Mission to explain

The 'Mission to Explain' is a philosophy of television journalism developed by John Birt and Peter Jay in the 1970s. It is generally associated with high brow analytical journalism – as apposed to the adversarial style (at least theoretically) favoured by current affairs journalists.

The concept emerged from a series of articles appearing in The Times in 1975 and 1976 when John Birt was head of Current Affairs at London Weekend Television and Peter Jay was an influential columnist at the paper. The term 'mission to explain' however was not coined until the early 1980s when Peter Jay used it in TV-am's bid to the IBA for the ITV breakfast franchise - drawing on his and Birt's ideas.

The concept was used as the rationale for a series of unpopular changes at the BBC during Birt's time as Deputy Director-General (1987–92) and Director-General (1992–2000) when news and current affairs programmes were brought under greater scrutiny and tighter and centralised control.

The Times articles

The first of the Times articles was published on 28 February 1975 and attributed only to Birt. In this first article, Birt diagnosed the problem for which the 'mission to explain' would become the solution. It began: 'There is a bias in television journalism. Not against any particular party or point of view – it is a bias against understanding.'

Birt criticised the practises of television journalism, which he argued could be defined into ‘three broad categories: news, feature and issue journalism.’ News and feature journalism, Birt argued, both failed to put events in their proper context:

Our economic problems for instance, manifest themselves in a wide variety of symptoms – deteriorating balance of payments, a sinking pound, rising unemployment, accelerating inflation and so on. The news, devoting two minutes on successive nights to the latest unemployment figures or the state of the stock market, with no time to put the story in context, gives the viewer no sense of how any of these problems relate to each other. It is more likely to leave him confused and uneasy … Feature journalism tends to focus on one aspect or one instance of a major problem rather than on that problem as a whole. … For example, making a film about homeless people is not an adequate way of approaching the problems created by our housing shortage.

What Birt called 'Issue journalism' was criticised for relying too much on panel discussion which were 'generally set up to examine disagreements' and were said to be 'little more than an entertaining way of feeding the viewer's already existing prejudices'.

Birt's article expressed concern that these alleged deficiencies might prevent Britain finding a way out of political and economic crisis of 1970s. ‘Television and the press,' Birt wrote, 'must ensure that the options available are fully and sensibly debated.’ He added that they was a 'greater danger,' that being that politicians ‘may be inhibited from taking the necessary action because of the outrage they fear it would provoke.’

A second article, published in September that year, returned to the theme of a 'bias against understanding' and this time made more explicit criticisms of news and current affairs journalists. Television journalists, it was argued, lacked the necessary ‘qualifications and background’ to properly explain politics and society. Since the 'average' television news journalists ‘left school at 16,' Birt and Jay wrote, 'it is not to be expected that the profession will be well adapted to explaining a world of continuing economic malaise and increasing social stress.' Similar criticisms were made of current affairs journalists, most of whom they said were 'not trained or indeed qualified to relate a problem like homelessness to our overall housing problem.'

The other major line of argument in the article was that television journalism had drawn too much upon the ethos of the film business and that its style and choice of stories therefore too often reflected ‘film imperatives rather than to journalistic imperatives.’ This meant that programmes were attracted to ‘exciting locations and lively situations with animated talkers,’ instead of ‘abstractions like social causes and effects or geo-political ideas.’

In a follow up article published the next day, Birt and Jay for the first time offered some practical suggestions on how broadcasting might be restructured to address its 'bias against understanding'. They advocated that news and current affairs should be merged into a unified department staffed by editors with expertise in particular areas – say economics or foreign affairs – and by specialist journalists who would supply material to all programmes, along with outside experts. They also gave specific examples of when programmes might be broadcast, and what their content might be. They suggesting a mix of straight news and analysis on the 'flagship' news programmes, and weekly and monthly news analysis, the latter of which would address 'basic continuing themes of our times'. These 'radical changes' were said to be needed across the media - not just in television - but it was the BBC which was seen as the most obvious candidate. They wrote: ‘This prescription for a revised news-and-current affairs service could, it appears to us, be put into operation more easily on BBC 1 than in ITV because in BBC-TV all news-and-current affairs programmes come, at some point under common management’ These structural changes were indeed later introduced at the BBC during Birt's time as Deputy Director-General (1987–92) and Director-General (1992–2000).

Two further articles on the ‘bias against understanding’ appeared in September 1976. The first addressed the concerns of critics that the stress on analysis would make television less popular with viewers. The second article – which went as far as labelling television journalism anti-social – addressed concerns that the proposed changes would mix fact with opinion and would therefore undermine the journalistic commitment to impartiality. Birt and Jay responded by arguing that the selection of facts itself represented a sort of opinion:

When a journalist chooses to report the latest balance of payment figures instead of what his aunt gave him for Christmas, he does so because he judges that it is more important for society to learn about the one than the other, or, at least, that more people will be interested. But in order to make a judgment about what is important or interesting, a journalist must assume, however unconsciously, the reasons why they are more important or more interesting.

They also alluded to the 'very relationship between language and reality' which they argued makes interpretation implicit in any description of the world.

Birt and Jay also returned to the issue of what are often called 'human interest stories'. These, they again argued failed, because of their specifity, to promote an understanding of broader social issues:

The big picture is just as much part of the real world as the personal tragedy, the general as much as the particular, the abstract as much as the concrete. Both have to be reported and explained; and neither can stand proxy for the other by simple multiplying or dividing the scale, a feat television journalism attempts every day.

Interestingly, the article also alluded to the relationship between journalism and power, although this appears as part of the rebuttal of the fact/opinion criticism, rather than being identified as a central problem in journalism:

Most current broadcast journalism is partial - it favours the views of one group at the expense of those of another. This is because, lacking a clear sense of its obligation to society as a whole, most journalism lives under the shadow of the state and the other main repositories of power in our society; the political parties; business; the trade unions and so on. It might almost be called "corporate journalism".

The 'Mission to explain' at the BBC

John Birt’s philosophy of television journalism, with its emphasis on analytical content and careful editorial planning, fitted well with the objectives of the new BBC leadership in the mid to late 1980s. In January 1987 the BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne was forced to resign by the Board of Governors – a move widely perceived to be as a result of BBC current affairs programmes that had offended the Government. The most notable of these programmes was an episode of Panorama called Maggie's Militant Tendency, which led to an organised counterattack by Ralph Harris, Sir James Goldsmith and other right-wing activists.

The removal of Milne had been orchestrated by the (Thatcher appointed) Chairman Duke Hussey, who with his new Director-General the accountant Michael Checkland now asked John Birt to oversee BBC journalism.

Birt oversaw the merging of news and current affairs into a new News and Current Affairs Directorate and shut down the Lime Grove buildings where the current affairs programmes like Panorama had been based. As the anthropologist Georgina Born notes, Lime Grove had been ‘physically distant from the news base in White City, a distance that symbolised its independence from the body of the BBC and its own creative tradition of investigation and analysis.’ BBC current affairs programmes were brought under tighter editorial control, creating in a more risk averse journalistic culture. Georgina Born writes:

The reorganisation was accompanied by intensifying managerial caution, as borne out by incidents in which programmes were cancelled or delayed under the threat of government displeasure. In January 1991, at the start of the Gulf War, and against the convictions of the editors, a sensational Panorama was blocked which revealed that Britain had supplied Iraq with a massively powerful piece of armoury, the ‘supergun’, on the grounds that public opinion would not tolerate the story at a time when British servicemen were going to war. And on the eve of the 1992 general election campaign, a Panorama entitled ‘Sliding into a Slump’ was pulled, in which Britain’s economic problems were laid at the door of the former Conservative chancellor, Nigel Lawson.