Peter Preston points out that while Sir Menzies Campbell (66), departed from the Lib Dem leadership because he would be too old to fight an election at 68, media people go on.

In his Observer column today he says Michael Grade (64) is bringing back Trevor McDonald (68) to present News at Ten. It might, Preston suggests make a topic for discussion on Question Time presented by David Dimbleby, 69 today.

Peter Preston, is older than any of them at 69 and five months. Long may he continue to write.

The BBC radio newsroom’s home page has some useful things for students including a link to download the news style guide, and news bulletin scripts from the past week. There is also advice on writing for radio.

I thought I kept fairly well up with the news until I clicked on the “Radio news quiz — how closely have you been listening to the news?”

It was hard. Very hard. Then I spotted the clue to why. It is in the questions one of which is:

Which pop group who have not performed since 1981 is to reunited for the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park?
A: ELO
B: Ultravox
C: Pink Floyd

Not my subject, and then I noticed a line at the top of the page: Last Updated: Tuesday, 24 February, 2004, 16:10 GMT. It must have been a bit later than that because Live 8 was in July 2005.

Can it possibly be that no-one has noticed that the same page has been there for more than two years or is there a technical glitch?

The sound of feet shuffling is almost audible in the stories today about the addition of the late-arriving James Purnell, the culture secretary, to a photograph of MPs organised by Tameside and Glossop NHS Trust. It seems to hinge on whether Mr Purnell understood the meaning of the word “merge” or whether he thought it would be OK because they were only going to lie to health service staff. The explanations are a bit different in the Telegraph and Guardian reports.

I am happy to put it all down to misunderstanding, but the idea that anyone could have thought it acceptable in any circumstances suggests media illiteracy. What really worries me is that Purnell has been spouting about trust in the media and the need to learn lessons from the fixing of phone polls.

It does not look likely that anyone’s head will roll over the picture, That is right, but it is worrying that the episode of the naming of the Blue Peter cat has reportedly led to the sacking of the editor. I do hope Mr Purnell will put in a good word for Richard Marson, of Blue Peter, next time he bumps into Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general.

Returning from Spain, I opened the papers to the story of the Blue Peter cat: a surreal episode which demonstrates just how dangerous inward-looking examination can become.  This morning seeing the words “witch hunt” in a Guardian headline, reminded me of how the people of Brandeston in Suffolk turned on their vicar in the 17th century and hanged him as a witch.

No wonder an anonymous person at Television Centre says everyone there is “terrified about the next move”.

There is good news for broadcasters from both sides of the Atlantic. While the patterns of listening in the UK, shown in the latest Rajar figures, and those for the US, in a report from Bridge Ratings, are different they are both good for broadcasters.

Previous pessimistic forecasts are proving wrong. In 2004 Bridge predicted a steep fall in terrestrial radio audiences but has now adjusted this to be almost level until 2020. Rajar reports that that the radio number increased by almost 600,000 listeners in the second quarter.

Fears that the iPod generation was lost to broadcasters are being proved wrong. Rajar reports that 2.7 million adults (18.3% of mp3 player owners) now say that they have used their mp3 player to listen to podcasts.

And Bridge found their panel had “greatly reduced their weekly use of their MP3 players returning to terrestrial radio listening patterns similar to those this group used in 2004″.

While the way radio is being delivered is changing fast the audience is still there. I find the most interesting suggestion is that there is “iPod fatigue” which makes me wonder if the importance of freedom of choice to create your own play list was over-rated.

If it was, it could also suggest good news for for mainstream TV and text media. Perhaps few of us really like a lot of choice.

Some things don’t change. I came across this yesterday while looking for something else:

Broadcasting in Scotland
In view of the fact that the charter of the BBC will come up for renewal next year, a majority of the General Assembly [of the Church of Scotland] yesterday supported an overture in favour of an independent Scottish Broadcasting Corporation. Sir John Anderson recently stated in the House of Commons that the future of broadcasting was under consideration, but the he was not in a position to say whether the matter would be referred to a joint committee of the Houses of Parliament. In 1926, when the BBC was granted its charter, the imaginative, but not imaginative enough, idea of “The Regions” was conceived. From Scotland’s point of view, this was not, and never has been satisfactory. It made no distinction between Scotland and vaguely defined areas desribed as “The Midlands” or “The Western.” If the BBC is to satisfy Scottish listeners, it will have to revise its policy and give considerably more freedom and more money to Scottish broadcasting.

It is not sensible, however, to suppose that Scotland, relying on her own talents and within her own borders, could support a twelve-hour daily programme that would absorb the attention of the majority of Scottish listeners who had access to southern wavelengths. Nevertheless, it is absurd that, to take two examples, certain people and certain subjects should be considered as too important for Scottish broadcasting and should have the label “National” applied to them — in other words, to be dealt with only from or by London. It is absurd that certain eminent Scotsmen (as was certainly the case before the war) should be approached only though and by permission of, Portland Place. It is absurd that certain general subjects, which are not merely “parish pump politics,” should not be discussed by Scots people over the Scottish air. In short, those in charge of broadcasting in Scotland should have greater freedom and responsibility. The question of finance enters into and colours the whole problem, but does not affect the general principle that broadcasting in Scotland should be national and not merely provincial.

Leader in The Scotsman, May 30, 1945

And this:

ANOTHER day, another front in Alex Salmond’s relentless 100 Day “War of Independence”. First, tax. Then flags. Now the broadcast media. Who could dissent from the First Minister’s bold new initiative this week? Responsibility for broadcasting, he declared, should be devolved to Scotland to combat “outrageous” budget cuts north of the Border.

The Scotsman, August 10, 2007

Unfortunately, I can’t bring you more of last week’s opinion because it is part of the premium area and I am not going to pay “as little as £29.95″ to read it. But I get the impression the argument has not changed much in 62 years.

The coverage of the foot and mouth disease outbreak by newspapers is criticised today by Peter Wilby in his Guardian column. Rightly so. He starts:

I’ve always been amazed by how the press gets so excited about foot and mouth disease. Farming accounts for 1% of the economy and barely 2% of the workforce. Genuine farmers - family-run businesses that could truly face ruin - are far outnumbered by agri-conglomerates and TV producers tending to a few sheep at weekends. An MP for one of the most rural constituencies in southern England once told me he’d never actually met any farmers, and I doubt most news editors have either.

I wrote about the same subject after seeing only the early TV reports, so I am glad to return to the topic. While heartily agreeing with Wilby, I think it is just because agriculture is now only 1% of the economy that the story is overplayed. There is now little collective understanding of agriculture in the media.

The 2001 outbreak was overplayed, because of terrible handling by the government as well as a lack of knowledge among journalists. Compare this with the previous very large epidemic (I know I should have written epizootic) in the 1960s when the coverage was much more measured.

Then there were more journalists around who understood the issues. With the diminishing share of the economy and the the declining perception that the country should feed itself agriculture ceased to be important to newspapers and broadcasters.

Country dwellers have changed too. Fewer farmers but more commuters and weekenders to drive to the farm shop to buy their bananas and then complain that the village shop is closing.

How embarrassing! It took a 13-year-old Finish boy looking at a newspaper to realise that pictures used to illustrate the story of Russian mini-subs laying claim to part of the Arctic seabed were actually from the film Titanic.

The boy, Waltteri Seretin, contacted the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat to point this out what picture desks around the world had failed to spot. Another Finish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, in English, reported:

The footage used by Reuters was supplied by the Russian television channel RTR, and apparently no claim was made in the original Russian news bulletin to suggest the pictures showed the two manned mini-subs beneath the North Pole. Indeed at the time of the original broadcast, the vessels and their crews were known to be still some hours away from their destination. However, a viewer could conceivably assume that the computer animations, the footage of ships on the surface at the North Pole, and the underwater scenes were all part of the same continuum. In its piece on the subject, two of the four Reuters pictures were from the Titanic filming.

The Finish-made Russian subs that were used to stake the territorial claim were also used in Titanic.

Anyone who speaks Russian will find it easier than I do to judge the Russian TV report. Reuters used pictures from the TV station in its report and a caption with one of the Titanic shots reads: “Russian miniature submarines are seen under water in the Arctic Ocean in this Reuters Television image taken from a television broadcast, August 2, 2007.”

Reuters has admitted that it “mistakenly identified this file footage as originating from the Arctic, and not the North Atlantic where the footage was shot”.

The Guardian on August 3 compounded the error by captioning one of the pictures as: “Mir mini-submarine under the Polar ice cap yesterday.” Reuters had only said when it was broadcast.

Yesterday Media Guardian posted a story about the Reuters admission and said that the pictures had been used by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited.

Surprise then that the story in the Guardian today is about an apparent attempt to “sex up” a news story by a Russian state TV station. There is no reference to either Reuters or the Guardian’s use of the pictures. It is worth comparing these two stories from the Guardian stable.

Before my previous post on the coverage of Foot and Mouth disease I had decided I wanted to question the BBC’s judgment on the 10 o’clock TV news last night. The floods in Nepal, Bangladesh and India which have left a million people homeless and at least 120 dead in Bangladesh and 55 in India got 16 seconds. The follow-up on the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis which had killed fewer people than reported the previous night was given 3 minutes 18 seconds immediately following the flood story. (Watch again, before the next 10 o’clock news)

The explanation for this disproportion can only be the BBC’s heavy investment in US news coverage, having sent a staffman to Minneapolis and the familiarity of news executives with North America.

Proximity is hardly an issue: Minneapolis is 4,000 miles away while the distance from London to Kathmandu is 4,500 miles.  And more viewers in the UK originate from or have family links to sub-continent than have similar links to North America. There is plenty of film available from the Indian sub-continent.
 

On the evidence so far, the Government has learned from the disaster of the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease but the media have not. TV reports — the story missed the early editions of the papers that we get in this part of the country — are played out against wallpaper of of the Stygian images of flames and smoke from pyres and carcasses suspended from cranes.

It is like deciding the pictures from a current war are not dramatic enough so we are using some from an earlier one.

In a interlude from this wallpaper in an ITN report we get a brief shot of the the chief vet who says there will be "no pyres, no burning of carcasses". Then it is back to film of pyres and their preparation. It is much the same on other channels.

Newspaper web sites are also illustrating the story with the dramatic pictures from 2001 rather than much less interesting ones from the new outbreak among cattle in Surrey.

After 2001 I did a comparison of coverage of the previous and massive epidemic in 1967 (I was working in a rural area and covered it) for a conference on risk management attended by, among others, scientists from the British agricultural ministry.

I started with images of the burning pits, suspended cattle and dead sheep being tipped from huge trucks. They were powerful pictures that had gone around the world in 2001, contributed to the sense of crisis in the UK and given the rest of the world an indelible image of the country. I compared them with pictures from 1967 of policemen at the gates of farms, people washing their wellington boots and piles of disinfected straw spread across roads.

At the root of the problem in 2001 was a lack of experience. After more than 30 years, the experience of how to handle an outbreak of the disease of cattle, sheep and pigs has been forgotten.

In 1967 there were officials in every part of the country who knew exactly what to do. From 1954 to 67 there had been 1,000 outbreaks and only two years, 1963 and 1964 were clear — the longest time without the disease since 1908.

By 2001 that experience had been lost (there had also been great changes in the way live animals and carcasses were moved around the country) and panic set in. Journalists like the scientists and officials had little experience. Great social and economic change over the previous 35 years meant agriculture was of less importance to an increasingly urban media.

Since then the government officials and ministers, on the evidence of their reaction so far, have learned the lessons. I rather doubt that Gordon Brown needed to break his holiday in Dorset (unless he wanted to get out of the countryside) but as a symbolic gesture it was probably necessary.

For the media there was no real need to reflect on its 2001 coverage: there was no expectation of a repeat. So it was a natural reaction to dig out the library film and stills in the absence of strong images of the new outbreak. But I do not think it was a wise one. At the very least it is sensationalism.