Issues Facing Producers of Factual

Programming
And How To Solve Them

GUIDANCE MANUAL

 Accuracy
- Accuracy is vital for any reputation as a news provider. You
have to ensure the audience has trust in your stories, if you
consistently make mistakes and provide wrong information
your audience’s patience will eventually wear thin and their
interest and trust will be abolished. Accuracy is vital if you
wish to please and keep an audience, they will much prefer to
read a story with straight facts rather than information that
may or may not be true, for example, if you’re reporting live
on a breaking news story and you are interviewing eye
witnesses you have to remember that some people may not
remember all the events as they took place and will often
exaggerate or even make things up to provide an interesting
story. Many interviews will have to take place with
eyewitnesses to ensure you get the best possible story to
ensure everything you report is as factual as possible.

 Balance
- Balance means to keep a factual TV programme fair to both
sides of the topic it’s discussing, there are always two sides to
a story and the information told to the viewers should be
correct, fair and equal. It is important to keep a balance on
views and investigate to find information for both sides of the
story. Ensuring that both sides of an argument are shown in a
factual TV programme is vital as it prevents a certain opinion
being glorified to a viewer, making them believe what they’re
told without knowing all the facts from both sides.

 Impartiality
 - Impartiality means to view both sides and opinions equally,
to not take sides or make your own personal judgement. It
doesn’t mean that things will always be fair, and it doesn’t
prevent reporting fair judgements that have a lot of evidence
backing them up. To make an impartial judgement,
journalists have to gather relevant arguments and present
them properly, so they don’t appear to be biased. If you aren’t
impartial and persistently bring your own opinion and
judgement into a topic your viewers will be displeased and
will probably think other information you say will be biased,
unfair and based around your own personal judgement.

 Objectivity
- Objectivity is to see the whole truth, using evidence and facts
and to be fair about it. This means that the reporter or
presenter has to show fair views from both sides of an
argument, so they don’t appear to be biased; this also allows
them to have different ideas and explore different opinions.
To achieve objectivity firstly you have to be able to stall your
judgement whilst looking at all of the facts. Some of the facts
you may find may not be enjoyable or make you feel good,
but to achieve objectivity all the facts need to be accepted and
analysed.

 Subjectivity
- Subjectivity is the term given to your opinion or judgement
you make whilst discussing a certain topic and is basically
the opposite of objectively. Subjectivity is usually avoided
during factual TV programming as this can prevent the facts
being used and may result in the programme being slightly
biased towards your views, however some presenters may use
it to help manipulate an audience into seconding their
opinion. It is acceptable to state your opinion on a discussion
but it’s vital you mention it’s your opinion and that your
opinion isn’t necessarily the opinion of anyone else, this will
prevent the viewers from thinking you will be biased towards
your beliefs.
 Opinion
- When the producer wants to use opinions to help show the
viewers what members of the public think it is important they
choose a wide variety of people from different walks of life
to ensure that the answers and opinions they get will be as
widespread and as different as possible. It is important to
keep a balance whilst showing opinions. This is vital when it
comes to keeping an argument fair because if you show too
many opinions stating they agree with an argument it will
make the show seem biased towards that, which is something
you try to prevent if you wish to keep a discussion fair.
Presenters shouldn’t mention their opinion as it can make
viewers believe they’re being biased.

 Bias
- During a factual TV programme, it is important that the
producer looks at different opinions, views and facts and
focuses equally on both concepts. It’s often easy for
someone to become biased especially if they feel there is no
room for another argument to pose, however presenters have
to be careful not to make biased statements or judgements as
it can offend some viewers. It is vital that factual programmes
stick only to correct information and don’t make statements
that support one side of the argument and not the other.

 Representation
- Representation means how something is constantly portrayed
or the stereotype of a certain thing. You have to be careful
not to stereotype anything during a factual programme as this
can lead to some information being wrong. For example, you
can often find the media stereotyping teenagers, claiming that
‘hoodies’ or teenagers that wear hooded tops are a bane on
society, this is stereotyping teenagers and can be quite
offensive and lead to problems for teenagers who wear
hooded tops.
 Access
- To begin making your documentary and filming where
necessary you need to firstly obtain permission. If permission
is not obtained lawsuits can be filed and your programme
won’t be complete. Yu also need to make sure you have
access to the correct resources that will supply you with vital
information.

 Privacy
- Privacy is an issue in factual TV programming because
everyone has a right to be in a state of being free from the
public attention, however the media have a right to a freedom
of expression and often argue that they should be able to
produce anything they believe is in the public’s best interest.
Sometimes journalists will be asked not to approach or ask
questions on suspects if they feel that any answers they may
give could potentially aggravate an investigation.

 Contract with Viewer

- The contract with the viewer is basically an unwritten rule
that means if you state your show is factual and interesting
and then describe what your show is about, you have made a
pact with your viewers to supply them with the information
you said you would as well as it being precise, accurate and
interesting.
DIFFICULTY WITH GETTING INTERVIEWS DONE

The people that we film may be nervous or shy in front of the camera.
They may also feel nervous about what they have to talk about to the
people behind the camera. It would be possible to resolve this by
offering to blur out or pixelate their faces if they wish to not be
recognised by anyone who watches the footage later on.

People in public, walking around and just doing what they usually do
in their lives, would probably be intimidated or scared to do an
interview if asked because of the equipment and possible a too
‘professional’ look. Dressing casually and being very polite when
asking for an interview will make you less intimidating and much
more mature. This will make it easier to do interviews.

An example; in the documentary “Aileen, life and death of a serial

killer” by Nick Broomfield, Nick is really polite, mature and careful
when he’s interviewing Aileen because she’s s psychotic mass
murderer. Even though she is reasonably calm throughout the
interviews, she loses her temper big time in the very last interview
before her execution because he asked her the wrong question.

BIASED OPINION ON THE SUBJECT MATTER

Depending on the topic being discussed, people will react differently.

To use as an example, I will pretend that I’m doing a documentary on
how young people are portrayed by the media. This would be a
difficult documentary to make because of the fact that I am a kid, so I
would have to be very cautious and not be biased on our side of the
argument.

To solve that problem, we could very easily not include our own
opinions on the documentary itself unless we have no other choice.
This would mean no one would be accused of being biased as the only
opinions being said are the ones from the people being interviewed
and not ourselves.

An example; in “Supersize Me” where the man is narrating and

completing the 30 day trial of eating only fast food is very biased, he
only talks about what he thinks of the fast food itself and their
companies but he doesn’t say anything good that the companies have
done.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

Again using the ‘young people portrayed in media’ as an example for

a documentary, it is a topic about how the media stereotypes us. So
we have to be very careful when we do the interviews about what we
say and who we say it to. We should always ask for permission first
in order to interview the public and we need to pixelate or blur the
faces of people who don’t who don’t want to be seen and the people
in the background of the footage.

Some of the topics that we may need to talk about won’t be suitable
for everyone to actually discuss so we can only ask certain people
specific questions. For example; in a documentary about a mass
murderer, you shouldn’t and wouldn’t be allowed to interview a 6
year old about what they thought of the murderer brutally killing
someone.

We can solve this issue by organising the interviews in advance

before filming it. Get permission and outline the different topics that
would be mentioned and ask the people being interviewed if there
were any topics they didn’t want to talk about, we should completely
respect their wishes.