Page 287 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 277
threat. But it is also true that other factors have influenced coverage of race
relations.

THE CHANGING CONSENSUS
Foremost amongst these have been considerations of ‘media responsibility’
which have been invoked by many media controllers in order to keep down the
temperature of race relations. The most notable expression of these
considerations during the 1960s came from the then Director-General of the
BBC, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, who said:

In talking about the BBC’s obligation to be impartial I ought to make it
clear that we are not impartial about everything. There are, for instance,
two very important exceptions. We are not impartial about crime…nor are
we impartial about race hatred. (Quoted in Harland, 1971, p. 21)

Whereas this permitted plenty of coverage of crime but excluded giving a
platform to those who advocated robbing banks, in the case of race relations this
precept was interpreted as meaning that merely to exclude those who advocated
‘race hatred’ was insufficient, and that it was best to have as little coverage of
any kind, based on the proposition, allegedly adopted by liberal-minded
producers of such programmes as ‘Panorama’, that to focus on racial problems at
all would merely serve to stir them up (Seymour-Ure, 1974, p. 112). Moreover,
as long as those who expressed strongly anti-immigrant opinions were confined
to the unsavoury political fringes, those who controlled the media felt they could
be safely ignored.
If in the Britain of the mid-1960s the media did then proclaim a consensus on
the subject of race and immigration, it was not, as the media critics contend,
simply that black immigration was a threat, it was also that black immigration
was a threat that had already been greatly diminished by the passage of stringent
new immigration laws, and which would be diminished still further if the
presence of black people was not made the subject of media controversy. The
problem that resulted was—contrary to Husband’s contention that media
coverage reflected racist assumptions—that the media gave little or no airing to
opinions which, though they appeared unsavoury to media critics and media
controllers alike, were very widely shared among the general public. As Enoch
Powell remarked: There’s very little connection here between the manner in
which these subjects are discussed…and the realities as they are known by the
citizens of this country’ (1970 TV interview, quoted in Downing, 1975, p. 134).
It seemed in the end that the attempt to play down racial conflict and hostility
had been counter-productive. At least this was the view expressed by the BBC to
the Select Committee on Race and Immigration. In its evidence the BBC
departed from its position of the mid-1960s to state unequivocally that there
could be no manipulation of the audience by the suppression of certain stories,