Nick Robinson (second from right) on a panel at the Institute for Government's Future of No 10 Communications event, 2011. Wikicommons/Institute for Government. Some rights reserved.There have been a spate of reflections on the state of British broadcast journalism in recent months, including widely publicised lectures from two of its most illustrious figures: first Channel 4 News’s Jon Snow, then the BBC’s Nick Robinson.
Those two interventions were in some ways very different. Snow, who delivered the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival in August, spoke movingly of the Grenfell fire, and not only of the social distance between journalists and the residents of Grenfell, but also the former’s proximity to the rich and powerful.
He worried that broadcasters were on the ‘wrong side of the terrible divide that exists in present day society’, having lined up ‘comfortably with the élite, with little awareness, contact, or connection with those not of the elite’. Snow also criticised Facebook and Google in his lecture, noting that the multinationals were profiting from journalism, but not contributing, and were thereby undermining the profession. ‘Facebook,’ he said, ‘feasts on our products and pays all but nothing’.
