Glamour is not good news

I can think of no time in my life when we needed to be better informed about the world beyond our shores, and no time when we have, in fact, been worse informed. The challenge is global as never before, as indeed the media empires are global. The response of the media in the UK, especially television, has been dismayingly local.

I suspected that something had gone seriously adrift when, at the height of the Afghan conflict, ITN led its early-evening news with a still picture of the Prince of Wales in Latvia, being chided by a 16-year-old girl armed with a flower. The suspicions deepened when, at the turning-point in the war, the BBC's news at 6pm gave precedence to the professional footballers' strike over the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif. They hardened into certainty when the weekend news on BBC 1 preferred the football World Cup draw to climactic events in Jalalabad and Kandahar. The age of trivia had not only dawned, but was already at high noon.

Let's name names here. The revolution in the news agenda didn't happen by accident. It was planned. The Palme d'Or for the dumbing-down of British television goes to ITN, which was once a proud name in journalism and owned half the terrestrial duopoly in TV news, until it sold its birthright on ITV for a mess of extra commercials. In hock to the advertisers, ITN set the trend by its decision, early in the 1990s, to promote an agenda of crime, celebrity and miracle cures – and to downgrade foreign news to a couple of slots a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, unless anything more sellable happened closer to home. The judgements were not editorial, but commercial. Foreign reporting was expensive, the bean-counters argued, and it didn't attract the viewers.

The BBC didn't go quite that far at that time. I belonged to the old order and was still allowed to report real news from a real war zone for a while. But time was running out on me; by the mid-1990s the BBC's values, too, were sliding downmarket, under the pressure of ratings and competition, on the pretext of accessibility. To hell with it anyway, I thought: we had the audience with us in our time, and our news drew much higher ratings than theirs did. After 34 years in the corporation's service, I suddenly had a sense of obsolescence, and I left for a brief career in the House of Commons.

Since then, ITN has fought off a bid by Sky News to supply the news service for the ITV channels at almost fire-sale prices. It did so by laying the axe to itself – shedding 200 jobs and reducing its annual budget from £45m to £36m. Among the host of economies, it decided that it didn't need a foreign editor any more – hardly surprising, since it would no longer have the resources to compete abroad, except in the show-business bureau it was planning to open in Los Angeles.

The changes were announced during a global crisis, the Afghan conflict, in which, for the first time in its history, successive cost-cutting had already blunted ITV's competitive edge. (The retirement of Sandy Gall, its Afghan expert, was also keenly felt.)

The oddest development of all was that the BBC, finding itself alone on the high ground, felt lonely up there and chose to abandon it. The change didn't happen overnight, and strongholds of serious and reflective journalism remained in such programmes as Newsnight, Correspondent and even the old warhorse Panorama. But BBC News was pioneering a downhill path without reconnaissance. In both style and substance, it transformed itself from what it had been – the standard of good practice in broadcast journalism, and the measure by which others judged themselves – into something strange and new and unsure of itself. Richard Sambrook, newly installed as its commander-in-chief, wrote: "For many years the BBC has rightly prided itself on its reputation for fairness, impartiality, accuracy and authority. We are trusted and respected. However, that is no longer enough... we have to engage audiences and tell them why the news matters... we have to find new ways of engaging our viewers, of drawing them in."

The new ways of engaging the viewers were not, in fact, new ways at all. They were imported, lock, stock and barrel, from the United States. An American-style guru came with them, to coach BBC reporters in presentation techniques that may be all the rage at Channel 39 in San Diego but are quite out of place over here. We Brits are not a demonstrative people. We prefer understatement. But under the new regime, reporters were required not only to walk and talk at the same time (a technique that I never mastered, and one which is rather harder than it looks), but to semaphore their lines as well as speak them. So there was much waving about of arms, and a new emphasis on broadcasting live, especially in interaction with the newsreader. Since the news programmes remained at their regular length, something had to go to make way for all this, and the casualty was the old-fashioned news footage, the images of what was actually happening.

The BBC did obligingly show its hand by publishing a 174-page handbook, The Reporter's Friend, which sets out the theory behind the practice. The handbook's cover is like the line-up on Lenin's tomb – a montage of photographs showing the correspondents in favour, and (by eloquent omission) those out of favour. Kate Adie, supposedly the chief news correspondent, is sadly in the second category, although she earns a passing reference in the text.

The author of the landmark booklet, Vin Ray, was once my most capable field producer in Sarajevo, which would locate him firmly in the old guard of TV news; and much of what he writes is a brave attempt to graft the old values onto the new. He is good on the clarity and simplicity that lie at the heart of good storytelling: "The most effective scripts are often quite 'spare' in their style." He is merciless on the hackneyed phrases that substitute for thought: "Dawn revealed the full extent of the cliché." And he tries to hold the line against gimmicks for their own sake: "The ability to walk and talk in front of a camera may be a valuable thing – but it is worth very little unless you have something worth saying."

But Vin Ray is now assistant head of newsgathering at BBC News. He therefore has to justify the dominance of live broadcasting over just about everything else in the repertoire, although I doubt whether, in his heart, he is a true believer in it. He certainly knows its costs and pitfalls better than most.

"Live reporting skills are an absolute prerequisite for any serious correspondent these days. With the growth of 24-hour networks and the move towards 'deconstructing' what would have been conventional film packages, live reporting has become important – and yet it is potentially so hazardous... avoid bad weather, big crowds and people with alcohol. You'll lose out to all three."

Note that word "deconstructing". What is being proposed here, on a management whim and with scant regard for the consequences, is the dismantling of a tradition of presenting the news on television, crafted and developed over the years, by assembling and editing the most compelling images available – and confining the reporter to a subsidiary role. Now, a substantial proportion of such images will be jettisoned to make way for the correspondent with hand signals, and the phenomenon of journalism as a performing art.

As a viewer, I don't want reporters (the men at least) to address me from far-flung locations with make-up on their faces and not a hair out of place. Nor do I expect them to stand uniformly "at a slight angle and leaning slightly forward" (another Vin Ray formula). I expect them to look a touch rough and rugged, with dust and sweat on crumpled safari shirts, as if they've been somewhere interesting and have a story to tell that's worth listening to. It was once said of ITN's Sandy Gall and myself that we had faces like the relief maps of the countries we were covering. The country in his case was Afghanistan and in mine was Bosnia – neither of which is blessed with regular features. But film-star good looks were not then in the job description. Different rules apply to the ladies, but even in their case too immaculate an appearance can be distracting. I don't expect Kate Adie to look as if she has just emerged from a visit to the hair stylist – and, bless her, she doesn't. Jennie Bond, on the other hand, does – but then, she's royalty.

The reductio ad absurdum of the prevailing fashion is the video wall. It is a full-length screen in the corner of the news studio on to which graphics, maps, photographs and moving images are projected like scatter-shot. As if to the scaffold, doomed correspondents are led to this contraption and required to make an obeisance to the newsreader, before turning awkwardly to the camera and addressing it with both hands flailing and all the gadgets flashing in the background.