It’s weird what’s happening at Channel 4. A channel which began as the most innovative and interesting experiment in modern broadcasting history has become unbelievably tacky. Following on the fiasco of the racist exchanges on Big Brother comes this.

Graphic images of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, are to be made public for the first time next week in a Channel 4 documentary that has been condemned as ‘grossly intrusive’ and bound to cause distress to Princes William and Harry.

One photograph shows Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor, Frederic Mailliez, who had been travelling in the other direction and who had not yet realised the identity of his famous patient. It is clear that the princess has been thrown forward into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. At the front of the car, a passing student is shown trying to help Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana’s bodyguard….

My mate Tony Holden, who knows about these things, is quoted in the same article as saying:

‘It’s grossly intrusive and beyond the bounds of anything remotely tasteful, and will no doubt upset her sons enormously.’

Holden said he was aware that such pictures existed but that the media had acted responsibly in self-censoring them. ‘One has heard about British journalists looking at them and not only refusing to publish them but wiping them from the system so people in the office could not be voyeuristic. I didn’t think anyone would sink so low as to broadcast or publish them,’ he said.

My guess is that there’s something seriously wrong with the top management in Channel 4. Luke Johnston Johnson, the Chairman, is a restaurant entrepreneur, not a broadcaster. Andy Duncan, the Chief Executive, is a cheeky chappie who goes around dressed like a financially-challenged undergraduate. Both seem to have tin ears for public disquiet. Both probably believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. They’re wrong.

Accurate, stinging assessment by Marina Hyde of Channel 4’s ludicrous hypocrisy about those racist interludes on the last series of Big Brother…

The overriding sense one gets from reading the report and listening to the various reactions of involved parties is the staggering and unabashed contempt in which the viewer is held. In Martin Amis’s novel Yellow Dog, the staff on the tabloid it features refer to readers, quite straightfacedly and at all times, as “wankers”. A circulation dip means the paper has “lost wankers”. A new feature called “Wankers’ Wives” is suggested. As record complaints banked up at Channel 4 in January, one can honestly imagine executives rubbing their hands with glee that another load of “wankers” had stoked the ratings even higher.

Naturally the channel’s director of television, Kevin Lygo, was careful to avoid creating this precise impression when mouthing a few platitudes following Thursday’s judgment. But perhaps he’d care to revisit the interview he granted to Broadcast magazine in late January – several days after he had been privately notified of the incidents that have now come to light – in which he explained that the race row had saved the show from being dull.

“This was in danger of being the most boring Big Brother that we’d had in many years, maybe even ever,” he prattled to the trade journal, whose readers are presumably deemed savvy enough to “get” how this kind of controversy can be a good thing. He added that Channel 4 had “made the right decisions all the time”.

Positively wafting off the pages of Ofcom’s report is the sense that both Channel 4’s and Endemol’s cultures are terminally introverted and smug. Yet both companies’ delusions of even basic professional competence should be shattered by their staff’s apparent inability to distinguish between media mischief and entirely justified suspicions on behalf of the people who pay their wages that four venal halfwits had been bandying about the word “Paki” in the name of light entertainment…

Jeff Randall, former Business Editor of the BBC (and a very good one he was too) is offended by our report. He thinks that members of the panel have no sense of humour and failed to spot his sophisticated use of irony and sarcasm.

During the interview, broadcast on Five Live on December 3 2006, Mr Randall, now the Daily Telegraph’s editor-at-large, asked Mr Murdoch a question about the future of new technology, such as high-definition television.

Mr Murdoch replied with a list of Sky’s achievements – prompting Mr Randall to congratulate him sarcastically on giving a great sales pitch for Sky and a free advert on the BBC.

We commented that “the interview with James Murdoch (December 3 2006) also appeared sycophantic when the presenter congratulated Mr Murdoch’s pronouncements about the future of his company as the best sales pitch he had heard.”

The Guardian reports Jeff’s astonishment that his comment had been taken seriously.

“That was a sarcastic comment. I can’t believe the listeners would have failed to spot it,” he hold MediaGuardian.co.uk.

“I was having a pop at an interviewee who failed to answer the question,” Mr Randall said.

Hmmm… I’m tempted to borrow Simon Hoggart’s crack about Gordon Brown and say that Jeff Randall — who is a great ornament to his profession but approaches it much as sportswriters approach Premiership football — does irony the way Alex Ferguson does self-doubt.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for spotting the story.

From Guardian Unlimited Technology…

A friend has two children aged 11 and 16. He explains: “The latest thing in Surrey right now is downloading high-pitched tones that only children can hear [the 17kHz “Mosquito”] on to their mobiles, Bluetoothing them around, and then starting up a cacophony in lessons – they can hear it and double up in agony, but their teacher can’t.” It’s a metaphor for the adult/child gap: the children can recognise what the grownups can’t.

This is just beautiful — an animation of flight patterns over the US.

Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for the link.

Roy Greenslade has a lovely dissection of a letter from the LA Times Editor to staff announcing their redundancies.

Did LA Times editor have help with redundancy letter?

It has been decided that 57 editorial staff are to leave the Los Angeles Times after a call for redundancies. I was particularly struck by the euphemistic corporate goobledegook employed by the editor, Jim O’Shea, in his explanatory letter to staff. I couldn’t really believe a journalist had written such guff. Then I realised that other people must have been at O’Shea’s shoulder as he wrote…

He began by referring to “a voluntary and involuntary employee separation programme” and pointed out that among those departing are “a very small number of involuntary departures… All will receive a generous separation package that includes salary continuation and outplacement assistance.” Straight from the human resources department handbook.

“We are also examining our polling operation to determine if reorganisation could increase revenues while achieving further savings. We expect to complete this examination in the next couple of months.”

Worth reading in full.

.. was published today. The BBC Trust (whose predecessor commissioned the inquiry) says

The BBC Trust has published today (25 May 2007) the Independent Panel report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of business.

The panel, chaired by Sir Alan Budd, does not believe the BBC has a systematic bias against business. Its overall conclusion is that “most of the BBC’s business output meets the required standards of impartiality”. But the panel also says it “has seen a number of individual lapses and identified some trends which lead to repeated breaches of the BBC’s standards”.

In October last year the Trust’s predecessor, the BBC’s Board of Governors, commissioned the panel:

“to assess the impartiality of BBC news and factual coverage of business with particular regard to accuracy, context, independence and bias, actual or perceived; to assess whether the BBC portrays a fair and balanced picture of the world of business and of its impact on society more generally; to focus primarily on business coverage in mainstream output though specialist business programming should also be considered; and to make recommendations to the BBC Trust for improvements where necessary.”

The Trust discussed the panel’s report at its meeting on Wednesday 23 May.

Text and appendices available here.

Interesting thought on Stowe Boyd’s blog

JP Rangaswami has adopted an unusual approach to email.

JP has set up a stringent approach to filtering his email. He throws all email where he is CC’d directly into the trash. Basically, he only reads email directed to him, alone. Of course, for this to have any influence on people’s behavior, he has to loudly and regularly let others know that he is doing this.

More interestingly, he has opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.

My university email has become positively dysfunctional — partly because of the “cc” culture. Wonder if this approach would work for me.

Thanks to James Miller for the clipping.