The future of faith and religion in the media

So what does the future hold for faith and the media? Well, in our newspapers we can already see the debate I’ve just talked about, and the renewal of interest in the intellectual and moral battle between religion and atheism, being played out. So too the complex and difficult story of the interaction of religion with some of the world’s geopolitical fault-lines.

In broadcasting, the picture is also evolving.

<…> Channel 4 has commissioned some exceptional religious output in recent years and I believe we’ve seen a remarkable creative revival and a new spirit of experimentation in religious programming at the BBC.

<…> We’ll also continue to do everything we can to reflect the UK’s other faiths and to do justice to belief-systems which do not involve, or indeed deny the validity of, religious and spiritual beliefs.

But we want to be bold. <…> And we want to go on exploring ways of using non-factual genres – drama, comedy – as well as live events and our growing creativity on the web and multimedia to bring the topics of faith and belief to life for audiences.

The digital revolution is transforming every kind of broadcasting, but I think its impact will be particularly profound in the case of faith. The ability to use the web to explore topics in greater detail with resources like the BBC’s own religion website, the chance to use on demand applications like our iPlayer to explore great content whenever and ultimately wherever you want it, above all, the connectivity and interactivity that enables communities to form and to create and debate their own content – all of these developments are already enriching and expanding the way millions of people think about and encounter religion.

At one level, the web is the Wild West, a gift to cults and conspiracy-theorists, at its very worst a dangerous new channel for spreading fear and hate. But it’s also potentially a wonderful new way of sharing knowledge and personal experience and of doing it in a far more individually relevant way than conventional broadcasting can ever do. This is why it’s such a big emphasis for the BBC right now.

New dilemmas

In some ways, then, we have been creatively liberated. But we also have to accept that we are also being confronted by some difficult new dilemmas.

When I became Director-General of the BBC in 2004, the conventional wisdom <…> was that the most difficult editorial decisions were bound to be about political stories and about the BBC’s political independence. Perhaps that will eventually turn out to be the case.

To date, though, no decision about political coverage has been remotely as contentious or as widely debated as the decision we made about the programme Jerry Springer – The Opera. In news, one of the trickiest judgements we’ve been called upon to make in my time as editor-in-chief was exactly how much to show on the air of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

Although people invariably try to parse decisions like these for general trends, we try to approach each editorial choice on its own merits. In the case of Jerry Springer, I believed that the arguments in favour of broadcast – albeit broadcast with very careful warnings so that anyone who might be offended by the programme would know to switch it off – I believed that these arguments, and above all the right of the public to make up their own minds whether to watch or not, outweighed the arguments against.

In the case of the cartoons, we elected to show a little more of them than the newspapers did and were criticised by some as a result. We didn’t do it because we wished to cause offence, but because we thought that, without some level of depiction, it would be impossible for many viewers to understand the story at all.

But the decisions do not always go one way. In the case of the animated comedy, Popetown, we decided that the balance of argument fell the other way and we dropped the programme.

I have two observations on the new dilemmas that are being thrown up. The first is that we are forced much more often, not just to weigh editorial decisions carefully – we’ve always had to do that – but to stand up publicly for our fundamental editorial values, and to do so in an atmosphere that can sometimes feel rather menacing. In the case of Jerry Springer, one of the things I and some of my colleagues learned is that the depiction of religious figures is not always an abstract or academic matter. Occasionally it can mean the need for a security guard outside your home.

But there is no point having a BBC which isn’t prepared to stand up and be counted; which will do everything it can to mitigate potential religious offence; but which will always be forthright in the defence of freedom of speech and of impartiality.

We are being tested in new ways. But we can and will meet these new challenges.

<…> We have a duty to ensure that no group – whether they are Christians or Muslims or agnostics or anything else – feels excluded or that their beliefs or customs will be treated with less courtesy and respect than others. And we have a special responsibility to ensure that, whatever the difficulties and the sensitivities, the debate about faith and society and about the way people with very different beliefs encounter each other – that this debate should not be foreclosed or censored.

Conclusion

I began tonight by emphasising the serendipity and uncertainty of the effect of broadcasting.

I’ve said we don’t know how the history of religion itself will work out. Nor do we know what the future history of faith and media holds in store. We don’t know what the seeds will be or where they will fall.

We don’t know how public attitudes and appetite will develop. They have ears, but will they listen? And what will they listen to?

We don’t know what will happen to media, though we do know that it is going through a profound and utterly unprecedented revolution. Many of the largest and best established media organisations – our equivalent, if you like, of the great cathedrals and mosques and synagogues – are going through a process of fragmentation of readership and audience very analogous to the challenge facing some churches and faith-groups.

In this climate, it would be very easy to become downbeat about the ability and willingness of the media to deal with the issue of religion and faith with the seriousness and commitment it deserves.

In the end, I can only speak for the BBC. But I believe that we can – indeed that we can and are finding new ways of doing it.

The promise of public service broadcasting was never to reach all of the people all of the time with everything we do. We need a proper humility about the place broadcasting occupies in people’s lives and about the speed and the extent to which any programme, no matter how good, how worthwhile, can impart knowledge or inspire change.

But I believe, as committed public service broadcasters have always believed, that what we do can sometimes have a transformational power. That it can be a force for enlightenment in the broadest sense. A force for good. And, on those occasions when it does connect, when it really hits home, that it can bear disproportionate fruit.

Sometimes not much. Sometimes nothing. But sometimes – who knows? – 30, 60 or even a 100-fold.

http://www.bbc.co.uk

1. Dwell on the speech opening. Is it an effective communicative technique?

2. How has the perception of religious matters and the way they are depicted on TV changed throughout years?

Ex. 2. Discussion. Express your opinion about the following. Are the effects of broadcasting really uncertain (as the speaker puts it)? Explain why you think so.

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