Peter Wilby attacks the press coverage of the BBC Trust’s report on impartiality (or the lack of it) in his Media Guardian column today and then moves onto his other target, the Trust’s report itself.

On the press coverage he writes:

It is impossible to imagine any newspaper conducting a similar self-examination, still less publishing it. Even achieving accuracy, etc, in covering the report proved beyond the press. "BBC report damns its ‘culture of bias’", shouted a Sunday Times headline. The phrase "culture of bias" does not appear in the report.

I made a similar point about a Telegraph report where the quoted phrase "left-leaning comfort zone" did not appear in the actual document, so far I could discover.

Wilby examines the tricky territory of impartiality and says:

The British right, vociferously supported by the Mail, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press, is trying to pull off the same trick as the American right: to convince the public that key sections of the media are gripped by a leftwing conspiracy. The BBC Trust shows the campaign is succeeding. Its report, though nuanced and thoughtful, is itself biased. Its examples of possible lapses from impartiality include the failure to feature more about Ukip in the 2005 election campaign, lack of airtime given to "socially authoritarian" views, uncritical support for the Make Poverty History campaign, general prevalence of "politically correct" views, and over-representation of ethnic minorities. Even support for "saving the planet" is apparently thought controversial. There is brief mention of the generous airtime given to religion but that is treated as unproblematic. The report focuses on a supposed "liberal" bias.

I looked back to remind myself why the Government had created the BBC Trust. In the Commons debate, nearly a year ago, on the new BBC charter Tessa Jowell, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, set out three objectives:

1. sustaining a strong BBC that is independent of Government and responsive to the needs of licence fee payers;
2. ensuring that the BBC is able to adapt to the rapidly changing media environment;
3. reassuring the BBC’s competitors that the BBC will avoid undue impact on what is a thriving and creative marketplace.

She said: "The extensive changes to the BBC’s accountability, which are embodied in the new charter and the agreement, ensure that the new trust will be a powerful voice and also an advocate, at the heart of the BBC, for the licence fee payer."

The report on impartiality may represent the views of licence fee payers who belong to the UK Independence Party but it does not represent mine. Its approach to the matter is simply partial.

But  it probably supports the third objective of reassuring competitors. That is why so much of the press has delighted in the report which will will shackle producers at the BBC and stifle creativity.

Pressure on Pearson to sell the Financial Times is mounting following the failure of their scheme to bid for Dow Jones in conjunction with General Electric.

With Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones, parent of the Wall Street Journal, looking increasingly likely to succeed, Pearson shareholders fear the prospect of FT facing stiffer competition. Many of them were already feeling that the FT should be sold to allow Pearson to concentrate on its huge educational publishing business.

The prospect of global competition between the two heavyweight business papers is worrying them. Media Analyst Lordna Tilbian told the Observer:

The way I see things, it was double or quits for Pearson. They had a chance to buy a principal competitor, but it hasn’t come off. Now they should sell the FT at a time when the financial advertising market is strong and the paper is doing well.
There is a danger that Murdoch will do to the FT what his newspapers in Britain have done to their competitors. Look at what the Times has done to the Telegraph or the Sun to the Mirror. The competition has been harsh. Does Pearson want that?

Without the enthusiastic support shareholders, it would certainly be harder for the FT to mount a counter-offensive against whatever Murdoch is planning. And there would be a lot of people out there who would like to own the FT and some may relish a fight with News Corp.

A report on the Newspaper Association of America’s  mid-year media review neatly shows one of the major differences between the UK newspaper market and that in the US.

Forbes reports that Gary Pruitt, boss of McClatchy said:

The daily newspaper in each local market is less subject to [audience] fragmentation than any other medium it’s competing against, because every other outlet faces more competition within their medium. More television channels, more radio stations, more Internet, more of everything else, [but only] one daily newspaper in each market for the most part. So we’re holding on to our audience better than our competitors. Our lead over the number-two outlet in terms of share of audience is actually growing, even though our audience in print is declining. And then when you add to that the unduplicated reach of our online sites, our audience is actually growing. While ad revenue may be the best indicator of your current performance, I think the best indicator of your future performance is your audience. More people want what we produce today than wanted it yesterday. That’s not the profile of a dying industry.

Another speaker, Scott Flanders of Freedom Communications, said something very relevant to the British Press, especially the regional groups with their high profit margins:

It’s painful for me to see us ever under-invest in content and audience aggregation even if in the short run we have to accept lower margins. It’s nothing compared to the absence of margin that Amazon got by with for a decade. Look at the kind of share that they built and the brand that they built and the kind of user loyalty that they built. In our local communities, we are just as well-known there as Amazon is on a national level. To me, it’d be a real shame to see the industry starve the investment that’s needed to take advantage of that opportunity.

Two views but both ultimately optimistic if the concentration is on the audience. (via LostRemote)

This morning I have spent some time looking at the BBC’s new document "From seesaw to wagon wheel — safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century".  

I pity the programme makers who are going to have to apply this to watchable, informative and entertaining TV and radio. First they will need to decide what "impartiality" is and will look at the section (page 23) which attempts a definition of what "remains an elusive, almost magical substance, which is often more evident in its absence than in its presence". On to the definition:

Imagine twelve bottles on the alchemist’s shelf, with the following labels: Accuracy, Balance, Context, Distance, Evenhandedness, Fairness, Objectivity, Openmindedness, Rigour, Self- Awareness, Transparency and Truth. None of these on its own could legitimately be relabelled Impartiality. But all the bottles are essential elements in the Impartiality compound, and it is the task of the alchemist, the programme-maker, to mix them in a complex cocktail. Different proportions may be needed for different genres. But, as the Guidelines make clear, a mixture there must be, in every part of the BBC’s output. The chemical reaction should produce not a solid (too rigid), nor a liquid (too fluid), but an odourless gas (harmless, of course) which will infuse the programme-making environment and be healthily breathed by those who work there. Impartiality is, after all, not a state of grace, but a state of mind.

So the programme maker, whether of a sitcom or the news, has also to be an achemist, attempting to turn dross into gold.

Even the title of the report needs explanation:

Impartiality in broadcasting has long been assumed to apply mainly to party politics and industrial disputes. It involved keeping a balance to ensure the seesaw did not tip too far to one side or the other.

Those days are over. In today’s multi-polar Britain, with its range of cultures, beliefs and identities, impartiality involves many more than two sides to an argument. Party politics is in decline, and industrial disputes are only rarely central to national debate. The seesaw has been replaced by the wagon wheel — the modern version used in the television coverage of cricket, where the wheel is not circular and has a shifting centre with spokes that go in all directions.

Not being a cricket fan, much of that is lost on me, but I know that any wheel which is not circular and has a shifting centre is going to result in a bumpy ride. And so it is.

The Telegraph draws comfort from the report and starts its story: "The BBC is operating in a ‘left-leaning comfort zone’ and has an ‘innate liberal bias’ according to a report commissioned by the corporation."

The first quote — "left-leaning comfort zone" —  is not attributed further in the Telegraph story and a search of the full PDF of the report fails to find it. Perhaps the Telegraph should be producing some of its own guidelines.

Adrian Monck’s blog has fun with the Wagon Wheel metaphor and sums up nicely:

The report reads like some earnest but sensible Church encyclical. You know it’s not going to suddenly pop out and tell you that God is dead and we’re stranded in a moral vortex.
Still, in a passing nod to Nietzsche, twelve aphorisms are offered for guidance.
The reality is that editors chart the limits of impartiality by weighing number of complaints, and the strength of public, political and press hostility. It’s called a "heuristic."

At least that approach is more reliable than alchemy.

Tony Blair’s speech a week ago in which he attacked the "feral" media fills much of the media pages today with Peter Wilby commenting in the Guardian, and Steven Glover in the Independent.

Wilby says the political pack are a bunch of "pussycats" while Glover sees journalists as "lapdogs".

A more distant view is expressed in an Independent story including an interview with Bob Worcester, the pollster, who is a broad member of the Media Standards Trust, set up to encourage higher standards.

Worcester complains that Blair’s speech was "long on diagnosis and short on prescription". It was, he said, "the height of hypocrisy from the man who employed Peter Mandelson, the architect of spin and manipulation".

He said:

Instead of having benign proprietors, who believed in letting their editors have high standards, you have constant pressure from the money men. This is true not just in the media but in the City and generally in society. The accountants don’t have control but they have authority, they are given power in a way that Harry Evans, when he was editor of The Sunday Times, would not have countenanced.

From his polling background Worcester produces some figures. In 1993 a Mori poll found only 10% of respondents believed journalists told the truth but last year the figure was 19%. "I personally think it’s getting worse but the public don’t think its getting worse, though they never thought it was very good in the first place," he commented.

Worcester also points out that penetration of the internet is slowing and suggests media professionals have little idea that only six out of 10 Britons were connected to the web at the end of last year (National Statistics).

"The trajectory was much steeper. It means that it’s going to be a long time before the forecast that newspapers are dead comes true, if ever," he said.

Last week slipped by without my remembering that Wordblog completed its first year. The intention last June was to try to understand more about blogging but the experience has probably raised more questions than it has answered.

Blogging regularly, around 575 posts in the year, has improved my appreciation of the way journalism is changing. Where it is going remains far from clear and my feeling that one should never try to predict the future is reinforced: the unexpected always happens.

Among the words written in the past 12 months — uncounted but certainly more than 100,000 — there are contradictions and changed opinions as I have learned and thought.

Above all I have realised that blogging on the media is somewhat  constrained  and narrow - rather like discussing the future of politics with members of one party only. On the whole those who believe that revolutionary change is taking place and and enjoy it are those who blog. The others don’t.

Among those who blog there are broadly the radicals and the pragmatists, always an uncomfortable alliance. What is missing is the voice of those who feel that while the internet brings change there is no fundamental shift. It is all too easy to brand these people as dinosaurs or ostriches but as the those who prepare reports for organisations like the World Association of Newspapers do not generally blog, they are not part of the blog conversation.  

From their point of view, the bloggers are probably nutters who believe that print will die in five years, that video rather than writing is is going to be the main means of telling stories and that anyone who does not blog is not really a journalist.

Many of the ideas expressed by bloggers, such as all journalists should be able to take still and video pictures and edit them, simply discourage the traditionalists from joining the discussion.

I don’t think there is any chance that they will join in but if the way ideas develop in the blogosphere is to be more meaningful the traditionalist views need to be taken more into account.

Personally, I find change exhilarating but I can understand those who see it as frightening, shaking their belief that they had acquired all the skills needed to see them through. Many of them have the skills which are needed just as much on the web as in print or traditional broadcast and their views are important.

During the second year of Wordblog I will seek to represent a broader spectrum of views on the changes in journalism.

While media converges and faces a future of which we know little, it would be surprising if all those who teach journalism agreed. So criticism by Jeff Jarvis (City University of New York) of Pete Hamill (New York University) is notable only for the entrenched position it suggests.

Hamill talking on New York public radio (quoted by Jarvis) said:

You know blogging, the blogosphere. When I teach at NYU I try to tell these young potential journalists: don’t waste your time with blogs because you need to be somewhere where there are editors, where you are getting paid. A blog might be useful therapy, but it’s not, at this stage of its development, journalism. I think that is a big mistake to be doing that kind of stuff.

Jarvis, naturally on his Buzzmachine blog, responds by telling students: ": I wouldn’t waste your time with this advice about blogs."

I too disagree with Hamill (I would, having decided to blog) but his points on editing and making money are worthy of discussion. Additionally, I would like to know his position on journalists who blog as part of their jobs. There is something to talk about here.

Responding the the interviewer, Hamill also said:

I agree with you. I think one reason for it is the overdependence on the internet: to sit in a building and call up all the statements from politician x y or z or think tank a b or c is not the same as going to 116th street and seeing the change over from Puerto Rican culture to Mexican culture.

Jarvis, who revels in being provocative, responds, in a post headed "Pay no attention": "So the internet and blogs are bad for journalism. Or is that just bad for columnists? Or Hamill? Or journalism students?"

Given that Hamill’s comments on blogging and journalism were small points in a long interview promoting his new novel about immigrants in New York, there is good sense in his suggestion that reporters are not getting out into the streets enough. It would be interesting to explore these ideas with him.

While I see great benefits from the internet for journalistic research, I do see students hiding behind it rather than getting out and talking to people. But near universal ownership of telephones had a similar effect long before the internet. There is a good debate to be had here…

Blair’s speech on the media omitted the root of the problem — the ownership structure he did nothing to break, says Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column today.

Had he been brave he could have restored media ownership rules to pre-Thatcher days, before Murdoch was allowed to expand his newspaper ownership and launch Sky, she writes.

Her picture of the state of the media is grim:

The newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC, reflects a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works, everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it. Then sententious editorials complain that children are being locked in by frightened parents!

On public attitudes and the internet:

Every poll shows its deep revulsion against the press, with journalists ranking lower than politicians. If only the internet had become the promised antidote to the media, a better forum for unmediated exchange of ideas and information. But its prevailing tone is even wilder. Strident, mostly male rightwing cynics, haters and wild conspiracy theorists deter more reasonable participants. In the same way the radio phone-in at first promised a breath of "real people" fresh air, until it descended into a domain for the odd and the obsessive, rarely the varied voices of a genuine cross-section.

And while doubting that Gordon Brown, as prime minister, will have an appetite for this issue, she suggests:

If Cameron and the Lib Dems were brave enough to join the dangerous discussion, the parties could galvanise support from just about every quarter, not for regulation - but for a cultural rebellion. There are policies to tackle bullies in the playground. It’s time to shame the bullies who make the country miserable and decent politics well-nigh impossible.

I wish I had as much faith in politicians as Polly Toynebee. Blair’s speech  ended making the entirely reasonable point that media convergence was making the current way of having separate regulatory bodies for the press and broadcast was unsatisfactory. That held out the prospect of Ofcom’s powers being extended, bringing the press under statutory regulation. A red rag to the press bull.

There needs to be a debate, but asking politicians to lead a "cultural rebellion" is like asking them to cut their expenses. The debate has to come from the grass roots.

It is fairly obvious when you think about it but Dan Gillmor at the New Media Age Forum summed up the problem of online MSM advertising neatly. He said: "Advertising is being systematically separated from journalism because there are companies that do advertising better than journalism companies. I don’t know how to solve that problem. I do know that people need good information." (Via Strange Attractor)

Yesterday Tony Blair met Wallace and Cromit, welcomed the prime minister of Lithuania, welcomed the prime minister of the Slovak Republic and made a speech on the role of the media. His official spokesman held two press briefings giving Blair’s views on Iraq, Scotland, the EU constitution, intelligence, the 2012 Olympics, discrimination law, the BAe affair and Ford’s plans to sell off Jaguar.

We are entitled to ask whether he has given sufficient thought to any of them (or whether some should simply have been passed to other ministers). In his speech he talked about the pressures of 24-hour media and acknowledged his own "complicity" saying:

We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative. But such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question.

He spoke about the tecnological change in media and continued:

These changes are obvious. But less obvious is their effect. The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there. They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary. And it all happens with outstanding speed. When I fought the 1997 election - just ten years ago - we took an issue a day. In 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on. You have to respond to stories also in real time. Frequently the problem is as much assembling the facts as giving them. Make a mistake and you quickly transfer from drama into crisis. In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a Cabinet lasting two days. It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day.Things harden within minutes. I mean you can’t let speculation stay out there for longer than an instant.

This is the politician’s perspective. From the jounalist’s perspective it provides lots of copy and, often, grounds for more speculation. In the words of Blair coping with the media at times "literally overwhelms".

That is good for neither the government nor the governed. What would be the result if politicians refused to make snap decisions to placate the media? It would be hard to argue with someone who said: "This is difficult. There are a lot of issues to be balanced and we need time to think about it."

The idea of instant decisions has been driven by the technologies of transport and communication. For half of the 20th Century politicians took long holidays and travelled slowly to important meetings. This is from Roy Jenkins biography of Churchill on the meeting between the prime minister and President Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in August 1941:

Churchill arrived in Newfoundland rested and relaxed. Prince of Wales had sailed from Scapa Flow on the evening of Monday, 4 August and arrived in Placentia Bay on the Morning of Saturday the 9th. Churchill had been more idle on the voyage than on any day since he became Prime Minister. He read C.S.Forester’s Captain Hornblower RN, he watched several films, including seeing Lady Hamilton (his favourite of all wartime films) for the fifth time and he lost £7 (£175 today) playing backgammon with Harry Hopkins.

Now the press castigates John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, for playing croquet after a meeting. We are putting politicains under too much pressure.

As Blair admitted yesterday, the Labour party decided that to win an election it had to go into rapid rebuttal of Tory arguments and increasing the rate at which fresh issues were raised in election campaigns. Then, in Government, Blair went in for a policy of spin.

The media is not now going to stop demanding instant answers. It has become conditioned to immediate response and failure to get it would inevitable lead to "fiddling while Rome burns" headlines. After a while they would wear thin.

I am not sure the heavens would fall in if the Cabinet spent two days deliberating on an issue. Few would find it "laughable".

The logic of ministers demanding thinking time and parliament (increasingly sidelined by Blair) debating issues would eventually restore some faith in the parliamentary process. Greater numbers of people might even start voting in elections again.