Remember That Pioneer TV Show “Who Do You Trust?” A Survey Says The British Public, By A Large Margin, No Longer Trusts Its TV

Philip M. Stone August 26, 2007

Before Johnny Carson became a household US TV name on “The Tonight Show” he hosted a daily half-hour quiz show titled “Who Do You Trust?” If That show was alive today and asked that question of the British public their overwhelming answer would be, according to a new survey, that they know who they don’t trust – British TV.

And Britain’s TV networks have only themselves to blame. It seems that very few days go by now when one scandal or another isn’t unleashed in the media ranging from fixed TV phone-in competitions to producers taking great “literary license” in editing their reality TV shows – events not always occurring when the program would have you believe they did. 

This past weekend any British TV executive who calls him/herself a TV executive would have been found in Edinburgh for their annual TV booze-up held under the cover of The Edinburgh Festival (the Discovery Channel’s research before the event said that on average each attendee consumes 20 units of alcohol over the weekend, they get three hours sleep, and 75% admit being hung-over every day.)  And that’s why the most important events are scheduled first on the opening afternoon in the hope the audience is still sober enough to be able to comprehend what is being said.

And this year’s opening session, “Trust Me…I’m in Telly” was aimed at the biggest furor between TV and its public in years. Indeed, the public’s disillusionment is so bad that Mark Thomson, the BBC’s Director-General, wrote in The Guardian on Friday (he obviously was hoping the delegates would still be able to concentrate on the printed word on Friday morning before the sessions began) “Anyone who does not believe this episode (various assorted violations of trust with the public) has damaged public trust in us is deluding themselves. The public are just not passive receivers any more. They increasingly enjoy active participation and watching and listening to others interacting.”

For that first panel discussion the organizers commissioned a special poll and if there is anything that should have kept those executives sober for the weekend it would have to be those poll results.  A full 72% of the British public no longer trusts TV phone-in competitions simply because they don’t know whether they really have a fair chance of winning. About 59% said they now believe documentaries distort the truth in the editing stage.

So it was little wonder that Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan told the packed session "this industry now has to move into a new era of transparency.” He acknowledged that the phone-in fixes were “unacceptable". He, Thomson and ITV executive chairman Michael Grade -- Thomson’s predecessor at the BBC -- have agreed to a September summit to discuss what measures their organizations can take to win back the public’s confidence.

All the terrestrial networks have had their trust issues. In the BBC’s case, aside from some telephone phone-in fixes, there was a huge uproar when a promo for a documentary about A Year in the Life of The Queen included a voiceover claiming the video showed the Queen storming out of a photo shoot, very unhappy with American photographer Annie Leibovitz, when in fact the video was actually of her walking to the shoot. Many apologies from the BBC at the highest levels but there were reports Buckingham Palace was angry enough to demand the documentary be canned.

ITV, the largest terrestrial commercial network, is investigating claims that its media department promoted a documentary about Alzheimer’s disease by saying the program showed the victim actually dying when in fact he died several days later and it was not filmed. The producer says he is currently going through hell from the ITV lawyers.

The telephone phone-in scandals have really angered the public and regulators. The Ofcom regulator imposed its first-ever fine on the BBC for faking the results of a phone-in on a children’s program -- £45,000 ($90,000, €66,000) for having a studio guest pose as the winner of that contest when the program was broadcast live, and a further £5,000 ($10,000, €14,700) fine because the program was later repeated.

At GMTV, the national breakfast time commercial franchise,  Managing Director Paul Corley resigned after the company admitted that viewers had spent £35 million ($70 million, €51 million) on competitions over four years in which they had absolutely no chance to win. There are similar cases on other stations – Channel Five fined £300,000 ($600,000, €440,000) for faking the winners in its “Brainteasers” program, and on Channel Four the  “You Say We Pay” quiz was fined £150,000 ($300,000, €220,000) because more than half of the calls, at £1 ($2, €1.47) each, were received after the shortlist of winners had already been chosen.

The commercial TV networks had discovered there was good money to be made off the premium phone costs of entering a contest, as shown by GMTV that announced that since it stopped the phone calls in April it has lost about £10 million ($20 million, €14.6 million) – about its yearly profits.

The big event at the Edinburgh Festival is the flagship MacTaggart lecture, and Jeremy Paxman, a very hard-hitting tough interviewer on the BBC Newsnight program, took television executives to task for screwing things up. In a plea for the “soul of television” he urged executives to agree upon a manifesto,” a statement of belief” and he said it was necessary for “senior people in this industry to have the courage to come out and state quite clearly what television is for. That sounds like as good a headline as any for what that September summit between the heads of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 could produce.

Paxton told the TV executives that their industry is in big trouble with its audience. “It is a very big problem. It has the capacity to change utterly what we do, and in the process to betray the people we ought to be serving. Once people start believing we’re playing fast and loose with them routinely, we’ve had it.”

And he laid it on the line for how bad things are. “Some of the things of which we stand accused are contemptible. I can see no circumstances at all under which you can justify defrauding the public on a premium rate phone line. In fact, I can’t quite see why there aren’t grounds for prosecution (a point ftm raised a few weeks back...read here). And frankly, I find it pretty hard to believe some of the television bosses when they say they had no idea what was going on. Whoever was responsible should be sacked (fired).”

And he was not enamored by what seems to be the punitive actions thus far, that young producers are left taking the blame while the older senior executives are left alone. Sounds a little like the military?

“We've had the preposterous spectacle of some of the most senior figures in broadcasting running around like maiden aunts who've walked in on some teenage party, affecting shock and disbelief at what they've heard," he said.

Speeches are one thing, action is another. The TV networks have acknowledged they have serious problems and they have pledged to fix them. But as the poll indicates, they have a long road ahead.

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