It wasn’t as bad as you think

While many commentators have lamented the year gone by, Raymond Snoddy argues it wasn’t all doom and gloom for media in 2016. Here’s why.

There were many things to be cheerful about for the media this year – if you have the patience to look carefully enough.

Admittedly there were distractions, and as distractions go these were mountainous.

Apart from Brexit, Trump, Syria and Daesh terrorism it was a pretty decent year, and after all this it is the season to be merry.

The abrupt removal of Culture Secretary John Whittingdale was enough on its own to light up the gloom.

Despite his slippery denials in public we now know that Whittingdale was indeed pushing for the privatisation of Channel 4 and pushing for it on the totally erroneous grounds that the channel had to be saved from financial perdition.

We have it on the good authority of Ed Vaizey, who should have been promoted to Culture Secretary rather than sacked, that Channel 4 privatisation was Whittingdale’s “agenda”.

If there was a bad media idea in town then Whittingdale was onto it like a ferret – suggesting that Strictly Come Dancing should be moved out of prime time and questioning whether the BBC should be allowed to run its Ten O’Clock news against what is about to become News at When again.

The trouble is that when a Culture Secretary is sacked that creates a vacancy for someone who knows even less about the subject than their predecessor.

Karen Bradley, an accountant, could have put the Channel 4 privatisation farce to bed but instead has left the threat hanging over the channel into 2017 with the attendant continuing instability. She has also done nothing to kill off the daft idea that the channel should be uprooted and transported to Birmingham.

But it is often the small things that reveal judgement or the lack of it.

It is difficult to know where to start on this month’s news that Bradley approved four new Channel 4 board members, all of them white and male, and rejected the only woman candidate who also happened to be black, Althea Efunshile.

[advert position=”left”]

The former deputy chief of Arts Council England has been described as “high calibre” and sounds like she would have been a decent addition to the Channel 4 board.

There has been no explanation from Karen Bradley.

Channel 4, itself, has been one of the success stories of the year – and will continue to be so if the Government has the wisdom to leave it alone. The continued success of All 4, the channel’s on-demand platform, with more than 13.5 million registered viewers, provides a solid base for the future. Congratulations.

Unfortunately Channel 4 was also responsible for the cock-up of the year – piling £75 million into The Great British Bake Off without first signing up the presenters who, apart from the contestants, had largely been responsible for the success of the programme.

The great cake-snatch presents a wonderful opportunity for the BBC to launch its own generic baking show with three of those presenters a year before Channel 4 is legally able to respond.

It was definitely a serious case of a soggy bottom decision.

Further reasons to be cheerful: the strong showing of the rest of terrestrial television – with the BBC, ITV and even Channel 5 showing uncharacteristic signs of life.

For the Corporation, Bake Off, Strictly and Planet Earth II dominated the ratings and helped give BBC One a 0.5 per cent rise in share with BBC Two up 2 per cent.

ITV may not have been able to hit the top spots but its share of total viewing rose by 3 per cent with the help of excellent drama productions such as Victoria and the Cold Feet revival.

In fact there has never been so much drama around if you are prepared to pay for it – indeed Netflix has been sloshing the money about as if there were no tomorrow. The viewers are spoiled for choice.

There is also good news to celebrate with the latest series of Games of Thrones. Thanks to the brave decision by Northern Ireland Screen to move heaven and earth to get the programme to Ulster in the first place, the Game of Thrones legacy is a vibrant production base in Belfast.

It may seem a curious thing to celebrate given the implacable numbers but the newspaper industry – or most of it – has survived 2016.

Only one national newspaper, The Independent, headed off into the ether (well, two if you count The New Day – ED.). It will be an even greater achievement if we can end 2017 without further casualties.

It is more than a little strange that as more and more research emphasises the superior impact and attention span of print versus digital, the advertising industry prefers to throw so much of its money behind bots, fake news and two-second video views with the sound turned off.

A curious programmatic achievement.

The ultimate challenge for the newspaper industry is to set a new number one priority – finding a viable financial model for print and promoting it.

The range of radio in all its forms, but particularly Radio 4, amounts to a national treasure even though it is often overlooked in the headlines – rather like outdoor which also just gets on with its business.

It has also been a good year for classic newspaper corrections, courtesy of Poynter, the American press institute.

One from the Guardian Style Guide: “Margaret Ritchie is not the MP for Down South as we suggested. Nor is she the MP for Up North. Her seat is South Down.”

And from the New York Times: “Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic state misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of the Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.”

From the year in numbers by NiemanLab, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that 99 per cent of Facebook’s stuff is not fake.

One per cent of Facebook “stuff” that is therefore fake – amounts to a mere 50 million pieces of content.

Ever heard a publisher proclaim, “We get it right 99 times out of a hundred”? NiemanLab notes.

The one thing you can be certain of is that there will be plenty of good news next year if you look hard enough – and just as many serious distractions.

Happy Christmas to one and all.