Passage

The ills of  ITV are too numerous  to mention - everything from falling advertising  to  collapsing share price  and an  alarming pension deficit. The implications for many of the  ITV staff  are likely to become all too apparent  when ITV executive chairman Michael Grade reveals the company's annual results and plans  for the future.

Will 1,000 job  losses  be enough?

Often it  is  the  little things that bring home  what has  changed  at ITV - what has  been lost.

Lee Bartlett, managing  director of ITV Studios who succeeded Dawn Airey was as open and  honest as he could be in the circumstances  when he spoke  an a Broadcasting Press Guild  lunch yesterday.

It's taken Bartlett, Los Angeles born and bred, some time to come to terms with strange British  television concepts  such as regionalism, unnecessary layers of  management and people working in silos, not talking to  each other  and  fighting 50- year old  battles.

It was when he was questioned  about  the decision not to go  ahead with a  new version of A Passage To India  that the  new  realities at  ITV became all too clear.

Lee was  obviously involved  in the decision to  pull the plug on the production.  Great script.It just wasn't going to make enough  money.

Wonder if Lee  has  ever  seen Brideshead  Revisited or Jewel in the  Crown?

Such a question has to stay unasked. It  wouldn't  be fair. Alas such thoughts and comparisons come from a prehistoric era or British television when ITV had  a  virtual monopoly of television advertising.

Now  an ITV drama has  to sell big around  the world to be viable and and what may  or may  not have happened  in a  cave in India apparently just doesn't cut the  mustard any more.

Where's the format to exploit?

ends    

   

media standards

Its  great news  that an independent charity is  looking at the  danger of  declining media standards and intrusion into privacy  in particular.

The work of the Media Standards Trust, (MST) chaired  by  Sir  David Bell  who  also chairs  the Financial Times  Group, is  very  necessary. No one who has  read  Flat  Earth News and  its compelling  catalogue of  press atrocities can  doubt  there is  a need  for such  an organisation.

The Trust  is  groaning with media  and business heavyweights -  everyone from Anthony Salz, executive vice chairman of Rothchild to  Simon Kelner, managing director and editor-in--chief of The Independent.

The MST has correctly identified the threat posed to  standards by  fewer and fewer journalists being asked to do more and more under ever-increasing time constraints.

Accuracy is an inevitable casualty when  there is barely time to check - or think. 

Unfortunate  then that both the Financial Times and The Independent  are among the news organisations now making yet journalists redundant  -  often the most experienced.

But the real problem with  this  week's  MST report  is  its primary target  -  the Press  Complaints Commission,  the self-regulatory  body  for  the  publishing industry. 

Sir  David believes  that the PCC is "constitutionally and  structurally unable" to deal with such matters  as  the threats to  privacy  and declining standards.

Of course  the PCC could be improved although any self-regulatory body represents an easy target.

But why has  the MST launched  an apparently  gratuitous attack on  the PCC just before a Parliamentary media select committee is  due  to begin  its  work.

Could  it be  that the  MST has gone for a sensationalist approach just to  get  attention - one of the very charges it levels  at the media?

The MST insists that it does not want to  see statutory regulation of  the press.

The  trouble is their approach will give  comfort  to the  head-bangers who do.

Oh and the PCC  has complained that it was given no chance to comment on, or  respond to  the MST report before the attack was published. 

Hardly best journalistic practice that.