What is the meaning of life? I know a pretty deep question for a blog post.
Maybe a better question should be; “Does my life have meaning?” which leads to “Does my life matter?” and “In a world of almost seven billion people am I significant?”
Although these can seem like rather abstract philosophical issues they go to the heart of what I think the TVCollective is about. History is full of BME, disabled and other people’s lives not being valued in comparison to other people’s lives. It was the heroic struggle of Doreen and Neville Lawrence to make sure that Stephen’s life was as valued by the police investigating his murder as any white victim that made them into icons of a struggle and changed British society.
The stories our media cover show who our society value and enable us to frame the importance of events in our lives, our communities and in the world generally. When I was eleven I won a chess championship, I was obviously happy, but it wasn’t until I saw my picture in the local newspaper with an accompanying article that I realised that what I had done was important not just for me but to an entire community. In a global population of five billion (the world was smaller back then) my life was significant it had meaning.
Last week Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, announced his plans for newlocal TV news provision. Emulating an American model he is looking for small organisations to be able to produce local news devolving responsibility away from large centralised providers. Most of the time the importance of local and regional news is framed as being important in terms of holding local councillors to account or telling people what is going on in heir neighbourhood. The fact is local news is far more important than that. It tells people that their lives are important, their local school is significant, their neighbourhood matters. Exclude people and events from news and TV and you are saying their lives are not important consigning them to a slow death of insignificance. It is this slow death that I believe we are fighting against when we are trying to increase diversity on television. The TVCollective rightly stresses the importance of increasing diversity in front of and behind the camera but all too often we are campaigning or fighting after the event, after the television production has been staffed up or after the programme has been transmitted.
Here is a rare opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds to shape the future of our lives before the event has occurred. Rather than just watch events unfold around us and comment on them afterwards we can join in now! Jeremy Hunt has asked for expressions of interest from people who want to provide local television news by 1st March. These do not have to be detailed business plans at this stage but simply a marker indicating your interest.
Like most people who work in television news and current affairs I can see a lot of potential problems with Jeremy Hunt’s plans for local TV News; will it be economically viable in the long term? Is it just a way of letting ITV off the hook from providing local news and shunting it off to a digital channel no one will watch? As well as a host of other issues.
Despite these concerns I believe Hunt’s plans for local news will become a reality and if that is the case I want us all to be involved, not just a few of the “non-diverse” usual suspects. I am hoping that black, Asian, gay, lesbian, disabled and every other type of person you can imagine will be involved in groups submitting expressions of interest. It is only if people of all different backgrounds are involved behind the camera that we are accurately represented in front of the camera. The local TV news covering the story of an eleven-year-old black boy winning a chess championship is as important as filming the white boy winning. And maybe that in some small way is the meaning of life – we are all equal.
Click here For more details on the plans for local TV.
(First published on TheTVCollective.org on 22/01/2011)
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