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(Continued from overleaf)
In the matter of what broadcasters call "due impartiality", David Mellor has decided that the antique notion of having to achieve a balanced viewpoint across each individual series of television programmes must be carried on lock, stock and statutory barrel into the new era of pluralism. The obligation to balance every series of programmes has proved unduly rigid for a four-channel system. It is perverse for a system where there will be more television channels than national newspapers. That doesn't mean that the idea of fairness in public service broadcasting has become old fashioned. But this literal, censor's, approach, counting minutes and reducing intellectual argument to a game of eenie-meenie-minie-mo, amazes our European colleagues and should have been thrown out as an anachronistic and unjustifiable infringement of freedom of expression.
Reckoning that the new bill should be drafted for modern times, we and the IBA proposed easing the rules. To no avail. What am I going to say when one day, as they surely will, someone complains that the channel's Business Daily has never featured the suggestion that capitalism might be bad for you or that the pursuit of profit is not axiomatically praiseworthy? Shall I stick Dennis Skinner in among the merchant bankers for a statutory one-and-a-half minutes of denunciation of the stock market? What insulting nonsense!
The Broadcasting Act 1990 is going to be even more restrictive of free speech than that of 1981. Where once we dealt with a single regulator, the IBA, we shall in future deal with four bodies, two different codes of practice and the criminal law.
The new Independent Television Commission must see that nothing is included which offends against good taste and decency. It must also see that due impartiality is observed.
In another part of the forest and operating to another set of guidelines, Lord Rees Mogg's new Broadcasting Standards Council is charged with being a "focus for public concern" about the broadcasting of sex and violence and having its own statutory right to scrutinise our editorial judgments regardless of whether the ITC agrees with us or not. If we get on the wrong side of them we can be forced to broadcast an "adjudication" about our shortcomings which could gravely damage the faith which our audience has in the editorial integrity of Channel 4.
The Broadcasting Complaints Commission has a mandate to investigate complaints about invasion of privacy or unfair treatment and even with our three-headed Cerberus of assorted regulators, the ITC, BSC and BCC, all barking noisily at the gates, we must still consider the criminal law which has been introduced for the first time to the broadcasting legislation in the matter of obscenity and public order.
If this all seems long in the telling, it is nothing to the aeons it is going to take in the real-life practice of getting slightly controversial programmes transmitted. In the new age of broadcasting where fewer and fewer programme makers are protected by the security of a permanent institution around them, this kind of time is expensive. Who is going to try to get difficult programmes on the air if you have to go through an assault course before you can even start?
Independent producers live on programmes in production, not on ideas dawdling about waiting to reach the starting gate. Who can blame them if they opt for nice simple feature programmes? Even directors of programmes get fed up with the hassle and start dreaming of interviews by Jimmy Young instead of a constant hail of sandbags. Is this what the public really wants from television?
THERE is plenty wrong with newspapers and TV but we are all in danger of permitting ourselves to be swept along on a fashionable tide of panic. The worst problem with the British media, press and broadcasting is not the vulgarity, cruelty, intrusion, or even lies of the tabloids. It is not sex and violence on television. It is not the invasion of privacy or the ungracious refusal to acknowledge fault. All those ills are there and we must address them. But the worst threat to the true, long-term public interest is the laziness of some journalists; it is the impoverishment and cowardice of some newspapers and broadcasting institutions; above all it is wanton carelessness with the precious right of free expression.
We are trailing it in the mud, we are trampling carelessly over it. We are sacrificing long-term health for short-term problem-solving and we are content to see a large hole in the legislative framework on which our liberties depend. We are chipping bits or letting others chip bits off the first freedom. We should realise what is going on and stop it.
Liz Forgan is director of programmes at Channel 4. This is an edited version of the James Cameron Memorial Lecture she gave last week.
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