High-level British news executives weighed in on a controversial video that UK Channel 4’s Jon Snow made in July after visiting Gaza. The Huffington Post UK was on hand as Fran Unsworth (BBC’s deputy news chief), John Hardie (chief executive of ITN News), and John Ryley (head of Sky News) weighed in during a panel discussion at a Royal Television Society conference.
The emotional video was branded with the Channel 4 logo, filmed in the Channel 4 studio, and posted on Channel 4’s website and YouTube channel. The video was not broadcast on television (more on that point in a moment). It did leave an impressive footprint online, being shared on popular mainstream news sites like The Independent, Daily Telegraph, Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post.
In the face of formal complaints, Channel 4 squarely backed Snow. Because the video wasn’t broadcast on TV but only posted online, Ofcom, the UK media regulatory body, told The Guardian it couldn’t take action after people filed complaints. In other words, Channel 4 got off on a technicality because the Internet doesn’t fall under Ofcom’s purview.
If the piece had been broadcast in a regular Channel 4 News bulletin on TV it may have fallen foul of media regulator Ofcom’s broadcasting code rules on due impartiality.
An Ofcom spokesman confirmed that the video fell outside its remit, as it had not been broadcast on linear TV.
Since Channel 4 isn’t going to throw its biggest personality under the bus for a video that had C4 fingerprints all over it, who is the regulatory agency to address complaints to?
Nobody.
But Snow didn’t get a complete pass from the executives at the conference. ITN’s Hardie called the video “sentimental,” agreed that the video not being aired on TV was a mitigating factor, then said, “It was a ventilation from Jon. After 40 years, if anyone has the right to do that, Jon has.”
Sky News’s Ryley was more supportive of the video (“Jon has seen a lot of suffering around the world in the last 40 years, and we should respect that emotion.”).
Fortunately, the Beeb’s Unsworth was the voice in the wilderness:
If one of our presenters had done something like that in a private capacity on YouTube, I’d have had to have said, this isn’t really appropriate in terms of your public role as an impartial presenter of BBC news programmes.
Snow’s entitled to his opinions, but this video crossed the line from level-headed, impartial journalism to emotional advocacy. It’s just a few degrees of separation from what Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill calls dead child porn. Despite the technicalities of Ofcom, this video undermines confidence in Channel 4’s judgement and what’s left of Snow’s impartiality.
Image: CC BY-NC-SA flickr/rjp, flickr/Victor Bezrukov
