Channel 4 News under threat despite scoops, integrity and awards

Media Column: Programme's demise is a realistic prospect, given the Government’s interest in privatising the broadcaster

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, presenter, and Ben de Pear, editor, of the much-lauded ‘Channel 4 News’ (Micha Theiner)

What would we lose if Channel 4 News – the iconic, early-evening bulletin hosted by Jon Snow, Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Cathy Newman – were to be abruptly closed down?

In my view, the programme combines an independent spirit with a lengthy format that allows for greater context and more nuanced debate than its rivals manage.

Others agree. The bulletin has won 28 awards this year, including the recent Rory Peck news features award for Zmnako Ismael’s “incredibly moving” footage of Yazidis fleeing Isis, and Amnesty’s TV News award for Jackie Long’s film inside the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

And yet the demise of Channel 4 News is a realistic prospect, given the Government’s interest in privatising its parent broadcaster. David Abraham, Channel 4’s chief executive, has warned that, since a sell-off was mooted, ministers have been “courted by international buyers and potentially by domestic asset strippers”.

The outgoing C4 chair, Lord Burns, identifies the bulletin as a first victim of private ownership.

“It is no secret that, as an economic proposition, Channel 4 News doesn’t really do terribly well – you can see this by the absence of adverts in the breaks,” he told last week’s Voice of the Listener and Viewer 2015 conference. “I struggle to see any alternative ownership that would be able to put on an hour-long news programme at that point in the day and of the quality it is.”

In the newsroom last Thursday there was little sense of impending doom. Channel 4 News operates from bespoke studios at ITN’s building on London’s Gray’s Inn Road. Its tight-knit team of 130 (the BBC has an editorial army of 7,000) is full of strong characters. I learned that Snow had ordered the ITN Christmas tree in the atrium to be chopped back by five feet because the star and bauble-laden upper branches were a visible backdrop for the programme’s cameras and, in the view of the veteran presenter, compromised the show’s integrity in broadcasting current affairs to an audience of all faiths and none.

An hour before going on air, Guru-Murthy was at his office desk, working on his 40 seconds of headlines for the top of the show. With RAF jets having completed their first mission against Isis targets in Syria, following the tense Commons vote on military action the previous evening, there was no shortage of news.

But the purpose of Channel 4 News, scheduled after the early-evening news programmes of the BBC and ITV, is to “show people that we’ve got something different”, says Guru-Murthy. Tonight, that means an exclusive interview, landed by deputy digital editor Brian Whelan, with the bumbling leader of the new UK version of the German right-wing movement Pegida. Another scoop, negotiated by the show’s deputy editor, Shaminder Nahal, is a live interview by Newman with Labour moderate MP Tristram Hunt, his first since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader.

Guru-Murthy has pre-recorded an interview with Barack Obama’s senior strategist in countering Isis, Brett McGurk. The presenter has become known for his combative style, ruffling the plumage of interviewees from Robert Downey Jnr (who stormed out) to Mr Corbyn.

“I think it is fair to say everybody from any political grouping regards us with a fair amount of wariness,” he says. “My interview with Corbyn was the only one since he stood for leadership where he was pushed to the point of losing his temper.”

Channel 4 News won’t interview Piers Morgan until he accepts questioning on phone-hacking during his editing of the Daily Mirror, or Julian Assange until he agrees to speak about the sex charges against him. The previous weekend, as The Independent revealed, Channel 4 News pulled out of an interview with the Prince of Wales on climate change after Clarence House produced a 15-page contract demanding a role in the editorial process and the right to withdraw the interview if it didn’t like the final product.

Chief correspondent Alex Thomson, who has done the interview with the Pegida UK leader (a former soldier identifying himself as “Tim”), accepts that there is a potential “compliance issue” with the piece.

“Technically, we are giving three minutes 12 seconds to a political movement and there’s no balancing voice.”

He asks editor Ben de Pear to view the unedited “rushes”.

But Tim is so inarticulate that Thomson says: “I found myself watching between my fingers – and I did the interview.”

It’s hardly a party broadcast.

The story is a coup because Pegida UK is a new vehicle for Tommy Robinson, who founded then quit the far-right English Defence League. Thomson says Luton-based Robinson and his followers “represent a constituency ... they’re living in places, let’s be honest, where journalists don’t live”. But Pegida UK’s calls for a five-year ban on Muslim immigration and building mosques makes nonsense of its claim to be moderate. “My view is they give themselves more than enough rope to hang themselves,” he says.

By the weekend, “Tim” had resigned.

Thomson, an outstanding foreign correspondent, says that the Syria raids mean that Isis will increase its efforts to “seize foreigners” reporting from the field. Syrian military intelligence “banned me for over a year” for unspecified reasons (possibly his film on military funerals in north Damascus being interrupted by a sudden firefight). He is “now unbanned” and keen to return.

He talks of heading to Kurdish Peshmerga-held territory to “percolate around with those guys” or to “run the gauntlet” of Bashar al-Assad’s strict media controls. But Isis, he says, has already moved its leaders to Sirte on the Libyan coast. Even Thomson would have to “think really hard” about following the story to Libya: “I’ve got kids – I want to keep a head on my shoulders.”

As the show goes live, programme editor Becky Emmett has to be highly skilled in giving due prominence to an eclectic mix of stories. The hour rattles past. Sitting on a desk, De Pear holds a debrief session and complains McGurk “went on and on” in his six-minute description of Syria. It should have been two minutes shorter, he says. Thomson is praised for playing “a blinder” in his exchange with “the biggest idiot who has ever appeared on television”. A live spat between a far-left activist and Labour MP Melanie Onn over online trolling of the MPs who voted for bombing was good television, the team agrees. De Pear concludes that the show was “a really compelling watch”.

Let’s hope it continues that way.

Nothing is new in wartime propaganda

In times of war we need a heightened awareness of propaganda, as the new edition of History of War magazine reminds us by debunking the myth that Polish generals deployed mounted lancers against Nazi tanks in the Second World War. This classic story of old tech versus new tech has become accepted fact – it even made it into the ITV epic series The World at War.

The story took hold after Italian journalists were invited to tour a battlefield at Krojanty, shown Polish horses and cavalrymen killed in a counter-attack, and were told that they had charged the tanks. In reality, Polish cavalry fought from a distance with anti-tank rifles, but the tale of the foolish charge, with its implications of intellectual inferiority, suited the Nazis. From Isis films to the sales pitches of the global arms trade, we are still being subjected to similar techniques.

The media’s religious literacy must improve

The lack of religious literacy in the media contributed to us being caught off guard by the rise of Islamic extremism in Britain. We mocked figures such as the “Tottenham Ayatollah”, Omar Bakri Muhammad. I remember laughing at Jon Ronson’s 1997 film on the Syrian cleric as he staged jihadi training in a Crawley scout hut.

Yet, all the while, young people were enchanted by this ludicrous character’s sinister message, and hundreds of his al-Muhajiroun devoted themselves to violent jihad. Channel 4’s recent Isis: The British Women Supporters Unveiled showed the enduring influence of a man referred to by one fanatic as “our Sheikh”.

Serious commentators idly dismiss Isis as “nihilists”. It is a group that bases its actions on a medieval interpretation of the Koran. They might be barbarous but they are devout believers. Too often the media lumps all Muslims together as terror threats, dismisses Christians as homophobes and Buddhists and Hindus as yoga teachers. Even in a soundbite culture, we need greater sophistication.

Today’s report from the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life will highlight the gulf between media professionals, with their perceived “lack of religion”, and religious institutions beset by “an absence of media literacy”. The BBC is praised in the report, which sensibly suggests that – with 49 per cent of Britons saying they are of “no religion” – Radio 4’s Thought for the Day “should be extended to include contributions from those who will speak from a non-religious perspective”.

Twitter: @iburrell