The Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture 21 October 2026
By Lewis Goodall
It is such an honour to be here tonight.
Steve Hewlett was, as a very sad, very politically obsessed, very media obsessed nerdy teenager in south Birmingham, watching Newsnight on his aerial set, listening to the Today programme on my pocket radio on the way to school- an inspiration- no i didn’t get bullied, honestly.
Why are you laughing?
Steve was one of those titans, listening to the media show, opening up a world for me to which I did not have access. To which I could never ordinarily have had access. That was the BBC, that was Channel 4, that was ITV that was TV journalism at its best. Were it not for journalists like Steve were it not for this industry, I wouldn’t-self evidently be standing here today.
I think Steve understood that TV news is not a building, it’s not a brand or institution, it’s not even a profession as such, it’s not even about any particular code of working. It’s a craft. A public purpose. About something inside you. About ends not just means.
Yet this is an industry, which out of political pressure, atrophy, entropy, and a lack of intellectual self confidence, has allowed itself to think more and more of means, of how it is seen to do journalism, not always the ends- the journalism it does or how many people watch it.
I worry that somewhere along the way, an industry which once prided itself on opening doors- like the one it did to me- has become rather too concerned with keeping them shut, both in terms of people, ideas and reach. Not because video journalism - and I use that term advisedly - is dying.
Quite the reverse.
Video journalism is changing, exploding, reinventing itself in front of our eyes. It’s an exciting time. And don’t worry I should stress this isn't an exercise in a former BBC journalist settling scores. That is already a rather crowded sector of the media economy. Out of interest I think the Andrew Neil report is out on Thursdays.
No, it’s because I’m so excited by this new world, and I’m gutted that too much TV news in particular has simply decided, for reasons of expediency, for reasons of complacency, almost for reason of a quasi- religion, and partly for reasons outside of its own control, not to join sufficiently in that revolution. There is a Reformation going on out there. And TV news, increasingly feels, like a very old church, singing old hymns, with fewer and fewer choosing to join in.
—
I want you to perform a thought experiment.
Imagine you could travel twenty years, to 2006.
Tony Blair is Prime Minister. George W. Bush is in the White House. Twitter has barely begun. The iPhone does not yet exist. And there’s me, listening to my pocket radio listening to Jim Naughtie, 16 and still inexplicably single.
And you switch on the Ten O'Clock News. Think about what you see.
The opening titles. The music. The presenter behind the desk. Well perhaps not him. But the headlines. The correspondent packages. The two-way. The weather. The structure.
Now come back to 2026. Switch on the news again.
What has changed?
Of course, the studios are a little shinier although frankly not always. Occasionally the presenter stands up and walks towards a map, gesturing at nothing in particular. But fundamentally? It's the same programme. The same rhythms, the same format, the same cortege of news, inexorably marching through the bulletin.This is news as going to church. As eating your greens. A grim, solitary ritual to be endured, rather than enjoyed.
When I was at Sky, an organisation I loved btw, I once had an argument with a duty editor, when I asked for an extra 30 seconds for a package, a package I perhaps unsurprisingly thought was superb, to be told, that this was a bulletin, and we just don’t have any more time. I was perplexed. When I pointed out that we were a 24 hour news station, that it wasn’t possible, quite literally within the laws of physics- to have more time, answer came there the same. We do it because we’ve always done it this way.
Now in twenty years of extraordinary innovation in media, ask yourself: what other genre of television could say that?
Drama? Absolutely not.
Think how drama has been transformed. The ambition, the complexity, the scale, the relationship with the audience.
Sport? Also virtually unrecognisable. New camera angles, new formats, new presentation, new technology, new ways of telling the story of the game. Even the current affairs documentary, our closest thing to a sister genre, has massively evolved. But the television news bulletin? The standard broadcast fare? In too many cases, you could take the programme from twenty years ago, change the names and the pictures, and broadcast it tomorrow.
And I want to ask a very simple question.
Why?
Why has an industry whose entire purpose is to tell us about a changing world been so reluctant to change itself?
And sure there’s been innovation- explainers, new attempts to tell stories, a move to vertical video.
But is it commensurate with the scale of the change which is going on in consumption habits?
And why, when audiences have moved away, has this industry's response so often been to complain about the audiences? To complain about news fatigue?
Well, I'm sorry, but you’re kidding yourselves.
I don't think the audience has failed broadcast news.
I think TV news has, in too many respects, failed the audience.
That isn’t to say, btw- that I don’t think this industry has some of the best journalism in the business- it does.. The BBC’s reporting from Ukraine and Gaza. Sky’s extraordinary eyewitness journalism from the world’s conflict zones. ITV’s investigation just this week into Reform. Channel 4 News exposing Cambridge Analytica, its remarkable investigations into the killing fields of Sri Lanka. My old patch, Newsnight’s compelling interview with Gisele Pelicot. TV Journalism which is courageous, expensive, painstaking, sometimes dangerous - and which genuinely changes lives.
But we have to confront one simple fact we’re in an industry which, because of the still solid but dwindling demographic base of its audience, has been insulated from changing enough- which has been doing too much of the same old thing for too long, while demanding that somebody else change the rules to make people watch. The latest idea from the leaders of this industry?
To receive algorithmic preference online. A media equivalent of an attention subsidy. It is like the nationalised industries of old - sorry Prime Minister - don't make a better product, don’t import something from abroad, give us a leg up, a hand out, a tariff, mr president-why? Because we deserve it. Because of who we are. Because of who we’ve been.
Imagine if the music industry had responded to Spotify by demanding that the government make people listen to CDs.
History doesn't owe us an audience. And the public doesn't owe us its attention and we can’t rig the game to give it to us
We have to earn it.
And right now we’re not, I think for three principal reasons which I’m going to outline. An almost conscious lack of self-renewal- a demographic trap. Second, an overzealous pursuit of the perception, not substance of impartiality. And third, perhaps most importantly, an overregulated broadcast sector, which makes less and less sense in an era where screens are in our pocket, largely unregulated, while the TVs in our living rooms remain bound to a technological order made half a century or more ago.
So the first. Renewal. Or lack thereof.
Now, I want to be careful here.
Not least because I'm looking around this room.
Some of the finest journalists in this country have been doing the job for decades. And they’re my broadcast heroes. I wanted and still want to be like them.
But an industry cannot survive on experience alone.
Now as you know, I’m a saddo.
I’ve watched old election nights on youtube more times than I care to remember. I’ve even been lucky enough to feature in one or two.
And what’s the one thing I notice? Beyond the drama, the craftsmanship, the remarkable commitment to accuracy and context and insight?
It’s the same old faces. Often from 30 years ago more- not on the political side, which are fluid- I don’t think we’ll be seeing Matt Hancock on another one but on ours.
That’s not all bad. But I do think it tells something. Of an industry addicted to itself. Which praises the familiar. Gorges on its lore.
Look at the organisations… Look at the major awards. Look at who is commissioned, who is promoted, who is given the big opportunities.
In RTS, in BAFTA, in other professional awards I think we see the same thing- new entrants to the market, clearly making video journalism, which can be watched on television, be smashed down, young innovative talent disincentives by the big boys, their representatives- BBC, ITN and Channel 4 by the old players of this industry, telling newer players in video journalism that they were less legitimate, less valid, less television, despite the fact we’re all operating on the same screen. I’ve been on awards juries like that. The big players acted like a cartel frankly. No let me put it another way, a group of people jealously protecting their own privileges- at the expense of new entrants, like a guild. Oh no, only we have the right to call ourselves television. Same screen. Different rules.
So what’s the consequence? You get the same old people, same old places, doing the same old thing nominated for the same old awards every year, patting each other on the back as they do so.
And are we surprised? Because how often does the industry - how often do you - make a genuinely bold talent decision?
When was the last great star signing in British television news? When you signed someone really new? When was the last time a major broadcaster looked at someone who had built an audience independently, who had done the hard yards- developed a genuinely different way of telling stories, and said: we want that person, we want their creativity, and we're going to give them the freedom to do what they do best? Even if they’re not how we’ve done things in the past?
Not bring them in and make them look and sound exactly like everybody else.
Actually let them change the product.
Because there is a fundamental problem here.
We now live in a media world where individuals increasingly matter as much as institutions.
Sometimes- dare I say it- and I’m looking at my agent’s approving smile here- more.
People develop relationships with journalists and content creators online. They trust their judgement. They understand their sensibilities. They return to them again and again. Even if they know their judgment is not always perfect.
I’ll illustrate this with a change I’ve noticed even with my transition from tv news to podcasts.
People come up to you. They look thrilled. They treat you like your family. It’s actually quite weird. The best bit is where they say they go to bed with you. But it’s connection. It’s authentic. It’s not the brand. It’s what they feel you do for them.
Compare that to my old days in TV. There was I , at sky, a happy newly minted reporter, thrilled to be on TV for the first time. I walked down Brixton high st, near where I was living for the first time. Some man comes up to me and says
“Lewis! I love you on sky!”
There I am, thinking I am, for want of a better expression. The bees knees.
And he says: “It’s just so good to hear your voice”
And I say sorry?
And he says “Oh it’s just that I usually just see you on silent in the gym.’
And that says something, right? For good or ill, people connect with individuals as they used to do with brands, usually, on their phone. TV News needs that too. TV news used to have that. It used to understand that. It’s what marked us out against the faceless ghosts of the papers. The Robin Days, the Alistair Bunetts, the Paxmans, the Kay Burleys and Adam Boultons, the Warks, the Maitlises. The Sopels. You can see he read the draft can’t you? The connection with someone you thought was on your side.
This journalist as content creator, as brand, is something, for political reasons, leaders of big broadcast networks, especially the last DG of the BBC, have often been uncomfortable with. Because it ceded their power. Or their control.
It has spent years trying to suppress precisely the qualities which can make a journalist work online, their personality. When they stand out. Their riskiness.
How can it be, that for example, in the new YouTube and podcast era, so few of the traditional broadcast networks have any big shows?
It’s for this reason. Because in the attention economy, if you don’t stand out, you don’t get noticed.
So we need to talk about your talent pipeline.
Not simply who gets the top jobs, but who gets into journalism in the first place.
It has shut down most of its entrance schemes. It relies increasingly on the grunt work being done by a smallish number of journalism grad students, usually rich, usually London based, the class gap within this business widening all the time. And it has to be that way, because on the union side- it’s not just management it’s an industry often geared to the older and frankly sometimes the more indolent, just because they pay their union dues.
I’ve sat in NUJ meetings, watching the older, often less productive older producers and talent complaining about being asked to come into the office, about doing their jobs, protected from redundancy, as younger members of staff, on fixed term contracts, or no contracts, sweat spinal fluid and don’t know when the next pay cheque is going to come. And the management of this industry has too often, especially in certain organisations, allowed it to happen.
And we wonder why it isn’t renewing. Why there can be the stench of death?
This is a business which has comforted itself in having a large but dwindling older audience, often, dare I say, presented to by a dwindling number of older presenters, there are a few honourable brilliant exceptions, but there are fewer and fewer young people coming up behind, on either side of the screen. In this sense, TV news represents the greying of Britain itself. We know where this road leads.
And moreover, can we honestly say that doesn’t affect our journalism?
An industry which struggles to attract and retain young people will inevitably struggle to understand the lives of young people. About the next generation of listeners and viewers.
Are the stories which define a generation- the stuff they see on TikTok- graduate labour problems, rents, AI interviews- given the prominence they on broadcast networks deserve?
Sometimes.
But consistently? With the same urgency? The same sense that the country's future depends upon them?
I don't think so. And if they are now, it’s because middle aged middle class parents are noticing them as their own kids grow up.
We see it every day. The fragmentation of the media environment leads to parallel news cycles, sometimes never touching, which TV newsrooms have to recognise in order to retain relevance. We’re not talking about different generational interest- we’ve always had that, we’re talking about entirely separate and distinct news streams.
For example, when Charlie Kirk was killed. I heard the same story in news room after newsroom. Those under 35 or so, weaned on the politics of the content age, couldn’t believe it. Thought it a huge story. For many over a certain age, the response was “Who is Charlie Kirk?”
This wasn’t some pop star or film actor, this was one of the biggest political figures on Earth. And for many in our game, he was occluded to them.
This is the feedback loop here. Older audiences. Older formats. Older editorial priorities. Which produce yet more older audiences. Which then justify older formats and older editorial priorities. And unfortunately round and round we go.
And yet there’s an outside, where none of this applies. So let me offer a different account of the state of TV news.
One which I think is considerably more optimistic.
We are living through an extraordinary period for video journalism.
The barriers to entry have collapsed, you can reach new audiences, the sorts of people who never would have sat down to watch the news. Exceptional stories, which would never have graced the doorstep of ordinary newsrooms are being told. And people are doing it to millions every single day.
This is liberation. Not an uncomplicated one- but a liberation nonetheless.
And I want to challenge one of the laziest assumptions in the industry. That these audiences don't want serious journalism. They do. They absolutely do.
What they don't necessarily want is serious journalism presented in the same way it was presented to their grandparents- sounding as it was presented by their grandparents.
For proof positive of that look at what people actually consume.
Long-form interviews. Two-hour podcasts. Detailed explainers. Extended conversations about politics, economics, history, war and international affairs. Millions of people watching extended reports about Switzerland’s history of neutrality, its hidden bunkers and how those bunkers affect the country’s politics today. Millions, watching current affairs, about Swiss defence infrastructure. Look it up. It’s got to be better than Rest is Politics.
People will give you more time than they used to. The attention span hasn’t gone but the obligation to be interesting has become more demanding. And our industry, TV news, just hasn’t kept up, partly because it’s had other, more political concerns.
This is a new video ecosystem. And to succeed, my argument is that it has to be navigated- on the inside and the outside- by people in your organisations who instinctively understand it. And that is going to require a gear change in recruitment, in contracts for presenters, allowing even young people used to owning IP to retain some IP, to accept that they might work for your organisation but not always speak for it.
—
Now you may think I'm about to argue- that you should take to this new world- and the way we should do it is by abolishing impartiality.
I'm not.
I think impartiality, properly understood, is one of the great achievements of British journalism.
But I also think we have allowed a very particular interpretation of impartiality to become an obstacle to journalism and to successful content creation.
And worse, we have allowed it to become a weapon used against journalists by political actors who of course don’t play by similar rules- motivated only by their political impulses. Sometimes, not just from without, from within. It has made our content blander than it needs to be. Allowed it to disappear. And in so doing we’ve failed the people we are meant to serve.
When I was at the BBC, in the heart of the Johnson years, it sometimes felt that a win was getting through the days without anyone really noticing us. Especially online. I spoke to executives genuinely bewildered as to why I was trying to build my own online platform. But you work for the BBC, they said- it’s the biggest microphone you could ever have. They didn’t seem to understand the power of bringing the individual voice and the corporate microphone together. It seemed stupid to me then- suicidal now. And they probably knew it too, but that was tomorrow’s problem. They had to get through the day.
Because we have to be honest, that old impartial model, pretending that a presenter or a journalist has no views, or can completely suppress them. I just don’t think it cuts much ice these days. The idea everyone can leave their politics at the door, that we’re almost a higher breed of journalist, of person. Audiences are way too sophisticated to believe that those people, just because they’re on tv, are devoid of bias or political impulse, in fact I think they don’t trust us when we say so. They know that no-one is truly an impartial vessel. They know, that even when we try, we have our prejudices, our biases, even the things we consume, we read, these are all biases. There are apolitical political journalists, and for my money, they’re bad ones. I think audiences think that too. And I think we’re better off sometimes acknowledging where we’re coming from. Having that conversation. We need to move from a strict, antiquated notion of pure impartiality, and instead think about the values our journalism has. What audiences want, is someone whose politics they might suspect, who can never truly be impartial, but who they know will be fair. Who will produce valid journalism- a theme to which I will return.
——
But this problems bleeds into the third problem.
Which is that the rules on how news is consumed, depending on the means of consumption are different and increasingly absurd.
Imagine two pieces of election content. Both are about the same election. Both are professionally made. Both feature reporters travelling to the same constituency. Both are watched on the same TV. One is broadcast on BBC One. The other is on YouTube.
A reminder this is quite literally the same screen. And yet they can exist in fundamentally different regulatory worlds.
The first operates within the elaborate architecture of British broadcast impartiality rules, some internally, some externally imposed.
The second does not. Now, let me be precise.
Ofcom does not require every marginal candidate to appear in every election report.
And impartiality rules do not literally prohibit interesting journalism.
But anybody who has worked in broadcasting knows that the formal rules are only part of the story. There is the interpretation of the rules. The compliance process. The internal culture. The institutional fear of complaints. The desire to avoid risk. To avoid fun.
And, over time, all of this can create a kind of editorial hypnotism.
A sense that there is a prescribed way of doing political journalism.
That every assertion requires a counter-assertion. That every argument requires a balancing argument. Where we slowly miss the due part of due impartiality.
Until the journalism becomes less an attempt to explain the world than an attempt to demonstrate compliance. To prevent complaint. I felt this every DAY at the BBC. At one particular low point, one editor asked me how Boris Johnson would react if he read my script that night. To which the answer of course, should have been, that as long as we were accurate and duty impartial, we shouldn’t care.
And audiences can feel it. And it is precisely the sort of compliance management which is doomed in the attention economy. A far cry from the glory days of Michael Crick’s Newsnight, taking risks, surprising the audience- where he once told me no one even checked his scripts before Tx. If we breed the distinctiveness out of programming, if we treat every piece of content as if it’s the 10 o clock news, we are dooming it before it’s begun.
Now imagine the other programme.
The YouTube programme. Some very popular programme, reinventing, boundaries, I dunno just for the sake of argument, call it The News Agents.
I can go to the same constituency for the same election report. Talk to the same people. I can cover the same election. But I can choose a different style. I can be funny. Well so they tell me.
I can be irreverent. I can spend time on a particular character or encounter.
I can follow the story where it leads. I can make an editorial judgement about what is significant, what is revealing, what is absurd. I can actually tell the story. What is actually happening. Rather than dancing around it. With all my own limitations of which the audience is aware. I don’t have to pretend that the Lib Dems have a chance in Makerfield.
And I can do all of this without having to navigate precisely the same regulatory obligations as my former colleagues. Without being afraid to reveal something of myself. And I still think it will be public service journalism.
Now, here's the thing. The audience is watching both on the same screen, on the same living room and the same television. Same political event. Same basic journalistic purpose. But potentially completely different rules.
Why? How on Earth does that make any sense?
Why should the means by which journalism reaches the screen determine so much about the obligations imposed upon it?
This is not a minor technical inconsistency. It is just an intellectual absurdity.
Now in fairness Ofcom has tried to grapple with this, via the ODPS, governing some on demand content. But it’s patchy at best and feels, as so much of our thinking around this at the moment, a patch and mend job. A holding position.
Our system is built around the technology of the twentieth century. But the public is living and consuming its media in the twenty-first. We are living with a system, almost designed to make you more boring than your online competitors- or at the very least, stolid or staid. And the gulf between those two things is growing.
That is not to say there were not reasons these things existed btw.
When there were one or two channels, we had extraordinary power.
But scarcity has given way to remarkable abundance.
And the idea that broadcasters occupy a uniquely powerful position in this ecosystem, is absurd.
We operate in a world where we insist a broadcast package list every by- election candidate, as if the election would be thrown if we didn’t, while a Joe Rogan can be listened to without a single political restriction.
Yet we continue to regulate them as though they are the dominant force.
It’s as if Lloyd George’s government in the early 20th century, had imposed the most elaborate traffic regulations on horse-drawn carriages, while allowing a motorway to develop alongside them.
There have been reforms- there is the Media Act, there is the Online Safety Act.. There is an ongoing debate about prominence, platforms and public-service media. There is also a current Broadcast regulation consultation about these distinctions, which in a small way I hope this can be a small part of.
But much of the discussion remains trapped in treating television, online, broadcast, phone content and streaming as distinct and separate categories. But to the viewer, it’s all just on a screen.
And that ought to be the starting point of our thinking.
——
Now, whenever this debate begins, somebody inevitably says:
But Lewis, we don't want American-style politics and American style partisan television. And I understand that instinct and I share some of it.
But there is a rather obvious problem with the argument.
We already have much of that political environment on TV. It’s just happening on the screens in your pockets.
Through new shows, through podcasts, through endless content and twitch streams, through videos which appear to be journalism but are actually political communication. All of this soon all to be augmented and intensified by AI.
Then look at TV and consider the quaint ritual of the party election broadcast, carefully rationed and allocated by formula. A broadcast still in the 20th century order… Meanwhile, our electoral law still has loopholes that allow foreign money to reach parties through UK companies, and nothing stops the very wealthy buying as much algorithmic weight as they like to tilt what voters see on the same screens.
Through networks of accounts which can amplify a message to millions of people before a traditional broadcaster has even decided how to cover it.
We have some of the most demanding standards in the world for the journalism produced by established broadcasters. But the wider information environment operates according to radically different incentives. The ability to make sure that people never stop scrolling.
A world governed algorithmic politics.
Politics shaped not simply by what parties say, but by the systems which decide what people see. And here is the really important point. You all know those systems are not neutral, indeed you know that they exercise extraordinary editorial power.
But they do so through processes which extraordinarily opaque.
And into that environment come political actors with increasingly sophisticated tools.
As I say, soon enough- Artificial intelligence will make it cheaper and easier to produce enormous volumes of persuasive political material masquerading as journalistic content. Content which is tailored to your eyeballs.
The technology is moving faster than the institutions charged with understanding its consequences. Do we really believe Westminster has even begun to grapple with these things?
This is why I think the debate about the future of video news cannot simply be about the future of the BBC, ITV, Sky or Channel 4. Tbh, that’s all quite small. It’s about the realities we imbibe on any screen, wheresoever it sits.
7. STOP ASKING TO BE SAVED But what has the response of the traditional broadcasting industry been? Well as I say, of late it has been to ask for help. We need prominence from the digital giants, we need to be protected. Asking the government for their content to be given premium status-algorithmic incentive.
Of course, the argument makes some sense. In a state of nature where the market does not reward public service content, the leviathan government has to make sure it reaches us.
But I find the tone of some of this debate profoundly depressing.
Because it seems to begin from the assumption that the existing product is essentially fine.
The problem is merely that people aren't being directed towards it.
And I'm afraid that isn't good enough.
Distribution isn’t your only problem. You cannot regulate people into finding you interesting. You cannot legislate an audience into loving what you do. Especially a younger audience which has become accustomed to finding what it thinks I want to find. And dare I say, they’re going to find that even harder if you slap a licence fee onto a Netflix account.
By all means, argue for fair treatment from platforms, which I’ll come back to.
But first, ask whether what you're producing deserves people's attention.
Is there any world for the 2.5 min news package any more?
The sync, the GVs, the plaintive PTC?
Ask whether it is sufficiently ambitious. Ask why they’re still being put online and getting next to nothing for your trouble.
And I know there’s been huge effort on socials, which has yielded results. But if we’re honest, we all know the pull of the bulletin, of the machine, is strong. It has a gravity for a group of people, who in our hearts came into this to get stuff on the radio and the telly. It’s what gets our blood beating.
But that’s us, in this room. Products of the world where that was the summit of the mountain. We have to ask whether the best young journalists in Britain would regard your newsroom as the most exciting place to work.
And if the answer is no, we have to ask why.
This is where I think we need a bit of shock therapy.
So here is my plan, for a new settlement.
1. For God’s sake be brave. Give journalists freedom to experiment.
Make new talent development central to the organisation.
You know older audiences respond to the older faces, that authority, the titans. The thing is, there are titans of the new world too. They just don’t do TV news as we do it.
Recruit people who have built audiences outside traditional broadcasting. Let them make things which don't look like television news. And put them on TV news. We need news broadcasters to become incubators again.
8. A NEW SETTLEMENT
But this cannot all be left to broadcasters.
Because even if every television newsroom in Britain reinvented itself tomorrow, we would still have the fundamental problem.
Same screen. Different rules. Different expectations. Different forms of accountability.
And a regulatory framework which remains too closely attached to the technological distinctions of the past. So let’s take this opportunity to rethink, not by abolishing regulation but crucially also, not by extending every existing broadcast rule to everyone with a microphone and some 5G.
That would not only be absurd, it would be unenforceable.
And more than that, it would threaten some of the very innovation we should be trying to encourage.
Does anyone really think that say the British podcast space would be richer, better, more informative, more fun if it were subject to every dot and comma Ofcom regulation? Do we really think they would have the bandwidth or resources or capability to do it even if we asked?
What we need instead, for news providers at least, is new rules. A new way of thinking. To start treating the audience like grown ups, who aren’t going to just be taken in by everything they see and hear- but who do need guidance in an online world increasingly marked by peddlers of unreality. A framework which is open to independent journalists, new organisations, established broadcasters and digital publishers alike.
One which rewards not the old 20th century model of impartiality, but demonstrable professional journalistic standards- most notably accuracy, transparency, a willingness to make corrections, and who are not political actors, but journalistic ones. Clear distinctions between journalism, advertising and political advocacy.
Not a government licence to be a journalist.
But I think we need a voluntary system of recognised standards, with independent oversight and meaningful consequences for organisations which claim those standards and then repeatedly breach them.
A genuine watermark of accountability, appearing on our artwork, our content, our footage. An IPSO which works for broadcast and for online newscontent. Not algorithmic subsidy, but a badge of, well let’s use that word- authenticity. Something which can be given and audiences know, yeah maybe some of this is political, but it’s a show which meets certain important and basic editorial standards. And with a voluntary enforcement body which can mandate corrections if necessary, which fall short of legal sanction.
This is about creating new institutions for a new media century, which can’t be like the old.
And though we shouldn’t ask for subsidy- we do need much greater transparency over the systems which distribute information.
The algorithms. And here I think government has been far too timid.
We cannot continue to allow some of the most powerful systems in the public sphere to operate as though their influence is simply a private commercial matter. Of course, platforms have legitimate commercial interests and have resisted opening their algorithmic books. But none of that removes the public interest in understanding how information is fed into their eyeballs. And that’s why we need Lisa Nandy to act.
Researchers need meaningful access to data. Regulators need the capacity to examine systemic risks. And broadcasters, should have the ability in a neutral setting, an independent arbitration panel, an attention court if you will, to challenge them.
Because YouTube right now is the equivalent of a monopoly newsstand, covering every street corner, every home in the country and that’s why the public needs clearer information about why particular content is being promoted.
And political advertising- or paid for political content- needs transparency which reflects the technology through which it is delivered. We need rules which establish who pays for messages and whether it’s generated or altered through AI. These should not be impossible questions to answer.
And third, we need to reconsider the rules governing broadcast journalism itself.
Not because the standards are unimportant.
But because should be asking whether the present interpretation of impartiality encourages the best journalism, rather than cosplaying as what we think impartial journalism ought to sound like.
Because if those rules are damning that content to fringe status, what’s the point? There is a difference between demanding that journalism be fair and accurate, and demanding that it be dull. The former is essential. The latter is not a public service. It’s actually letting everybody down. And I think the industry has sometimes confused the two.
So- the new world I’m proposing, editors who let their journalists off the leash, allow them to take risks, accept complaints, more creative freedom, an acceptance that the old highly regulated world is gone or should be lessened, enforceable accountability for participating publishers who want the watermark, fairer treatment by platforms, and additional obligations where public funding or privileges justify them. I think this is a reform agenda which is institutional and cultural - and recognises the realities of the world we’re in and the audiences we serve.
—-
I want to end where I began.
With television news.
Because despite everything I've said tonight, I am not pessimistic about TV journalism.
I'm profoundly optimistic about it. This is such a rich time. Such a desire, among all the noise- for sound.
For faces and yes brands people trust to cut through it all. For investigation and stories, engagingly told. A time of experimentation.
But what we cannot and should not do is preserve the conventions of old for their own sake. Because they are familiar.
And if we don’t find a way to make sure our content is both fair and true and engaging and seen, it isn’t just a problem for us. If serious journalists vacate the spaces where audiences are gathering, they won’t remain empty.
They’ll be filled by the chancers, the propagandists, the conspiracy theorists. Who aren’t waiting for Ofcom to finish their next consultation or the BBC their next strategic review.
Steve Hewlett and journalists like him opened up a world for me. Our responsibility is to do the same for the next generation, to reinvent the best values of this industry for them. And we brave enough to let the next generation show us how.
The screen is not the point.
The journalism is.
Thank you.