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Lord Gould of Brookwood: My Lords, it is with some humility and a great deal of trepidation that I follow my noble friend Lord Bragg. If anyone exemplifies public service broadcasting, it is him—for the BBC and elsewhere. It was a superb speech well made. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and his committee on their excellent report. This has been a good debate and a serious and timely one.

I am speaking today hoping to follow on from what was an excellent debate yesterday on political participation. I must say at the outset that I am not an expert on the BBC or on broadcasting and I would not claim for moment to be able to pronounce with confidence about an institution and an industry which is hugely complex and, for the most part, hugely successful. I leave that to others who have better earned their broadcasting credentials.

What I want to say, without any kind of hesitation, is that the BBC is an extraordinary institution and one that genuinely represents the best of public service values in Britain. It is one of those things about Britain which can claim to be genuinely outstanding. Because it is so successful so often, it can irritate—it certainly irritates me on occasion—but in part, that is the price that you pay for success.

For a public organisation to be a world leader in an industry which globally is as fast-moving and competitive as any other in the world—probably more than almost any other in the world—and in which serious and contentious bets on the future had to be taken a decade or so earlier, is something of which we should all be proud. Because the BBC has been successful does not mean that it was ordained to be so successful; we should all be mindful of that.

In general, when it comes to a financial settlement I tend to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Birt, who had so much to do with the success that I have described, who said that although he is a hawk on value for money, he believes that the BBC has to be very well funded. That is my certainly my view. I believe that in part because media fragmentation, channel proliferation and the almost exponential growth of new media outlets make the BBC not less necessary, but more. One of the lessons of the growth of new web-based news communications is that the websites that bloggers use most often are sites that are
 
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both free and substantial enough to be the gateway to massive amounts of other information. There are very few such major gateway sites; the BBC is one of them; that position must be preserved.

If the BBC retreated as an organisation in any way now, it would lose not just the battle of the present, but, far more disturbingly, the battle of the internet future also. Winning that future is important not just for broadcasting, but for Britain.

There is a second reason for maintaining the strength of the BBC in a world of media proliferation. It is that all research into the patterns of behaviour in the use of new media shows that the internet is a medium both of individual communication and of community cohesion. In that context, the BBC can act as facilitator both of personal connection and of social bond. The BBC has never been more necessary.

The issue on which I want to focus today is news. I can feel the whole House inwardly groaning: here is yet another new Labour apparatchik complaining about BBC news. I assure the House that I am not concerned today with political balance; I leave that to my private rants in front of my television set—they are definitely best left private.

The issue for me is how the BBC develops appropriate news coverage for a new media age. For me, that issue first arose almost as a by-product of work I was doing for the election in 1997. Confirming the prejudice of all in this House, I personally conducted focus groups for each night of the election, including, amazingly, bank holidays. As part of that process, I used to show television coverage of each day's campaigning. I noticed something that I thought was interesting. It was that the public simply did not want to see the news interpreted for them; they wanted to be informed and then to make up their own minds. They saw the BBC correspondent or political editor not as an aid to understanding, but as a barrier to understanding.

In contrast, a rival channel, which will remain nameless, had a different approach, allowing the politicians to speak for themselves and allowing the public to make up their own minds. That was far more popular and far more engaging. That struck me as a serious piece of learning. As each election progressed, that tendency has grown. People wanted information on which they could make up their own mind, not opinion that had already been made up for them by others.

What I did not know then was that I was seeing in its nascent form the beginning of probably the biggest revolution in media attitudes in many generations. It is the shift from communication that is one-way to communication that is two-way and participatory. The point about the communications revolution is that people are increasingly no longer prepared to accept communication that comes from one top-down source, especially when it contains an opinion or a point of view. Instead, people want facts. They want to hear the facts and make up their own minds. They want bottom-up communication.
 
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When a senior political correspondent of the BBC asked me the other day, "Would it really be better to go back to the old way when the news participants gave interviews directly, and BBC correspondents just gave the facts?", he was absolutely right. Not just because it would make for better and more serious news, but because it is closer to the mood of modern times.

What is perhaps most interesting about the BBC in the face of this news challenge is that it is taking two bets at once. It has mapped out two futures for BBC news. On the one hand, with its website, it plugged straight into the new communications zeitgeist. The website makes absolutely clear the distinction between news and comment. Every BBC correspondent writing a piece on current political events visibly strives for impartiality. All serious issues are examined seriously and explained in depth, and the arguments made for and against. Opinions are made; the BBC political editor has his blog, but we all know that it is his opinion and his opinion alone. Anyway, we can all respond to it, if we want to, on his blog. The BBC website is a model for the communication of news in modern times and must in no way be harmed. But the other bet the BBC has made is different. If the website is mostly about information, the main terrestrial news is about opinion. What was a nagging concern in 1997 became the basis of the whole BBC approach to television news. So-called two ways proliferated, political correspondents became more and more judgmental, and slowly but surely the crucial gap between information and opinion began to blur.

Finally, the next and fatal step was taken. We moved from a situation in which not only the correspondents in the news bulletin articulated opinions but the whole news broadcast began to have an opinion, by which point we became very close to tabloid news. An example of this is the BBC "Six O'Clock News" on 22 May, which began, "A country awash with drugs; our special investigation into the crime ruining our communities. In our exclusive poll, drugs are a problem for three-quarters of people in their area. We live in a country in which countless families cower in their homes while dealers rule the streets, and where three out of four families we talked to experience a drugs problem on their front door".

This information, which was contentious enough already, was presented in a sensationalist style that was a cross between Fox News and the Daily Mail. What was the information based on? I am embarrassed to say that it was based on an opinion poll, but one whose findings were at odds with the interpretation placed on them in the programme. Eighteen per cent of those surveyed said there was no drugs problem, 43 per cent said there was a small drugs problem, and about two-thirds said that drugs were no problem or only a small problem. There was no mention in the survey of a country awash with drugs, or of drugs taken outside the front door. This was all interpretation, opinion and sensation. This broadcast, I am afraid, was a classic example of tabloid TV.

I know there are reasons for this. Time is short, ratings press and audience numbers are high, but this is the wrong response to the challenge of engaging the
 
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public at this time. People do not want the news to do their thinking and form their opinions for them; they want to do it themselves. The BBC will respond by saying that it retains the trust of the public; it does, but this may be changing. A survey commissioned by the BBC on 3 May says that 51 per cent nationally trust the Government, while 49 per cent trust the media. That is not a huge difference, but for the Government to be trusted more than the media in these times is a pretty remarkable feat.

My point is clear: the BBC has taken two routes into the future at the same time. On its website, it has put information first and trusted the user to make up his or her mind. On its news, it has put opinion first as a way of creating interest and ratings and of maximizing accessibility. I am confident that I know which one is right; it is the modern way, the participatory way. It is to trust the viewers and allow them to make up their own minds, because that is the way of the future.

I close by quoting Michael Grade, the current chairman of the BBC and someone whom I greatly admire. He said:

"We may have created a tension—on the one hand the expectation that editors should deliver the traditional serious news agenda, and on the other a perceived pressure on editors to win audiences—with the result that a certain confusion may have taken afoot about which is the right road to follow".

This is a false dichotomy and a false tension. My view is simple: opinion blocks accessibility, but information assists it. We are no longer in a world of chasing ratings by creating impact and sensation; we are in a world of creating understanding by providing information and inviting response and feedback. In this new media age, there is no tension between seriousness and accessibility. If we allow people to have all the information they need, and we trust them, they will make up their own minds in their own time. That is the future, and thanks to the extraordinary work that it has done in recent years with the internet, the BBC is very well placed to face it.

12.55 pm

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