Corbyn’s support at the moment is a quarter of a million … That’s 1/20th of the people who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the last election. They got eight seats. Every single Labour MP goes to talk to their constituents. They know, should they go along with that grouping, it’s a wipe out.
Corbyn is quite a special case. He may be entitled to be called the leader of the Labour Party. But he never really has been. He was always a marginal figure – I think the BBC’s assumption was he will remain a marginal figure. Should someone else emerge who clearly was a leader … I think they will be treated very differently. You can’t be somebody who votes against your own government – he holds the world record – and turn around and talk about trust or loyalty. You can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.
Does the report have something to say on this?
The report takes the relationship between broadcast media and democracy very very seriously. And what the report says, and what I say in my forward, is that we’ve managed to create a deeply ignorant society – we’ve been careless – and what happened last week, with the Brexit vote, was people voting out of a combination of fear and ignorance. We allowed a parody, a Monty Python parody of Europe, to become commonplace.
The people we’re likely to end up with at the moment are like the cast of Fright Night… John Redwood? Iain Duncan Smith? These are bizarre creatures. Lawson? Lamont? The two people who have done more damage to the British economy between them than anyone else – if you accept that 2008 was a global collapse. How dare they.
This is about the fragility of democracy. I was talking [at the launch] about Whitelaw [William Whitelaw, then Home Secretary, who negotiated a 15-year BBC Charter in 1981] and this generation that I knew. They’d been in the war. They knew what a close-run thing the war was. We don’t have these people anymore. You’ve heard it [when you talk about] the notion of a European war – you’re laughed at.
Source: Opendemocracy
