The Gregg Wallace scandal is odious. But should it be in the news?
Some think the Gregg Wallace scandal has been overly represented in the news. But is this true? Eliot Wilson reflects on the role of the media.
If you are not interested in the conduct of Gregg Wallace, the former greengrocer whose laddish, shiny-headed persona has been part of the BBC’s Master Chef for 20 years, then the news headlines last week were not the place for you.
Wallace has been portrayed as boorish, predatory and displaying unrepentant and sexually unacceptable behaviour towards a dismaying number of women. He is at the centre of a many-threaded debate about relations between the sexes and conduct in professional and private contexts, captured admirably and rationally by this paper’s opinion editor Alys Denby.
One strand of the argument, especially on social media, has been a contemptuous dismissal of the coverage of Wallace, which has come in two parts. The first is a high-minded belief that Wallace represents a societal obsession with quotidian celebrities (fair), and that his behaviour is not really important (incorrect).
Flowing from that is the argument that we are expending energy reporting on and reading about a television presenter concealing his penis with a sock when we should be concentrating on Ukraine, Gaza, pensioners’ winter fuel costs, farmers’ inheritance tax or your chosen hobbyhorse.
There will be disagreements over the prioritisation: recollections may vary, to use the late Queen Elizabeth II’s masterfully lapidary yet charged phrase. But it prompts a broader, valid question about our media ecosystem: who decides what is “news”?
What deserves to be in the news?
It is a given that some form of judgement will always and everywhere be required. Even rolling news has only the day’s 24 hours to accommodate events and analysis, and some stories will achieve greater prominence than others. That can partly be mitigated by the vast spectrum of sources now available to us, transferring a degree of editorial control from broadcasters to consumers – which may be good or bad.
Each news source will still have to make its individual judgements, however. The BBC, ITN, Sky News, News UK, GB News, DMGT, Press Holdings, Reach: they are all playing a zero-sum game. Commercial enterprises have to serve their customer base or they will not endure, but most of us accept there is also an element of public responsibility. That is why we have Ofcom, IPSO and Impress to regulate the media at all.
News reporting should not be reduced to by-the-numbers clickbait. There remains an important distinction between “the public interest” and stories which interest the public. I am a firm believer in free-market competition and plurality and de minimis regulation focusing on the prevention of abuse, wilful deception and harm, but none of that means the “curation” of news is irrelevant.
The consumer vs the media
Ideally we would rely on responsible and sober editorial judgement, but we know that is not always the case. Equally, we are in a period of kicking against the pricks, rejecting hierarchy and expertise in favour of a false democracy of knowledge. Only a third of us trust most news most of the time. The BBC and Channel 4 carry the additional burden of being public service broadcasters, and we have lost consensus on what that means; the problem was pinpointed by Baroness Fox of Buckley in a debate in 2021 in anticipation of the launch of GB News.
The last thing we need is a state-mandated order of precedence for news. Choice has a critical role to play, accepting that consumers have agency and will determine what they want to know, with commercial consequences for media platforms. Somehow, however, we also need to insert an element of editorial selection which is careful and considered, as well as being seen as fair and frank.
Transparency may be the key element. There is nothing wrong with media outlets having a particular standpoint – call it bias if you like – if it is overt and does not suppress alternative points of view. The Daily Mirror and the Telegraph will rarely agree and that is fine. Bias is much less dangerous than pretended impartiality.
It need not always be hyper-seriousness. The BBC’s “Reithian principles” are often invoked, but we should remember that Lord Reith, a serious yet restless and devout Presbyterian, preached a duty to inform, educate and entertain. We will all sometimes think a story has too much or too little prominence. What we need to create, somehow, is a public confidence that an editorial judgement has been made fairly, honestly and transparently. If that can prevail, there is always the option of changing channels.