Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q400 Lord Inglewood:
What follows from that is that you must find that you get tensions
between producing the news in a sexy way to draw the audience
in as opposed to making sure you get your other values.
Ms Boaden: No. You see, I do not think audiences
want us to be sexy. They want us to be straightforward, reliable,
comprehensible and connect with them. Often connecting with them
is the tricky bit. For example, there was an impartiality report
done on our business coverage recently that was basically very
supportive and said we were not biased, which was a great relief,
but said that sometimes we over-focused on consumer news, and
I think they were right. When our people have over-focused on
it is has been because it is one way we know we can get audiences
in to then listen to or watch something that is more complicated.
You have to start where audiences are and audiences are in very
different places. The Ten O'Clock News, like the Today
programme, has a broad audience but an audience that is absolutely
going to sit there and trust us to tell them the ten most important
stories of the day in the order that we think is important and
in the depth and range that we think is important. They trust
us to do that. Your under-24s do not particularly trust us to
do that or do not want us to do that. It is not where they start.
They start in a world where they have got a myriad things coming
at them and news is one tiny bit of it, so we slip it to them
on Radio 1 in the bulletins. That is why I think it is very Reithian.
Newsbeat is 15 minutes but they do stay with it. Equally,
if you go online and you look on the Radio 1 site or go on to
the news site, you can see this whole world and they can find
the stories that they are interested in. The real tension, however,
is around resource because all the content that we do we can push
out online, vodcasting and podcasting, but it is how much money
you need to put into the technical infrastructure to make that
possible as you go forward. Again, I am sure it needs to be done
in other cases. Do you invest money in making all your vicars
have broadband? This technical stuff is a huge dilemma. The BBC
has always had to deal with it and that is one of the reasons
why we do not just need to meet the Government's efficiency targets.
We need a bit more extra money to make sure we have got the infrastructure
right.
Q401 Lord Inglewood:
Clearly, if you are the under-25s that we have been talking about
who have different approaches, you suggest—
Ms Boaden: By and large, yes.
Q402 Lord Inglewood:—
and I do not disagree from my experience of them, do you think
that this is a function of the possibilities that are there or
do you think it is something that has changed, that they are different
from what we know about us?
Ms Boaden: Do you know, we do not know. I mentioned
it earlier. We genuinely do not know, when those young people
settle down, get a mortgage, get a steady job, worry about the
pension, whether the news as we know it will engage them in the
way it has previous generations or whether they will not see it
as relevant.
Ms Kevill: However, there are indications to
suggest there is a shift going on. We see people who have been
brought up on computer games are still doing it and they are not
just doing it in their teens; they are carrying on doing it into
their twenties.
Ms Boaden: They are men, are they not?
Ms Kevill: They are men, but there is a sense
that there is a shift in texting and things like that, for instance,—
Q403 Lord Maxton:
How sexist of you!
Ms Kevill:— that is pretty embedded in
female culture.
Ms Boaden: Girls like texting because it is
communication.
Lord Inglewood: Don't I know it!
Q404 Lord Maxton:
I am tempted to say that all the top chief executives in America
now are people who were brought up on gaming, not necessarily
at university, because it gives multi skills. One of the things
that is going to happen, of course, and is already beginning to
happen, is what one might call connectivity between the computer
in one room and your television so that instead of watching BBC
24 you will be able to pull up the BBC website onto your television
screen and then select that piece of news you want to watch.
Ms Boaden: Yes, that is right. That is what
I was talking about—personalisation.
Q405 Lord Maxton:
You think that is happening?
Ms Boaden: Oh, definitely, it is already happening
on the web but when connectivity really happens, and the manufacturers
are still struggling to make this work but it will happen, the
point is the degree to which you will get, as it were, a national
conversation about issues of importance and people can select
out what they do not want. It is a huge issue for the public policy
makers: how do you get a national conversation in a world where
at least a great chunk of your consumers opt out because they
are not interested in that so they get different sorts of news?
Q406 Lord Maxton:
This raises what, if you like, is a very philosophical question,
which is, is it your job to ensure people watch news or is it
your job to provide news that people can watch?
Ms Boaden: I do not think you can make people
do anything. I do not think the public is biddable; I do not think
it has ever been biddable. You have to provide something that
people think they need and want. This is this whole point about
both being connected to audiences and understanding them deeply
but as the BBC not just saying, "That is what they want so
that is all we are going to give them", because that is just
a market-led organisation. The licence fee obliges us, and I believe
this passionately, to go the extra mile, to feed in information
that will touch their curiosity about a wider world than they
thought they were interested in. We do that not just in news and
current affairs but in a huge amount of what we do at the BBC.
That is what we do all the time. It goes back to Lord Reith.
Mr Chapman: "Raising the sights" is
a phrase we use. I think "raising the sights" is quite
a good phrase for this.
Q407 Chairman:
We are coming to very much the last part of this inquiry. I would
just like to give you a rest for the moment and ask some questions
of Nigel Chapman on the World Service. We learned from the last
inquiry that you are going to launch a television Arab language
service later this year.
Mr Chapman: Yes, all being well.
Q408 Chairman:
"Later this year" and "all being well"?
Mr Chapman: In the sense that there are serious
technical challenges and staff challenges but yes, the ambition
is to launch it.
Q409 Chairman:
When?
Mr Chapman: I am not going to give you a date
because I do not want to get into the situation that other organisations
have done where they change the date four times in the space of
about three months. I will just say by the end of the year.
Q410 Chairman:
You were giving us a date before.
Mr Chapman: No, never.
Q411 Chairman:
Who will you be competing with?
Mr Chapman: Obviously, in the Arab world you
have a whole series of satellite television news broadcasters
who have moved into that domain in the last four or five years—Al-Jazeera,
Al Arabiya, to name but two, but what will be different about
what we are trying to do is that those channels are centred in
the Middle East and their agenda is quite narrow when we look
at them. They are pretty obsessed about every development in the
Middle East at a given moment, and I do think the BBC has had
a wider role than that. I think these are very important issues
and we would not want to avoid them but I do think, to put it
in a phrase, we want to bring the world to the Middle East.
Q412 Chairman:
They do have one advantage, do they not, in that these two channels
we have mentioned are going to run 24-hour news services?
Mr Chapman: They do at the moment, yes.
Q413 Chairman:
And you are going to offer a 12-hour news service?
Mr Chapman: That is all we can afford at the
moment, yes.
Q414 Chairman:
What happens if there is a crisis in the Middle East, the bombing
of Lebanon, something like that? It might not happen in the 12
hours that you are on broadcast. What happens then?
Mr Chapman: I agree it is a weakness and it
depends on the level of notice you get about it. Let us take the
case of a more set piece occasion. Then you could go on the air
a bit earlier to cover it, but, obviously, something totally unexpected,
out of the blue, is going to be a problem, which is why I have
said to the Government repeatedly on numerous occasions that the
number one priority in this spending round after confirming the
funding for Farsi television which the then Chancellor announced
last October, now the Prime Minister, is to give us the funding
of £6 million we need to make the Arabic television service
a 24/7 service. There is, to be honest, a consensus, and everybody
I have talked to says this is necessary. The case intellectually
is made. We have to win the case in terms of the Treasury discussions
and the spending discussions.
Q415 Chairman:
To be blunt, you are not going to win, are you? Things like Al-Jazeera
have not just appeared overnight. They have been there for several
years. They are well established and you come along, and the BBC
has got a history here which has not been altogether helpful,
and you offer a 12-hour service, you are not going to win the
audience, are you?
Mr Chapman: You have to be careful though because
actually the biggest audience for Arabic television will not be
in the morning. It will be in the afternoon or the evening and
this is the time when it will be broadcast, so we will be broadcasting
at prime time along with everybody else. Having said that, I accept
your point, Chairman, that it needs to be a 24-hour service. I
do not dispute that for a minute. I have lobbied extremely hard,
as others have. I hope and pray that it will work.
Q416 Chairman:
You are seriously telling us that the only thing that stands in
the way of a 24-hour service is £6 million a year?
Mr Chapman: Yes, I am seriously telling you
that.
Q417 Chairman:
And this is going to be decided in the current—
Mr Chapman: In the current spending round which
is where discussions are going on at the moment. What we have
said, let me be quite clear, to both the Foreign Office and the
Treasury, other than confirming the funding for Farsi, which you
have got to do through the spending review process through 2008-09
onwards, is that the number one priority is to give the World
Service the £6 million for Arabic television. If there is
a decent settlement that will be part of it. If there is a very
poor settlement where it is effectively a cash flat settlement
then you could end up in a situation where you had no extra money
at all for anything. I do not think that is where we are at the
moment. I think the conversations are going well. This is not
falling on deaf ears, this conversation. This is falling on ears
which are alert to it, but until you see it in writing and you
see the cheque arriving in the post you can never guarantee anything.
Q418 Chairman:
I think many of us would find it extraordinary that we are even
having this discussion where it self-evidently leads to one conclusion.
Mr Chapman: Chairman, that is your view and
I share it but you do not have to convince me of this argument.
Q419 Chairman:
But you are the only one here.
Mr Chapman: You have to convince the Treasury
and the funders.
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