Stuart Cosgrove: Lessons for the Yes movement in TV's effort to engage youngsters

Here in the UK, Dominic Cumming’s explosive testimony before a joint session of the Commons Heath, and Science and Technology committees, and the aftermath of Martin Bashir’s skulduggery has overshadowed events across the Atlantic.

Lost beneath the canopy of controversy, and the big money headlines, another ­far-reaching story was unfolding, all but ignored by the British press but a story that will prove deeply significant when the dust settles.

Last week, MSNBC appointed Rashida Jones a 40-year-old “digital native” as President. Jones is a millennial and the first African American professional to run a major cable news network. Significantly, it is her age rather than her gender or her diversity that is the story. Jones was born in 1980, the year of the Rubik’s cube and more aptly, the year that Tim Berners-Lee began work on the ENQUIRE software project which eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web.

Unlike most of her executive colleagues, Jones has never known a time when the internet did not exist. She will head up NBC News Digital which claims to be “a collection of innovative and powerful news brands that deliver compelling, diverse and visually engaging stories on your platform of choice”.

Like Al Jazeera’s Portal, its primary objective is to challenge the major streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and capture the “white whale” of American broadcasting: how to bring more young people to breaking news.

It is an age-old media trope that ­nightly news is not for the young. In recent years, the mean age of viewers who watch America’s big three cable news networks — CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC — has been in the 60s, an audience that media analyst Andrew Tyndall calls ­positively “geriatric.”

The figures in the UK are not much different – the average viewer of BBC 1 is 61-year-old, a fact that has emboldened the BBC’s fiercest free-market critics.

In Scotland, where there are disproportionate numbers of so-called licence-fee refuseniks, the funding of the BBC has become inextricably bound up in the ­independence debate and it remains a mystery to me, why BBC Scotland’s ­senior management seem unable to alert their semi-detached leadership in ­Broadcasting House to what is going on in Scotland.

Young people are overwhelming ­supporters of independence and they are increasingly deserting terrestrial ­television channels. That reality speaks to an underlying dynamic that is much bigger than Scotland. Young people are deeply interested in politics but are less attached to the practices of political ­parties, institutional governance or the sad parade of diary-based stories that dominate the nightly news.

A global survey of political change in the last year confirms that young people have gravitated to movements and causes, the Belarus Resistance, Black Lives ­Matter, Thailand’s Youth Rebellion, the Eco-Warrior Movement, Trans-Activism, the Yes movement and the Deportation and Dawn Raids resistance that flared up in Kenmure Street recently are examples of this global phenomenon.

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Conventional television news struggles to inhabit and explain these movements and for all their global diversity, they share one unifying thing in common. The new political movements of the last ­decade have broken a once-reliable link with curated news services, they have successfully bypassed the media many of us grew up with, preferring to plug into newsfeeds from the web and personal peer-group recommendation.

THESE factors are not only a challenge for both BBC but for the SNP too.

The BBC is still hugely popular and broadly trusted by older viewers who are demographically the generation that is most likely to pay for and defend the licence fee. Younger ­generations are less likely to share those sentiments or in some cases even understand those obligations.

But the restlessness of the young is not ideally suited to support for long-term SNP government either. Many young ­people yearn to dream and want a ­politics of action, which can often ­coalesce around a single-issue and sometimes ­manifest itself in dramatic demonstration or acts of social disobedience.

It is not clear how decades of ­cautious government with the conventional ­drudgery of party conferences and the necessary compromises of managing an economy, will continue to energise younger citizens.

If the independence movement fails to understand those contradictions it too may wither away like old news bulletins.

Nor is this restless audience uniquely a challenge for traditional broadcasters alone. Many social media and connect sharing platforms are struggling too. MySpace is now an ancient joke, Friends Reunited has withered on the vine rarely remembered even by bitter divorcees, and the once dominant Facebook is now seen as a place for parents to reminisce rather than a cutting-edge destination.

This week Vice, once hailed as the ­future of young news, ran a campaign to commemorate the anniversary of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. The ­slogan they chose was “We Are Still Here”. It was supposed to signal the refusal of the Black Lives Matter to fade into the background, but it was also unintentionally a desperate plea not to be forgotten. Vice is still there but now it has to remind you.

There is a warning in there for the Yes movement too, the trouble with being fashionable is that you can also become unfashionable.

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Back at MSNBC, Rashida Jones has identified the restless audience as a problem to be solved. She is not the first and she won’t be the last. Jones is tasked with finding a solution that ­combines the curatorial power of ­television and the randomness of the web.

“You’ll see more of that kind of blurring of the lines because it’s how people consume content… It’s also a place where you can experiment a little bit,” she said on her appointment.

Emphasizing her relative youth, Jones also told the wider media, “I’ve probably been a little bit ahead of the curve in ­being platform-agnostic. I just liked information, and it didn’t matter from where it came.”

What is deeply challenging about Jones’s remarks is the ugly but threatening term “platform agnostic”, a tech savvy way of saying you don’t really care who distributes content as long as you can watch or listen.

It sounds like a soulless mantra for those of us that have grown up with media brands that truly meant something.

The current Conservative government and their vengeful free-market vanguard have already set their sights on a denuded BBC and a privatised Channel 4.

But the sad inevitability is that a ­configuration of new technology and ­generational change may wound public television more deeply than the most ­craven politicians we have ever witnessed.