Ed Murrow: inventor of American TV journalism, London, 1961

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

That speech still has huge resonance 50 years later. Murrow not only understood the importance of television as a force for enlightenment and democracy, but also how to keep it healthy. He understood, crucially, that for this extraordinary medium’s potential to be fulfilled as a journalistic force required a determination by those responsible for television’s output to ensure that sufficient time and resources were made available. American television journalism has failed; British television journalism – for the time being – has succeeded. Why? And for how long?

Pertinent things about journalism

“We know what the dangers are. Left to itself, the medium will achieve its potential to be no more than a giant electronic circus or freakshow. We know how bad it can get, whether it’s the Russian station that has its newsreaders read the news while performing a striptease, or the Brazilian audience show with its Deformity of the Week feature. In Britain, for the first several decades of its life, television has been something better than that. The presence of the BBC was obviously a big factor. Regulation had something to do with it. But most of all, I think, television has maintained high standards of creative excellence and honesty because the people who worked in it believed they were doing a job which mattered.”

I will come back to the root causes, but want first to pinpoint why the professional view from across the Atlantic is verging on despair. There are three inter-related problems. First, the audience for network news is shrinking rapidly. According to the 2007 State of the News Media report prepared by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), the evening news audience halved from an average of 52 million in 1980 to 26 million in 2006 – partly due to the impact of new channels and the internet, and partly to the three widely-available cable news channels, CNN, Fox and MSNBC. This desertion is not down to viewers switching to 24-hour channels: the combined prime-time audience for all three cable news channels is around 2.5 million, or just 10 per cent of the network news channels. And even that is in decline.

Second, the economic model for television advertising is suffering through the rise of online. The problem is not as dire as in newspapers, but the TV problem is exacerbated by an ageing television population – particularly bad news given advertisers’ obsession with the 25-55 age group, precisely the group most likely to be moving from TV to online.

Third, all the networks are now owned by large corporate conglomerates, publicly-quoted companies that have to meet expectations of investors and shareholders. News divisions are expected to contribute to profit margins of 30 per cent-plus, significantly more than other industries. The net result is the closing of foreign bureaux and cutbacks in staff in order to protect the bottom line.

These pressures have been exerting an inexorable downward pressure on content. The result was recently summarised succinctly in a book by Leonard Downie Jr, former editor of The Washington Post (and a contributor to BJR issue 19.3): “The history of network television news can actually be reduced to a pair of compact sentences: As audiences declined, network executives decreed that news had to become more profitable. So news divisions sharply reduced their costs, and tried to raise the entertainment value of their broadcasts.” (Downie’s italics). He quotes Dan Rather, one of the most respected TV journalists of the last 50 years, speaking as long ago as 1993: “We have allowed this great resource to be cheapened. We should be ashamed.”

Time and again, some of America’s most dedicated TV practitioners have railed against the descent of network news into market-driven celebrity, sensationalism and trivia as the ratings battle intensified. One veteran American foreign correspondent, Mort Rosenblum, attacked what he called the “news thieves” of network television, and quoted a CBS bulletin that described its foreign news datelines as “Chicago, Northern Maine and Outer Space”. Another, Tom Fenton, gave the CBS Evening News running order on September 8 2001 which included “a report on the sexual exploitation of young people; a story with eye-catching video on dangerous aerial stunts by military pilots; another story with in-your-face video, this one featuring a Sacramento serial killer; a piece on declining consumer spending; and two health stories – one of them about dietary supplements. In short… a mirror image of a nation eager for titillation and fascinated with its own navel”. The BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, last year revealed that one senior American TV executive had told him that foreign news was complex, dispiriting, expensive, dangerous to make, and not liked by audiences. Another said: “Soon, international reporting is going to be the wire agencies and you.”

Her live-on-air protest

The pressure on journalists to overrule their own professional instincts is enormous, but every now and then there is a rebellion. On June 26 last year, Mika Brzezinski was one of three anchors presenting the news programme Morning Joe on 24-hour news channel MSNBC. According to her producer, there was an obvious lead story: the release from prison of Paris Hilton, hotel heiress and star of celebrity gossip magazines, after serving her sentence for drink driving. But Brzezinski – along with many other serious journalists on both sides of the Atlantic – thought it was a non-story. She wanted to lead on Republican senator Richard Lugar calling for a change of policy on the operation in Iraq – the first sign of a U-turn among Bush’s own supporters. But her producer had ignored her and made Hilton the lead story. Live, on air, Brzezinski voiced her frustration: “No, I hate this story and I don’t think it should be the lead.” She ignored the script and moved on to Iraq. An hour later, faced with the same running order, she became more determined. “My producer is not listening to me,” she said, and tried to set fire to the script with a cigarette lighter. When that failed, she tore it up. And when the same script turned up an hour later, she walked over to the paper shredder and shredded it. In less than a month, the YouTube clip of this television journalist standing up for journalism, live on air, had received more than three million hits.

UK television journalism has its critics, but we are nowhere near the American crisis – yet. News audiences on terrestrial television are in slow decline as everywhere else, down 16 per cent between 1994 and 2006 according to Ofcom figures. There have been cuts at the BBC, ITN and Sky in recent years, and the job losses recently announced in ITV’s regional news operation are the most draconian for some time. And of course there are frequent accusations of “dumbing down”, with ITV News, in particular, attracting a growing number of critics. Hard evidence is difficult to come by. Ofcom’s New News, Future News report last year concluded that the balance between hard and soft news on terrestrial TV hadn’t changed between 2002 and 2006 – but a careful reading demonstrated that crime stories were classified as hard news (as was the story of Madonna adopting a Malawi child). The Westminster/Goldsmiths study in 2000 found some evidence of a tabloid shift in ITV and early evening BBC bulletins, but also concluded that generalised accusations of dumbing down were not justified.

Moreover Britain does undoubtedly have, in contrast to the U.S., a regular peak-time balance of national and international stories on all the major channels, properly resourced and run according to high standards of professional journalism. In particular, the one hour of Channel 4 News is unique – no other nation in the world can boast a peak-time hour of news on a commercially-funded free-to-air and universally available channel that is almost entirely devoted to serious analysis, and which has, throughout its 25-year history, sustained a 50 per cent commitment to international stories.

This is where we return to the thrust of Paxman’s Edinburgh speech, because the answer is less about the professional dedication of individuals than a series of public policy interventions designed to promote the institutions and structures in which those individuals can thrive. While in the UK successive governments have maintained the BBC as a well-resourced mass audience broadcaster and imposed news obligations on the commercial sector, in the U.S. these obligations have progressively been abandoned.

Back in 1934, there was a U.S. Communications Act which required the holders of broadcast licences to operate in “the public interest, convenience and necessity” in return for use of publicly-owned airwaves. It was never properly enforced by the Federal Communications Commission, which was established by the same Act. In the late 1950s, the FCC did react when networks were caught rigging live quiz shows and were ordered, as their penance, to re-emphasise news and public service commitments. In the 1960s and 70s there was little pressure on network news as money rolled in along with dramatic pictures of Vietnam, demonstrations, urban riots, moon landings, even assassinations. News was good business.

The Magna Carta of ITN

Meanwhile, in the UK we went down a different route. The Television Act of 1954 established a regulator with teeth, the Independent Television Authority, which demonstrated from the start that it would not be pushed around. Within a few months of going on air, the programme companies faced financial difficulties and unilaterally cut back both the funds and the time allocated to its nascent news service, ITN. The regulator stepped in and decreed that there must be a minimum 20 minutes of news every day in peak-time, including a reasonable amount of film (which was expensive).

According to ITN’s most influential editor from those early days, Geoffrey Cox, this ruling was “the Magna Carta of ITN, giving it a secure foundation on which to build”. It was the ITA that insisted on an experimental extension to a half-hour bulletin in 1967, and the ITA that insisted in the teeth of bitter opposition from programme companies in 1968 that the experiment should continue for another year. As a result of that regulatory intervention, News at Ten became an established and authoritative competitor to the BBC, benefiting from the cash that flowed into ITV’s coffers in the 70s and 80s. When Channel 4 was created in 1982, it came with a statutory remit to be different and innovative. Its first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, was determined that the editorial agenda for the channel’s evening news would follow the spirit of the channel’s remit and would do so in an explicitly “broadsheet” manner. In his own words:

We did not want stories of individual crime, or of minor natural disaster. We did not want coverage of the daily diaries of the Royal Family. Channel 4 News would deal with politics and with the economy. It would bring coverage of the City, and of industry. It was to report on developments in science and technology, and in the arts. It was to cover the politics of other countries and to supplement that reporting with the output and insights of foreign television news programmes.

In other words, the framework laid down by the country’s lawmakers and monitored by the regulator succeeded in safeguarding a different editorial vision that has survived to the present day.

Even when Margaret Thatcher bequeathed a “light touch” regulator in her 1990 Broadcasting Act, it took two attempts for the newly-liberated ITV companies to persuade the regulator that it should be allowed to move News at Ten – now widely recognised as a huge mistake which Michael Grade attempted to remedy by reinstating it last January. And despite deregulatory rhetoric and globalising pressures to liberate companies even further, the 2003 Communications Act not only reaffirmed the 1990 obligations for news in peak-time on the commercial free-to-air broadcasters, but even added that ITV’s service should be adequately financed. Such a requirement would be regarded as anathema to American broadcasters today.

The story either side of the Atlantic since 1958 is one of two models of broadcast journalism. Over there, an unregulated free-for-all which, despite huge investment by major media conglomerates, has become a byword for sensationalism, celebrity worship, and abdication of the serious. Over here, a regulated model which, despite smaller institutions and fewer resources, has produced broadcast journalism combining quality, trust, scale, authority and relative seriousness with proper resources, and resulting in a pluralism and an international reputation out of all proportion to the size of the economy. The legacy of the BBC is of course an important factor – but that, too, could easily have been squandered without the support of successive governments.

Americans may distrust regulatory intervention, but some are not entirely deaf to the lessons. In his New Yorker review of the Clooney film that resurrected Murrow as a classic American hero of journalism, Columbia University’s journalism professor Nicholas Lemann argued that the answer was not to “Bring back Murrow”. Rather than sentimentally mourning the passing of great men, we should, he said, endeavour instead to understand the structure that produced and encouraged them. He went on: “The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs.”

So the UK’s got it right for 50 years – but can it last? The signs are not good. All the noises coming out of Ofcom are of concessions to commercial broadcasters who are suffering badly in the economic crisis (which can only get worse) and whose licences will lose value after the analogue signal is switched off in 2012. ITV’s regional news cuts are just a first response. In reply to my question at a conference in September, Michael Grade could give no assurances that ITV would be doing any news at all in 10 years time. Meanwhile Channel 4 is now, for the first time in its history, looking for public funding to maintain its status as a public service broadcaster. We still have the BBC, but the sound of knives being sharpened is getting louder as a general election draws nearer. This is the time to dust down Murrow’s words and shout them out again, because the forces that turned American television journalism into another branch of showbusiness are gathering steam over here.