Will Hanrahan - Factual Producers Should Look To Journalists When Setting True Crime Standards

Established journalistic good practice shows how to balance ethical conundrums with exposing wrongdoing – so let’s not reinvent the wheel, says the founder of FirstLookTV.

I don’t like secrets. They allow wrongdoing to go unexposed.

But there are many secrets kept each day that affect the lives of us all – and in some cases, cost lives. Baroness Casey’s work to expose the dangerous inadequacies in the running of the Metropolitan Police has shone a light on routine practices which had become so common in the Met that they were accepted by serving officers as ‘the norm.’

If that same light had been shone on the Metropolitan Police ten years earlier, it’s possible that women would not have been raped by serving officers – and one woman might still be alive.

Scrutiny only gets really serious after a tragedy, so it took the death of Sarah Everard for the establishment to truly listen to the whispered rumours
of a toxic, misogynist, racist and homophobic culture residing deep in Britain’s biggest Police force.

I got an insight into that culture years ago when FirstLookTV exposed how four young men had been lured to their death by Stephen Port using a
dating App. Their murders were initially written off as gay sex games gone wrong and not thoroughly investigated – the truth was only exposed
through the dogged work of two sisters of one of the victims.

Our programme about Port – available now on Netflix – battled its way to screen originally on a smaller linear channel, Crime+Investigation, where a switched-on compliance team navigated the implications of our criticism of the Met and allowed broadcast.

Delays in releasing full coroner’s reports, and the Met’s refusal to comment until the Independent Office for Police Conduct had released the findings
of its inquiry into the issue meant that basic failings in the Met’s performance were kept from the public for four years.

They might have been kept from the public longer had we decided not to proceed with our film.

So when I read of the refreshingly open moves taken by Kate Townsend at Netflix to self-regulate an industry-wide approach to production in the factual space, alarm bells rang.

Those looking for safeguards in the factual space need look no further than the lessons learned - literally - over centuries of journalistic practice and over a century of Broadcast practice.

A group of true crime producers recently, FirstLookTV among them, agreed to set up a workshop to establish a type of ‘Guild’ of producers who work
to a set of journalistic standards in our highly problematic genre.

The clue in our aims is that key word - journalistic. The protections we need as an industry to ensure ‘good behaviour’ amongst producers are already there. They can be found in Ofcom guidelines, traditional journalistic standards and BBC producer guidelines.

Corralling them into a post-internet world snapshot for producers is probably a good, practical idea. However, trained journalists will tell you that balance, fairness, accuracy and avoiding defamation and contempt are things we work with on a daily basis.

Factual productions which fall into the journalistic space, but which are not run by trained journalists, would do well to apply the same values as we journalists have for generations.

Meanwhile, we need to discuss the biggest issue facing factual producers - the Wild West that is online content, and behaviour aimed at gaining
online clicks.

Who regulates TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube... and dare I say, Netflix?

As well as codifying our own behaviour to ensure standards, factual productions need to operate in a fair world where the online content provider is subject to same regulations and the same standards expected of our community.

That may not ever be possible - the self-styled citizen-journalist genie is out of the bottle.

But as we reach towards agreeing how legacy ‘mainstream’ content providers should behave, let’s not forget what we often try to achieve: scrutiny
of those who make decisions.

Best be careful not to self-censor so much that we let the powers that be get away with keeping too many secrets.