Shilpa Shetty

Shanti Kumar provided us with a considered and thorough outline of the 2007 UK Celebrity Big Brother saga in a recent flow column. As Shanti charted, a lot has been made about the series in relation to its racialised dynamics and about what it tells us with regards to the state of local/global race, gender and class relations. Less, it seems, has been said about the relationship between the content and the broadcaster (Channel 4), although this might present a useful case study for broader discussions around the media and the state. Now that we can begin to look back at the series in less impulsive, more diagnostic ways, the major upshot – aside from a surefire boost to Shilpa Shetty’s international career following her win – should be the critical attention paid to Channel 4’s role.

Channel 4

CBB is on course to draw more complaints (currently over 45,000) than any other programme in British television history and has led to enquiries around the alleged racism and editorial and compliance processes that support the programme, raising some big questions – and not least because Channel 4 executives are currently lobbying for government money. Channel 4 was launched 25 years ago with an original remit for ethnic minority representation. As the only channel set up with a dedicated multicultural programmes department and commissioning editor, a unique conception of public service broadcasting was promised.

When that specialist department was shut down in 2002, Channel 4 declared that the real future of ethnic minority representation was in mainstream programming. At the time it could hardly have anticipated a more bizarre validation of ‘mainstreaming multiculturalism’ than the recent ‘race row’. Minority representation, yes. Mainstream, yes. But the international spotlight and copious complaints to their regulator about alleged racist bullying could hardly have been part of that vision.

And yet one doubts that many of those who took offence at CBB did so primarily because they felt betrayed by what has traditionally been perceived as the most ‘minority-friendly’ terrestrial channel. If so, why did they not protest as loudly when targeted multicultural spaces were axed? Or did they believe that the ‘new multiculturalism’ and plan to ‘go mainstream’, as Channel 4 executives spun it, was based on cultural intelligence rather than commercial pressure?

What about Channel 4’s continuing strategic pledge to cultural and other diversity (‘it lies at the heart of our remit’), which the rest of Europe and the world have long recognised as a perfect model of diversity-aware media? Perhaps the introduction to Channel 4’s Statement of Promises sheds some light: ‘The Channel needs commercial success in order to fund projects of ambition and risk and to support the range and diversity of its suppliers.’ If the handling of CBB was a means to an end, then what does this tell us about the broadcaster and indeed about the public service framework through which it is tasked to operate?

The viewing figures for CBB plummeted to below 3 million in the first week and gradually rose in tandem with the media focus and complaints, peaking at 8.8 million on the evening of the carefully stage-managed eviction of Jade Goody. The Big Brother brand is Channel 4’s largest money-earner, and accounts for approximately 10 per cent of its revenue. So did Channel 4 prioritise commercial success over its diversity mantra? Did it maximise profits by maximising conflict? Was it, as Tessa Jowell (Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport) suggested, ‘racism being presented as entertainment’, and if so, at what cost?

Jade Goody

More fundamentally, can a broadcaster that claims to champion diversity afford to take such a sluggish response to criticisms of racism, and manage any potential fallout so clumsily? How could it be that viewers were rapidly taking offence several days before the climactic ‘stock-cube showdown’, yet Channel 4 stayed quiet? (Stranger still because Channel 4 was already in some trouble with the UK media super-regulator, Ofcom, for not intervening during a ‘distressing’ incident in 2004’s Big Brother.)

Or was there, in fact, an intention by Channel 4 to expose the real face of prejudice in our midst, as Channel 4 Chief Executive, Andy Duncan, suggested when he said it was a “good thing that the programme has raised these issues”? But would any other institution (the police-force or a university perhaps) sustain a target-busting employee if they had also demonstrated bullying tendencies? Should racism or bullying – or indeed racist bullying – be buttressed or left uninterrupted on TV any more than it should elsewhere in society? Isn’t this precisely when a broadcaster should be editorially transparent? Such ambiguities sit oddly alongside the organisation’s politicised cultural diversity, and indeed public service, remit.

The so-called codes and conventions of the reality TV genre only muddle things further. At what point does the programme-maker, in a format with such broad ‘truth’ claims, step in and be seen to deliberately take control? And, as a consequence, undermine any ‘mirror on society’ hypothesis that broadcasters so frequently and expediently bandy about? These issues touch on a very important aspect when considering the relationship between media and state: which is about the nature of trust between the audience and broadcaster?

Channel 4’s apparent non-intervention as the gang bullying intensified was defended with an alibi of genre-etiquette; that is, the producers could not be seen to ‘intrude’ and spoil the natural order of things in the house. Of course, the real codes of reality TV demand that it is never left uninterrupted by the manoeuvring of those in the business of programme-making (who devise tasks, edit strategically, interview provocatively, and so on) in order to generate interest.

Big Brother Brazil

As reality TV expands and reality formats go global, other broadcasters – in spite of different media models and political traditions – may well face similar issues. How differently would an Indian broadcaster, for example, react if a similar situation arose in Big Boss (the Indian version of the original Dutch Big Brother, launched by Endemol)? The real ‘culture clash’ in this story is how cultural differences are negotiated and represented in the very public arena of ‘world television’. In spite of the recent spread of global formats (Big Brother, The Kumars at No. 42, Pop Idol, Wife Swap and X Factor have all been launched and aggressively marketed abroad), deep differences among world audiences exist.

Digitalisation, the internet and interactive media, as well as broadening our viewing options, are making it easier to complain, mobilise discontent and vocalise opinion internationally. For better or worse, there is real pressure for broadcasters (and indeed artists, filmmakers and other cultural practitioners) to consider not just local but global sensitivities. Channel 4, already using CBB to validate its position as the channel that pushes boundaries, will need to negotiate some of these concerns if it wants to maintain its claims of integrity, and perhaps more importantly, if it wants the world to keep watching.

– Sarita Malik writes on race and culture and is the author of Representing Black Britain.

Image Credits:
1. Shilpa Shetty
2. Channel 4
3. Jade Goody
4. Big Brother Brazil

Please feel free to comment.

British factual television, widely considered to be the best in the world, has played a key role in the latest furore around Islam in the UK. A series of recent events has further positioned Islam at the forefront of the nation's consciousness, feeding into the already frenzied rhetoric around “the war on terror.” These have included the Danish cartoons controversy, the 7/7 bombings in London, and Pope Benedict XVI's remarks about the Prophet Mohammed in September. In October, Britain's Leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw, stated his opinion that the full veil (niqab) signifies Muslims' separateness from mainstream British society. This has led to what is being dubbed “The Great Veil Debate,” unvaryingly preoccupying the news agenda of the UK broadcast, print and web media.

As with documentary, the discursive organization and production of television news is central in how the moral judgements and consensus about community, citizenship and social inclusion are constructed. Television news, as an everyday routine structure, meta-discourse and classic realist text, is a powerful site in how the imagined community and geographies of nation are framed and in how the nation narrates itself to itself. Gramsci's notion of hegemony is particularly valuable in understanding news frameworks as a central knowledge system through which this national common sense about in-group cohesion and out-group difference is established, disseminated and authorized. The identification of Islam in Britain as an issue worthy of substantial news intervention in the interests of public communication makes “factual programming” a powerful force in how this common-sense is developed.

The coverage of stories foregrounding Muslims has, however, been both sensationalist and simplistic. Broadcasters typically solicit those on the radical fringes of Muslim opinion whilst moderate Muslim views are ignored; secularists are pitted against Islamist extremists and the “common voice” goes unheard. This kind of bias emanates for two reasons: first, from commercial pressures that even the publicly-funded BBC face, and two, from traditional TV's quest to be impartial and to be seen to offer a fair and even-handed approach within the broader paradigm of “public service broadcasting” through which it operates.

Although there are differences in the daily flow of mainstream news programming – for example between the nightly bulletins on BBC1, its commercial rivals on ITV and Channel 5 and the two so-called “minority” channels, BBC2 and Channel 4 – the overall spectrum of viewpoints accessed in the recent coverage has been seriously limited. Take for example, the long-running, BBC flagship political discussion programme Question Time, which in its extensive focus on these Islam-centred stories, has continued to structure its panel with such painstaking equity (one Labour, one Conservative, one Liberal, one other political party and one journalist or celebrity), that any real political discussion has been stifled within the confines of organised party politics and “official” standpoints. This is how liberalism, the cornerstone of public service broadcasting, works. It never seems to interfere, but always shapes the underlying agenda in such a way as to confirm its democratic status: it does what one might colloquially call “sitting on the fence.”

Even Channel 4, which trades on being our most “minority friendly” broadcaster, has aired a series of documentaries (What Do Muslims Want?, Women-Only Jihad) that have shown little more than a pathological preoccupation with all things Muslim. A recent edition of its flagship current affairs series, Dispatches, titled, Muslims and Free Speech, implicitly debated freedom of speech only in relation to Islam. The deliberately confrontational framework of the programme (formatted as a court-style battle somewhere between CNN's Crossfire and the BBC's The Weakest Link), staged disagreement rather than harmony, encouraging discord over agreement (by for example, focusing on the emotive cases of the Danish cartoons, the murder of Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh and the Pope's comments) in order to produce a suitably heated and polarised debate in the name of balance.

Muslims and Free Speech was hooked around interactive studio votes to two questions: the first was whether the voting audience wanted the programme to show the Danish cartoons; the second was, “Are Muslims threatening free speech?” Both questions were absurd. The latter for obvious reasons; the former because in spite of a majority vote for Channel 4 to show the cartoons, the show's presenter, Jon Snow, explained that they would not because there was “no editorial justification.” What we got then was self-censorship on a discussion programme debating free speech! You can't get better context than that. Suffice to say, Muslim-mania has got British TV in a bit of a muddle.

Although the staging of formulaic political positions and the politics of mainstreaming are nothing new to the genre, what is different about this moment in British media culture is that the cracks are beginning to show. The problem is that British viewers are feeling increasingly frustrated and marginalised by TV's liberal fundamentalism. More specifically, many secularists feel that religious viewpoints are being too heavily represented or that British broadcasters are too scared to openly challenge British-Muslims in fear of reprisal or claims of religious incitement.

This sway of opinion, already frustrated with the cult of liberal tolerance that defines governmental approaches to Britain and its minority communities, argues that majority rights are being curtailed by militant New Labour anti-discriminatory approaches and that this is helping to produce a new censorious climate as an extension to the “Political Correctness” agenda already set in place by the Right. Meanwhile, many ordinary Muslims feel that they are being demonised and are always publicly represented by Islamist extremists or self-appointed “community leaders.”

Politically, the sheer weight of the Islam-heavy news agenda has led to a series of moral panics (for example, that Muslim police are letting their faith interfere with their professional duties, that we need a crackdown on Islamist extremists on our university campuses). Culturally, it has led to a certain kind of apathy towards traditional TV news. Whilst the BBC and other public service broadcasters are struggling to offer informative and unshackled news coverage, alternative outlets such as web blogs and digital TV are demonstrating the possibilities of unleashing informative, diverse opinion outside of the public service paradigm.

Although still in its early days, ventures such as 18 Doughty Street, Britain's first internet political TV station in which content is added by “real people” (something which reality TV has been doing for several decades now), are already revealing some of the most interesting aspects of the
blogging/political interface. Traditional current affairs programming, although still highly-trusted by many, is looking increasingly outmoded. Its future power lies in realising that real impartiality is delivered by accessing a genuine plurality of viewpoints not by hiding editorial control in order to operate within a narcissistic interpretation of “fairness.”

Image Credits:
1. Women in niqab
2. Channel 4 logo
3. BBC media coverage of demonstration

Please feel free to comment.