The graves of the victims of the Aberfan disaster in the village's cemetery in Wales, on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. Andrew Matthews PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.Hegel argued that the newspaper serves a purpose akin to the Morning Prayer. In Hegel’s era, ‘realists’ settled down every morning with their breakfast and routinely read the same stories as their fellow compatriots. Like the Morning Prayer, the newspaper offered a shared experience of the world and informed the collective consciousness. While newspapers have lost ground to other mediums in the present day, notably television and the Internet, and the Morning Prayer seems relatively absent, Hegel’s sentiment persists: media informs our shared experience.
Media in our time offers myriad perspectives that often skew our shared experience with positive and negative results. Differing interpretations open the wider political and cultural debate, for example, and offer voices to the marginalised, which is undoubtedly positive. But rent seeking and misinformation often inform these varying perspectives and serve to undermine national discourse, which is undoubtedly negative. During moments of national trauma, however, folks tend to ignore the more compromised and thus unreliable outlets and turn instead to the BBC for a sense of shared experience. Two principal reasons explain this trend: the public fund the BBC and thus there exists a sense of ownership, which instils trust, and the public seldom seek a compromised position due to the sensitive nature of the event and opt instead for assumed neutrality.
The BBC thus has a huge responsibility in moments of national trauma. As a service relied upon by the public, the onus rests on the BBC to offer balanced coverage that includes marginalised voices and avoids rent seeking and misinformation.
