Last night, BBC2 launched Common Sense, a sort of soap-box Gogglebox, in which Britons comment on current affairs. A couple who run a butchers shop chat about fracking. Three octogenarian women do a gentle exercise class while discussing whether Theresa May needs to get a move on with Brexit. A pair of male nail technicians shoot the breeze about the Trump-Putin relationship.
Common Sense is one of TV’s attempts to address a growing sense of crisis in the provision of journalism. Falling audiences for – and declining faith in – traditional reporting is often attributed to a so-called “post-truth” environment, in which fact has little impact on opinion.
Post-truth, though, is only a third of the problem. In All Out War, Tim Shipman’s tremendous book on the EU Referendum, the Remain team makes an alarming discovery during a focus group with potential voters in Doncaster. The convener of the meeting reports urgently to London mission control: “People had absolutely no idea what the EU was, or how it worked at all, to the point that it beggars belief. No one had ever heard of the single market, or knew about what it did ... [they] have literally no idea what you’re on about. Literally no idea.”
All journalists and politicians should pin that quote to their walls or foreheads. The Doncaster anecdote suggested the existence of a “pre-truth” population that does not follow news at any level.
The mainstream news media, though, cannot be too pious. Their coverage of recent major events has often proved to be anti-truth. This was inadvertent – a result of metropolitan bubble-think, dodgy opinion polls and, in broadcasting, strict rules of impartiality – but the consequence was that the real stories were missed.
Anyone watching the main news bulletins in the UK over the past 18 months would have got the impression that the first election of Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit victory and the Trump presidency were impossibilities until almost the moment they occurred.
Common Sense answers this by going to the source: real people saying what they really think. The concept presumably came from the BBC wanting to tap in to the energy of Twitter, chat-rooms or radio phone-ins. But Victoria Derbyshire, on BBC2 in the mornings, already delivers that powerfully – and on her show, people can talk about events that just happened. In contrast, hot topics on Common Sense included stories that were a week or more old: the Queen being mistaken for an intruder by one of her soldiers, Tony Blair’s re-emergence in UK politics, and a fluffy survey about how many hours the average Briton spends in a bad mood.
This distance from what people are genuinely talking about is partly a result of the time required for editing. But it also comes from the editorial caution and impartiality to which the BBC is constitutionally bound. The problem with Common Sense is that the best conversations about news events this week in Britain were almost certainly either grossly defamatory or savagely partisan – two forms of discourse obviously problematic for a BBC on the verge of coming under the regulation of Ofcom. In the opener, one person made a passing reference to ancient gossip about the love life of the Duke of Edinburgh, but that was as edgy as it got.
One reason the show has to be moderate is that it has no moderator. Ruth Jones’s voiceover identifies the news events and speakers but otherwise makes no intervention. The drawback of this decision is that, if a contributor gets something wrong, the only options are to cut the line or transmit it unchallenged.
For example, when discussing Donald Trump’s tensions with the US intelligence agencies – in connection with last week’s private meeting, rather than yesterday’s sensational press conference – a market trader suggested that he should watch out because President Nixon was forced out of office by the “Secret Service”, proving that you “don’t mess” with them.
Although there are numerous conspiracy theories about the Watergate scandal, it has never been suggested that the President’s resignation was a result of being nobbled by his bodyguards, and nor was that what the speaker meant to say. A phone-in host would intervene, “Hang on, mate…”, but Common Sense has given itself no method of correction.
The biggest test is whether – if it had been going out during the last two years – the show would have given an early warning of the public undercurrents that led to victories for Corbyn and Leave. I suspect that the raw footage might have done, but that the transmitted show – edited to meet BBC anti-bias guidelines – would have been as misleading as the rest of mainstream media coverage.
Unless Common Sense can get closer to real-time news, and catch the scabrous and speculative nature of real street speech, it threatens to be no more than an out-of-focus group.
