[Media-watch] FW: Platform

david Miller david.miller at stir.ac.uk
Fri Mar 14 14:03:45 GMT 2003


McKinney is the Head of News and current affairs at STV.  He was on the
Glasgow anti-war march (after asking permission from managment).

does anyone on the list regularly catch any of SMG's political output?  late
on Thursday night or Seven Days on Sunday?  If so, maybe they could
summarise what they see for the list?  It would be good to start passing a
stream of suggestions for coverage to STV as they may well be sympathetic...

----------
From: david Miller <david.miller at stir.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 13:51:48 +0000
To: Paul McKinney <Paul.McKinney at smg.plc.uk>
Subject: Platform

Dear Paul,

quick comment on last night's Platform. I know that the programme is a
'political' show and that it is likely to be mainly politician talking
heads, but I wondered if there might be scope to open it out a bit more.
Maybe you have already been doing this in the last couple of weeks, but the
thing which struck me last night was that there is a danger of just
replicating the significant disconnect between the political elite and the
population. On the programme you had Eric Joyce, Nicola Sturgeon, John Hume
Robertson and Michael Moore (all MPS/MSPs), together with a rather
frighteningly right wing US hack.  You also had an interesting package by
Iain Mackenzie which did try and raise some wider issues.  And you had more
usual suspects in the form of Angus McLeod of the Times.  I did notice Tommy
Sheridan and John McAllion too in the clips, but not in the studio.  I
suppose my concern is that if we leave this to the politicians we are not
going to get a fair representation of public sentiment against war.

let me put it this way:  The population is fairly obviously opposed to war
(according to all the opinion polls), yet in the political class there is a
much lesser level of dissent as witnessed in the 122 votes in Westminster
and the 6 Labour votes yesterday in Edinburgh.  given that political
broadcasting tends to take most of its cues and interviewees from the
political class this serious disconnect leaves broadcasters with a problem
of not representing the public or the level of dissent properly.

Channel Four has done a lot of good stuff: Jon Snow presenting the whole C4
news from the London march and a week of bulletins from Baghdad; Channel
Five - under new editors - have appointed an 'anti-war' correspondent; even
ITV have done new things with both the Ten and Tonight getting Blair face to
face with anti war voters/marchers.  The ITV report was interesting for the
fact that not a single member of the group which met Blair changed their
minds after seeing him - in the words of the reporter - 'at the limits of
his persuasive powers'.  The Tonight programme ended with Blair being slow
handclapped.  (Perhaps you could get 'robo-Jack' on to confront anti war
voters?). The BBC has by and large ducked the responsibility of portraying
the dissent properly.

Can I suggest that you routinely bring wider antiwar voices into the studio?
I may have missed some of these on other programmes, but it seems to me that
there is a need for regular accessing of these voices.  Accessing more
'ordinary' voices would be good in film clips, but the key thing is to have
the anti-war case properly explained by its advocates as an attempt to
balance the relentless pro-war drum beat of most papers, the BBC and much of
the political elite.  There are lots of well kent faces from England - even
Question Time has had Tariq Ali, Vanessa Redgrave.  But the most important
thing is to get the leaders of the scottish coalition and associated
campaigners.  There are any number of people you can get into the studio
from the Scottish coalition and the associated movement: SCND, Palestine
Solidarity, Edinburgh Stop the War, Trident ploughshares or other
campaigners like Mike Gonzalez of Glasgow University or Aamer Anwar.
Obviously, there are a variety of elements to the movement and having a
variety of anti-war campaigners on to debate with the normal talking heads
is likely to make for more gripping TV.  All the reports I have seen suggest
that real debates like this never fail to boost audiences.  Craig Williams
at Newsnight Scotland tells me their figures are up because of the war,
Question Time  which normally bumps around 1 million got 2.3 and 2.4 when
Galloway and Redgrave were on.

I know that Platform is a 'politics' show, but it seems to me that we are
now in quite special circumstances which require inventive responses if we
are to properly present dissent.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

David

 







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