Mission to explain

The 'Mission to Explain' is a philosophy of broadcasting journalist developed by John Birt and Peter Jay in the 1970s. 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 first of the articles was published on 28 February 1975 and attributed only to Birt. At this point the phrase 'mission to explain' had not yet been coined. In this first article, Birt diagnosed the problem for which the 'mission to explain' was the solution. His article 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 current 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 son 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 on panel discussion which were 'generally set up to examine disagreements' and do 'little more than an entertaining way of feeding the viewer's already existing prejudices'; whilst those programmes which did not rely on studio discussion 'runs the risk of being boring.'

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 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 ‘qualifications and background’ to properly explain politics and society. Since the 'average' television news journalists ‘left school at 16,' they 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. They wrote that: 'Most researchers on current affairs programmes specializing in narrowly focused feature stories of this type are 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 upon the ethos of the film business, and that its style and choice of stories too often reflected,‘film imperatives rather than to journalistic imperatives’ and were therefore to be attracted to ‘exciting locations and lively situations with animated talkers’ instead of say ‘abstractions like social causes and effects or geo-political ideas.’