Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Monday August 29, 2005
The Guardian
Germaine Greer, the feminist broadcaster and writer who earlier this year walked out of Big Brother, yesterday called for people to be made more media literate to counter the pervasive influence of modern television.
In a rambling speech at the Media Guardian Edinburgh TV Festival that ranged from the Iraq war to the private parts of No 10 adviser Lord Birt, who on Friday delivered the keynote MacTaggart lecture, she said that reality TV had become "both a tautology and an oxymoron".
Ms Greer said that television had become real life for many people, who no longer participated in society but lived through characters on reality shows.
"It's also an oxymoron because what we see is not real," added Ms Greer, the author of the Female Eunuch, who surprised many by agreeing to appear on a celebrity version of Channel 4's Big Brother earlier this year. But she walked out of the show before the end, claiming that the programme was "an object lesson in bullying" and comparing the conditions to a "fascist prison".
Ms Greer pointed to the trend for people to record every aspect of their lives and the increase in the newspaper coverage of shows as evidence that television was infecting every part of people's lives. "Life is not on the street anymore, it's on telly," she said.
Ms Greer also argued that 24-hour coverage had changed the nature of television news, referring to the aftermath of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was erroneously shot dead by police in the wake of the July 7 London bombings.
"A lot of the misreporting about what happened at Stockwell tube station came about because the media were running around looking for eyewitnesses.
"People were coming forward with things they thought they'd seen. Why did they say it? Partly because they wanted to be on television," she said.
Arguing that viewers should be educated about how television was made, she said: "We have to got to begin to understand that this a political question. We should think about empowering viewers and not impoverishing them."
Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general who was forced to resign last year in the wake of the Hutton report, also raised misgivings about the trend for ever more extreme reality formats.
"I have a concern that it is being pushed further and further and that we are turning it into a freak show. I have real concerns about this. I worry that at some stage something terrible will happen, something really unpleasant and that will be the end of the genre," he said.
