David Dimbleby: Are journalistic values under threat?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Where do you get your news from, and do you trust it to be true? For many of us, the answers to these questions are changing. Social media is an increasingly dominant source of information; long-established news sources, like the BBC, are in a fight for audiences and for trust too. Stephen Sackur speaks to David Dimbleby, who, in the course of a long broadcasting career, became the face and voice of the BBC on the biggest occasions, from elections to royal ceremonies. Can his journalistic values survive in a world where opinion so often trumps truth?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service. My guest today has over the course of six decades |
| 0:06.8 | woven himself into the fabric of British broadcasting. Maybe you remember how TV anchorman |
| 0:13.4 | Walter Cronkite was America's trusted guide to the biggest news events of the 1960s. Well, |
| 0:20.0 | my guest, David Dimbleby, has played a not dissimilar role in the UK in recent decades, hosting election shows, prime ministerial interviews, and a host of royal ceremonial events, all the way up to the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a role that Dimbleby's upbringing prepared him for. |
| 0:40.1 | His father, Richard, was one of the leading BBC correspondents of the World War II era. |
| 0:46.1 | He made the transition to television and described for the nation the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth. |
| 0:52.3 | Now, that makes David sound like an establishment figure |
| 0:55.3 | who never strayed from a path laid down by his father. |
| 0:59.3 | But as his just-published memoir suggests, |
| 1:01.8 | David Dimbleby's patrician heir was in a way misleading. |
| 1:05.5 | He says he always felt like an outsider rather than an insider. |
| 1:10.4 | And his instinct was to seek the truth, even if that meant challenging authority. |
| 1:15.5 | So he spent his career inside the BBC, but the journalistic landscape around him has been transformed in the course of his career. |
| 1:24.7 | Many of us now get our information from social media |
| 1:28.3 | rather than the so-called mainstream media. |
| 1:31.3 | Can his journalistic values survive in a world full of fake news, |
| 1:36.3 | disinformation, where opinion often trumps fact? |
| 1:40.3 | Well, David Dimbleby joins me now. |
| 1:43.3 | Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. In the course of your |
| 1:47.1 | broadcasting career, you have seen a massive transformation in the way news and information is |
| 1:53.2 | produced and the way it's consumed. Do you think for the better? For the worse? For the worse |
| 1:59.6 | because? I don't sort of subscribe to the view that there is one truth |
... |
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