Time to stand firm – social media and challenges to reporting

[This lecture was delivered by the Master of Selwyn College Cambridge and former BBC news and sport executive Roger Mosey at the annual lecture of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association on 22 November. It has been reproduced on the Round Table website with the kind permission of the author.]

The victory of Donald Trump matters most for how it shapes the world and changes America; but it also throws into question the role of the media – and especially the way that traditional media outlets seem to be struggling to cope with how politics is evolving, and the way new and alternative platforms are surging.

Here in the United Kingdom, and in countries across the Commonwealth and around the globe, we are having to get to grips with the consequences of social media. Yes, it was liberating and allowed us all to have access to the media – at its best, it empowered individuals. But, as we saw in the riots in the UK this summer, and as we have seen elsewhere, social media can also be a tool for inciting hatred and violence; and we have seen just how destructive disinformation and misinformation can be.

You then stir in a further complication of the ownership and control of those platforms. Elon Musk portrays that most vividly, with a sense that Twitter/X has gone from being a rather left-leaning platform into one where its owner ruthlessly propagandised for Trump. More generally, politicians the world over are asking: should we and can we control the harmful effects of social media?

Why is it that a few commercial companies in the United States of America can have such a huge influence on democracies worldwide?

Now, we’re not going to solve that particular question tonight – but let me just note an underlying principle. Free speech within the law is vitally important. Social media, at its best, helps that. It is essential for a democratic society that people should be able to say what they think, and to challenge orthodoxy; we should all be exposed to views we disagree with, even if we sometimes find that upsetting. It’s only by testing arguments, by challenging ourselves and others, that we can identify what we truly believe and how that works for society. As someone who is employed in a university, that’s what universities are for – and we should resist any attempt, however well-meaning, to create an intellectual monoculture.

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More widely, I tweeted what I believe on free speech and social media earlier this year:

“I have long supported freedom of speech, but within the law. The laws are set by democratically-elected governments. They must always prevail over foreign billionaires.”

That seemed to be largely uncontroversial among my followers in the UK. But it was got picked up by some more radical souls in the US and Canada, and they vigorously dissented:

“Free speech rights are given to us by God, not the Government”, said one American.

And responses started getting abusive:

“You would be just fine under Goebbels. After all he was elected and the law was the law.”

Before becoming one of those social media pile-ons that reminds you just how unpleasant contemporary debate can be. So this is contended territory for some, and as I say I can’t offer an agreed resolution now – other than to say that it seems to me obvious that there have to be some legal limits on free speech, as minimal as you can make them, such as stopping an incitement to violence; and also that I would prefer that parliamentary democracies decide how a country’s media should operate rather than Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and the owners of Google.

What I want to concentrate on more, and where we have more ability right now to change things, is the relationship between the traditional media, the mainstream media, legacy media – call it what you will, and certainly including public service media – and the new platforms that are now running rampant.

The CNN media commentator Brian Stelter put it like this after the American election result:

“Podcasts, YouTube videos and other digital sources are ascendant while traditional news outlets are struggling to remain relevant. On social media, in-depth investigations get ignored while misleading memes get shared millions of times. Frankly, some journalists feel defeated.”

What I want to argue is that now is not the time to lose faith in the traditional media outlets and not to abandon or weaken journalism. In this fragmented, disputatious world, we actually need their values more than ever. And I do salute all journalists who are fighting the good fight, and especially those in the BBC and elsewhere who are doing so on radically reduced budgets. But what should concern all of us is the drift that says: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

That means flagship news programmes should become more like social media output, that we move our focus to light consumers who have to be seduced into serious news coverage by clickbait, that everything becomes bite-sized and re-postable.

Now, there should be an inquest into what has been going wrong for the conventional media. And before we examine what are still its strengths and its role in the future, I want to spend a short amount of time on its weaknesses.

The most concerning is that conventional media still doesn’t fully understand the countries it’s reporting on – and I think this applies particularly to the legacy television and radio services. Brian Stelter sums it up in a quote from an anonymous network TV executive in the US: “When we cover Make America Great Again it’s like going to the zoo to report on an exotic animal.”

And that has consistently been the case with Donald Trump and his supporters.

In 2016, American media organisations based overwhelmingly in New York City – a Democratic stronghold – and Los Angeles – a Democratic stronghold – were driven throughout their campaign coverage by an alignment with the worldview of Hillary Clinton and therefore an assumption that she would be victorious. It was exactly the same in the UK with the Brexit vote, where metropolitan newsrooms thought it was inconceivable that the Leave campaign would win. Local media knew what was going on in the nation’s towns and villages – but the decision-makers for the major channels were all in Remain-voting London.

That lack of understanding has continued. The conventional media didn’t really spot the strength of the Boris Johnson surge in the so-called Red Wall seats in the north of England in 2019. How many mainstream American journalists really thought Trump could win in 2024 despite the chaos at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and the convictions and the multiple other sins which were thought to be disqualifying? In the UK election this year, I think in fairness the media were aware of some of their previous gaps in knowledge; but reporting was stronger on why people were voting Labour, and it still tended to depict Reform Party voters as strange anthropological specimens. It wasn’t any better on the emergence of powerful Muslim voting blocks, and the new generation of urban left wingers. I would say it’s a simple fact that most broadcasting executives don’t grasp the reality of or really get heterogenous values, and that creates barriers to seeing what is happening around a country of almost 70 million people.

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Part of that need for understanding is also about voters actually being quite sophisticated. The enduring and increasing fixation that the media have with ‘vox pops’ – those street interviews where someone makes a pithy point that may even become a news headline – underestimates the range of factors that may shape a decision. I found the single most useful insight into the American election to be the more structured longer interviews with voters from across the continent in the New York Times. They showed that people had huge doubts both about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. There were very few of their voters in swing states who unequivocally went for one side or the other, and some people chose a candidate whom they still disliked but was less bad than the other. And that, in the end was what it was about: a choice – a bet on the outcome for you and your family, and for the country, in which many voters wished there was actually someone else on the ticket. That doesn’t translate into a five-second headline clip on the main network news.

Allied to that, is at times an amiable bewilderment about the media they choose. There was a telling moment on the BBC’s Americast podcast when, discussing Donald Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, the BBC’s North America editor Sarah Smith said: “I have to be honest: that’s the first time I’ve ever listened to the Joe Rogan Experience”. And she then asked the estimable Justin Webb: Have you listened? To which he replied: “No, no absolutely not – but then neither us would and nor would most people listening to Americast because if you’re listening to Americast you’re interested in politics, and I don’t think most people listening to Joe Rogan are interested in politics…” And yet the Joe Rogan Experience is just about the most popular podcast in the world, let alone in America. It does, actually, feature quite a lot of political figures and crucially it is where tens of millions of Americans get their politics. Just asking, really, but what if a BBC editor had said they never read those great liberal bastions, the Washington Post or the New York Times? And why is there this great divide, or an assumed divide, between the audience of the BBC’s Americast and the audience of Joe Rogan? One person still inside the BBC told me: “I like both of these people hugely, but for me that’s an admission which reflects poorly on any claim to have a finger on the pulse of the American electorate.”

Then there is the conventional media’s obsession with the political horse race and with process – its love of the latest poll results and who’s in or out in Washington or Westminster. I seriously lost the will to live about the number of times it was explained what a swing state was, or that correspondents told us ‘the campaign was neck and neck’. It seemed to be more important explaining the mechanism by which Trump would win – by focusing on Pennsylvania – rather than what he would do with the presidency should he be elected. Similarly, in the July election in Britain we had a fixation on whether Reform would overtake the Conservatives Tories in the polls – which didn’t happen – and speculation about the size of the Labour majority which turned out to be based on polls that significantly overestimated the Labour party’s lead.

This matters because these are the subjects which research shows interest the public much less than the issues in their daily lives – their children’s schooling, their health care, the potholes in the road, the local transport services. So, the risk is that you assume a lack of interest in that kind of politics because audiences don’t actually care that much about the Westminster political bubble and the pollsters’ number-crunching.

So just to take stock of that for a moment: what I’m saying is that the traditional media needs to be better at understanding the countries on which they’re reporting – and that is especially the case for the BBC, where everyone is compelled by law to pay for the organisation. It may be a legitimate path for the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Guardian, or the Telegraph, or the Daily Mail to stand with one set of voters and one set of values; but it cannot be an option for an organisation which is universally funded as a public service broadcaster.

Now, some people will argue say at this juncture: doesn’t it mean that public media is doomed to decline? We are in a post-truth world in which most people are quite content – even happier – being in their own echo chamber.

But that would, I think, be a terrible mistake; because we might lose the common space in which we can all gather. It is happening in America where a country much more polarised than the United Kingdom gets its television news from Fox News or MSNBC where there are alternative agendas, alternative opinions and alternative facts. There are vanishingly few places where the public can go to find out the truth or what matters; and if you don’t have those, how can you have an informed and civil dialogue about the issues that confront us?

So I both support public media, obviously, and I also sympathise with the dilemmas it’s facing. The world has changed, and media must change with it.

But I think there are some dangerous paths, enabled by social media, which should be avoided. And let me spend a few minutes on those.

The first is the view that everything should be interactive, that what restless audiences want is a chance to take part. I noticed one of my old colleagues Victoria Derbyshire at the end of Newsnight the other night plugging the fact that they love to hear from us and we’re on “every bloomin’ platform” and we can also WhatsApp them, as we can with Peston on ITV and lots of shows on Sky News and all the rest. Victoria had just read out two messages from viewers which – in true BBC fashion – had one arguing one side of the argument and one the other. A simple question: when you tune in to a flagship news programme such as Newsnight, is the thing you most want to hear from other viewers – or is it to hear politicians, experts, the studio panel? I’m not against interactivity per se. I was controller of 5 Live after all, and in my time we launched the Nicky Campbell phone-in. But now even on the flagship Sunday morning Laura Kuenssberg show we’re being asked what we think, and Laura frequently uses the format “our viewers want to know…” in her questions. It’s quite hard to imagine Robin Day doing that in a major political interview, even though he was sometimes a phone-in host too.

My own view is that interactivity should not be everywhere for a number of reasons. It’s too often cosmetic. You can’t really tell what the views of “our viewers” really are based on the tiny minority who get in touch. There’s also what one BBC insider described to me as a potential continuing bias:

“It’s true that ‘connection’ is seen as a virtue, but I would seriously question how genuine that connection is – particularly when it doesn’t fit with a perceived wisdom. Some connections are more virtuous than others. Did we listen to what the audience said on social media about Brexit? Are we really listening now to what they‘re saying about immigration? I have my doubts.”

Then there is the snare about what people engage with and share and repost anyway. And let’s be clear that all of us look at the more trivial stuff online, and some pieces of video are fun or compelling. But if you see the BBC’s “most watched” section sometimes it can seem to be a series of dash-cam videos and alarming car incidents from around the world, or the latest cute pictures of an animal born in a zoo. I’m not myself convinced that curating these is a good use of the BBC’s time. That, surely, is what commercial media or social media can do.

And it’s at this point that we need to remind ourselves of what the BBC specifically is required to do by its Royal Charter. Forgive me for quoting this at some length but the first stated public purpose in the 2016 charter is remarkably clear:

“To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them: the BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world.”

The next section is crucial:

“Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range of depth and analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”

So that is a high bar and I would interpret it as meaning that the BBC and public service media generally should sometimes be different from the market. They should do things others don’t. They should sometimes reject what everyone is talking about on X, and they should opt for what is important for society instead.

I would take an example from the most recent election campaign. The betting story about insider dealing from Downing Street is a good one and eminently reportable. I would have unquestionably made it the lead story in the bulletins if I’d been editing when the story broke. But the question is about the prolonged coverage over literally days of the campaign, reaching its nadir when the Today programme interviewed the two main Work and Pensions spokespeople for the Tories and Labour entirely about the rules of betting and not at all about the world of work and pensions.

Now, I don’t think it’s an amazing insight to say that the rules on benefits and the future of pensions are huge issues that affect everybody. I simply don’t accept that you can’t make those stories engaging, and that they’re not suitable for BBC One in prime time. I would rather we spent 80% of the time discussing that and 20% betting rather than, on occasions, 100% betting. We need to be able to give journalists the space to decide what’s significant, and to switch off social media for a while to allow a clearer focus. That applies to politicians too: they also need encouragement to think about the long-term future of the country, rather than the tweet that will get 1 million views.

As the director of news at the BBC, I have I had this argument with senior managers and journalists in the public broadcasters. The response which I find most persuasive is the one that says: “look, we tried to raise these more serious themes – but the politicians didn’t want to. We asked over and over again about Labour’s tax plans, but they just wouldn’t engage properly with the financial reality.”

And there is no doubt that politicians both embrace new media platforms rather than the traditional set pieces and debates, as well as being frankly terrified that one mis-step can lead to endless vilification and abuse across every single platform. I can see why they’re defensive: we are creating a media world in which verbal abuse and worse is an increasing threat. Yet we also can’t bemoan the lack of trust in politics and politicians and then foster a media climate in which they cannot share interesting thoughts or digress from the party line of the day.

If there’s also one thing to watch out for, it’s journalists who say “Rishi Sunak could not get away from the questions about betting” or “Keir Starmer is still hounded by the row about Diane Abbott” when it is those very journalists who are still asking those questions. It is they who decide when the news agenda moves on. They can, if they want, ask about climate change or social care or the future of our schools instead, and scrutinize politicians’ particular choice of terms in policy debates – but they choose to stick with the topic that “everyone is talking about”. It was, for instance, a bit unfortunate that the great flurry about what Labour meant in its manifesto pledge about “no rise in National Insurance” and by the term “working people” only got scrutinised properly after the election rather than during the campaign.

It was probably somewhat arrogant in the past when my generation on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme talked about setting the national agenda, even when the BBC’s Six O’Clock News that night was sometimes a precise reflection of the stories we’d started running, and it’s no longer deliverable in the same way. But it would equally be a dereliction of duty if the main public broadcasters ceded the agenda to whatever is trending on social media. ITV showed rather brilliantly how a drama can transform the national conversation about the Post Office and the scandal of IT software; and channels and platforms which still have millions of viewers and listeners should retain the ambition to do the same.

What I’m saying, then, is that traditional broadcasters should remain confident in an agenda about what they believe matters to society. And if they understand their societies, and there really is more work to do here, then they can engage with them more effectively, in a way that a social media platform based in California Palo Alto cannot. That’s all because the prize here is a big one: it is literally about the future of a functioning parliamentary democracy, and the way that media and politics can support the national conversation, rather than corrupt it.

There is always the risk here of a myth of a golden age – that everything was better in the past, when it was simpler and more controlled. I don’t think that.

I still believe that the United Kingdom and its people have great potential, and the creative industries can delight and surprise. But I also think we need to cherish the things about journalism that brought us into it – the ability to report first-hand on the world’s triumphs and tragedies; the hope that we could bring facts and insights when the debate was all about hunches and misinformation; even the way that freedom of expression has eroded tyrannies and enhanced the lives of millions. Remember Watergate: it was investigative journalism that brought down Richard Nixon. The Ethiopian famine, where it was journalism that alerted the world to the catastrophe of the Ethiopian famine in 1984. And more recently, more contemporary stories where the BBC has exposed the terrible wrongdoing of Mohamed Al-Fayed and when Channel 4 revealed how the Church of England had mishandled allegations of child abuse and in the process brought down the an Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the worldwide Anglican communion.

These kinds of stories require investment of money and effort, journalistic commitment, editorial bravery, a long hard slog. Those are, generally speaking, not the adjectives I would apply to social media platforms. So that is why I would recommend two things: first, accept the way the world has changed.

But also stand firm against the practices and the platforms and the trolls which damage journalism and damage society.

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