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Chat compromising facts - plus fakery for fun

Thursday, November 5, 2009

I’VE READILY CONFESSED HERE my enthusiasm for radio – even calling it my favorite medium (as it often is). But that keenness has been dented this week.

There’s a fledgling, 18-month old daily news show put out by Public Radio International, the smaller, sassier competitor to National Public Radio, that’s called – in what seems a clumsy effort at in-the-know argot - The Takeaway. I’ve previously exercised a self-denying ordinance about commenting on the program - partly because of its still-developing infancy, and partly because I sit on the Community Advisory Board of the station here in New York from which it originates, WNYC. (It’s produced collaboratively, though this is hard to discern over the air, with WGBH of Boston, the BBC’s World Service and The New York Times, as well as PRI.)

 

Each daily broadcast offers a deliberate alternative to NPR’s long-running stalwart Morning Edition – not least by being chattier, by using a lot of presentational bells-and-whistles, and by accentuating listener participation, both on air and online.

 

My main problem is with the chattiness. I’ve seen too many broadcasting train-wrecks happen once live journalism starts out down this casual track.

 

Nothing bad has happened yet – nothing like for instance the row at the BBC, when its top executive, Director-General Greg Dyke had to resign, after a defense reporter, Andrew Gilligan, did a live Q & A with a morning show host in 2003 and departed from the required pre-scripting process to ad lib that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office had knowingly distorted pre-Iraq War intelligence. (True it may have been, but the reporter didn’t at the time have the facts to back up his statement – and would never have made such a claim in a carefully written-and-voiced report.) On top of that, other consequences included Gilligan's main source for his inadequately substantiated story, a government scientist, committing suicide.)

 

The Takeaway’s slip from chattiness toward sloppiness came with this week’s election results. As prelude to hearing from listeners, co-host Celeste Headlee (above left) casually announced “Analysts are saying the results are a referendum on President Obama”.

 

I wonder where Headlee does her research. If there is anything serious analysts are agreed upon when they consider this off-off-year round of voting, it’s that it’s NOT a referendum on the presidency.

 

No real harm done, as I say … but please be careful, hosts and producers. Casualness of manner is one thing, but not reporting accurately is quite another.

 

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IT'S TIME I GOT over trying to be cute, telling and re-telling my dinner-table dispute with currency dealer and politically-minded philanthropist George Soros over his stubborn belief that the Financial Times is the best newspaper in the world.

 

For my money it simply isn’t – though of course it is obviously a fine paper. And we all, of course, want different things out of a daily.

 

What's unquestionable is that the FT knows how to do many things right. It can’t avoid the worldwide flight of advertising from print to internet outlets, and like other paper media producers its owners, Pearson plc have had to chop jobs and almost double the paper's cover-price. But the company is also investing nearly $2 billion in digital technology, notably in the paper’s website www.FT.com, and this helped the Pearson group as a whole to deliver earnings this year well ahead of expectations, and to enjoy soaring stock prices when the London Stock Exchange learned that news. The strongest profit growth, in fact, had come from the FT part of the group – a remarkable 13 percent.

 

Now this week comes a development which, though small in itself, speaks of a certain self-confidence on the part of the paper. A controversial columnist is returning to its pages, writing now from behind bars. He’s Martin Dukes, who’s described in the FT’s own fulsome words as “iconic leader, trendsetter, multiple award winner and former CEO of Atlanta-based A-B Global” – a business superstar who just happens to have ended up serving a prison sentence for insider trading.

 

And yes, of course it strains credulity. Dukes is in fact a fiction, created by the real (and for me when writing in her own voice not hysterically funny) columnist Lucy Kellaway. She contrived to be pretty straight-faced when she announced the new feature in the FT video newsroom ...

 

 

First-rank satire it is not. But I think it’s kind-of sweet that the salmon-pink paper still seen by many as a stodgy journal for market researchers and bean-counters should be pouring some of its renowned expertise into a cheeky Jon Stewart-style mold.

 

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