A matter of opinion

That’s such a good question. Julie what do you think? As the writer? (laughs)

(laughs). …it, well actually at the moment I’m doing a music programme and that’s quite a good example. I pick people to be on that music programme who I personally think are really great. They might not be mainstream musicians or even people that will necessarily go on to become famous or anything like that. It’s just people who I think are fantastic. So you have to have the confidence that the subject that you pick is interesting to you, and therefore interesting to other people and sometimes that means that you pick quite an obscure topic, but it’s something that is just interesting. And to sway public opinion, I guess that’s more in the realms of being a columnist, someone who writes opinion. You know you have these wonderful writers, like for example, my favourite political columnist Jane Clifton who writes for the Listener, and whilst her columns are very, very opinionated and yet, she doesn’t take a particular political standpoint in those columns. So it’s a sort of very clever kind of line that she treads there.

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean in the arts, Julie and I come from the same area, we celebrate the arts and the same with the Arts on Sunday. My producer might pick people who blow us away. You know, we’ll hear about them and go, “that’s fantastic, we’ve got to talk to them”. So it’s not really about persuading people that they should take up bell ringing or something like that you know, it’s about profiling really interesting people and celebrating the diversity and the richness of the arts that we have in this country. In terms of swaying opinion, you know, the media is very powerful and I’m mindful of it. Having worked in it for most of my life now, that it is a very persuasive tool, and you have to use that responsibility very, very carefully, whether it’s in the arts, or working on a morning report, or something like that, or working in a newspaper. You be very careful with what you say because people will believe what they read and what they hear, no matter now many times I tell them not to, they actually will believe it. So it’s very powerful. It’s a big responsibility that you have. You can destroy people’s reputations, if you’re not careful, if you think about it. You can destroy lives. Not so much in the arts but as a weapon you know. If you wanted to really damage somebody as a journalist, you can really do it, and you might be sued for it, but there you go. So I think you need to be responsible and I guess for us, what we’re trying to do is open people’s minds up to things that they might not ordinarily think about.

Yeah and if you go to say something negative about somebody, be very, very sure that you’ve got your facts right. Yeah.