I remember my first editor, almost 35 years ago when I worked on BBC’s Newsround, explaining our mission and responsibility as journalists for the programme: “We sandwich the stories we believe the audience should be told about, but wouldn’t necessarily choose to watch on first glance, in between the things they’re naturally attracted to.” Our job was to keep the news agenda as broad as possible and hope viewers stuck with the unfamiliar, to inform and explain, not just give people what they know about.
Far from broadening or democratising the agenda, the fragmentation of news and current affairs has narrowed it. Our bulletins and feeds are hyper-focused on a smaller number of stories. We all became experts during the Covid pandemic, debating the finer points of policy as entire news programmes were mainly about one story. During the pre-Brexit years the debate reached fever pitch on every channel. Today Gaza, Ukraine, Trump and issues such as immigration are the stories that dominate.
But while those things are important, there has also been a cost. News organisations too often chase the same agenda, counting online views and hoping for viral moments, while huge parts of the world go uncovered and important stories go untold. It’s why I’m thankful to work at Channel 4, where our remit demands that we go beyond the norm and tell the stories others don’t.
Shortly after I joined Unreported World in 2011, I bumped into Alan Yentob, then the BBC’s creative director: “If there’s one programme I wish I could poach from Channel 4, it’s Unreported World,” he told me. I was on my way to South Africa to find out what was causing the riots in townships. Fourteen years later, in February, the series sent me to Sudan: one of the most inaccessible and terrible wars on the planet. It took us days to get in to tell the stories of some of the most desperate people I have ever seen, receiving no help from the outside world having fled from horrific fighting and massacres. These kinds of expeditions are expensive and require the kind of time and commitment that is increasingly difficult for most news organisations to find.
Our new series features episodes on South Africa’s ‘slay queen’ phenomenon, the drug war in Colombia displacing thousands of people, and the US undercover agents throwing migrants into detention. I’ve just filmed a story in Israel about the explosion in unsolved murders in Israeli Arab communities, where criminal families and gangs rule the streets, and where the far-right policing minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is accused by Arab citizens of abandoning them. While all eyes are on Gaza, that story is very much off the news agenda. If you want a reason for public service broadcasters, and Channel 4 specifically, to exist, it’s Unreported World.
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