Roger Graef (17:21)
Well, I rather foolishly probably cast myself as ethics man when this debate started quite a long time ago by publishing and discussing the rules of filming and saying to the people we wanted to film that this is what I would want if I asked for access or somebody asked for access to me. And so we have very clear guidelines which we then show the finished work to the people that have been in the films so that we make sure that they're factually correct according to those people. People. But as we've moved on into other kinds of journalism and television, and with deadlines imposed on us, and with more and more people who didn't kind of grow up in the same environment as I did, working with me, I can see a number of different kinds of ethical problems. And being economical with the truth, of course, is something that you have to do when you've only got 1,000 words or 200 words or 15 minute report out of many hours, or even one hour out of 45 or 60 or 100 hours of shooting. And with video technology, people do a great deal more spraying and hoping than actually considering what they wanted to do in advance and really knowing what they're going after and then testing it. And in a way, what that has then produced are what I really would call four typologies, if you like, of error and mistrust, if you like, grounds for mistrust. The first is simply inexperience. People who don't have any sense of what fact checking is really about, who will go to Wikipedia as a source without realizing that it's actually composed of people who just put in whatever they want it to be. And they don't in a sense, know what two, three sources or primary sources really are. And that's not obviously something that we can do very much about, except through training and support and supervision. Then you have ignorance, as in, again, not knowing what a primary source is about, but real ignorance of, in a sense, what the truth could be. Because in a way what they really are looking for is a story. And there's a wonderful phrase which has been going, you know, as long as I'm sure journalism existed, which is don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. And that's always said rather jokingly in the editor, when you come up with something that doesn't quite fit what you think you've got. But it is a moral predicament for everybody who's ever had that experience of finding that what you thought was there just wasn't. Or sometimes in our experience it was least it's even better than you thought, but it's more complicated, so you then have to be economical with it. So you chop off the edges because you've got to simplify. And in so doing you are definitely falsifying, certainly by losing nuance, and you could even change the emphasis, which is why we find it helpful to show the films. But, you know, the combination of inexperience and then Ignorance is the second one. The third, of course, is venal, where somebody really knows something hasn't happened or has purposely not bothered to find out. They've actually seriously distorted what's gone on simply to sell the story. And, you know, time and again, more in tabloid than in television, they've been asked to do this. The Madeleine case in Portugal is a very clear example where the Portuguese media have been fed specific stories by the police that the chief investigator of that case knew to be wrong and then was told by his superiors to defend. And so he resigned. He just wasn't going to do it. But you could see the process and it's picked up very quickly by the media here because they couldn't and didn't bother checking primary sources to combat it. The fourth, however, is really interesting and I'm going to confess something which people in this room will not have known, except with the possible exception of Stephen Whittle, who worked at the BBC when we did, and that is that we're unwitting failure to tell the truth, as it were, because technologically, either the camera switched off at a certain moment or you were blocked from the action, or some way or another, you think you've got the whole story and actually you don't, because either you weren't there or you just missed it. And that's even more complicated, if you like, because when you're in that situation and in this situation that I'm going to quote to you, the footage we showed in one of our episodes of a police series showed a police officer stopping a fight by grabbing a girl who was trying to get away from the fight, and apparently just she looked like she was wrestling and resisting and kind of being very aggressive to him. But. And that's all the footage we had, and put it in the film, and then she afterwards complained against the police officer, saying that he'd started it, and in our footage he simply hadn't. And I defended him to the family and I really didn't, you know, looking at the rushes, I wasn't there. And then it was only when we. The complaint was being investigated properly, seriously, by an officer in the force that we then rewound all the rushes, looked very closely, realized that the key moment which would vindicate either him or her was simply blocked. There was a big person right in front both of the CCTV cameras and in front of us. There were just too many people around and nobody really knew. But the chances were from the fragment of an elbow that was raised, you could just see beyond one other person that she was right. And after weeks of looking at this and really soul searching, it wasn't casual. We decided that we got it wrong. So those are the four types that I think we have to deal with. The fourth just makes you humble so that you never can think that you've really got the answer the whole time. The first needs training, supervision, and the kind of experienced editors, series editors and executive producers that are in shorter and shorter supply and that are not just going to say, this is a great story, don't you know, file now, deliver now. And with the new technology, I think the problem is even worse because with user generated content, you can have people turning in their own video stuff, filing it, posting it online, and so on, and you can never tell whether they just did it in their backyard. Lastly, and I just, you might find this interesting, I was making a film for the BBC about the Quran, about Islam, the first one. And I was in Fez on the terrace of a hotel when the first moon, the pictures of the earth from the moon were taken. And it was on the back page of the Times. And it was an absolutely wonderful photograph. And the waiter came up to me and said, of course that was shot in a Hollywood studio. And I said, no, no, no, it's, you know, we don't do things like that. He said, don't be ridiculous. How do you know? Because it turned out I discovered later that the Moroccans believed that Islam would come to an end when man landed on the moon. And he was certainly not having it. But as I found myself trying to say to him, the Times wouldn't do such a thing, I felt the weakness of that argument becoming more and more evident to me. And so I think those of us who do claim to be committed to the ethical journey have to remain modest because we may find ourselves trapped by any one of those four types of mistakes, or chosen or purposeful mistakes. And there's far too much of it. There probably always has been. And the lack of trained supervision, I think is a crucial weakness in today's management of news and factual television.
