For as long as he has been broadcasting, Stephen Nolan has been raising people’s blood pressure.
He is a classic tabloid journalist, a controversialist – he has an eye for a good story, an ability to interrogate, and he knows how to entertain. That’s why he’s paid the big bucks.
In any discussion about the Nolan phenomenon, it’s important to differentiate between Nolan the Man, and Nolan the media brand. The former is a jobbing journalist, trying to earn a crust (well, quite a lot of crust).
Nolan the Man has conducted some of the most moving radio interviews I’ve heard. The fine details are lost to my memory now, but I remember still the impact of an interview more than a decade ago about suicide.
Nolan the Brand, however, is a BBC construct – in the same way as Strictly Come Dancing is a brand, or Masterchef, or Homes Under the Hammer. Brand Nolan is not an individual, but the team around him, a team which stretches up to the BBC’s editor-in-chief, Director General Tim Davie.
If people have complaints, they should not be about the man, but the machine behind him. And it is a machine – paid for by you and me. And the machine has a lot to answer for.
Tabloid journalism is often too concerned about making a splash regardless of the consequences. More heat than light.
It can be addictive, and BBC Northern Ireland is hooked on the addiction; and it is in denial about the consequences for the society it serves.
You only have to scroll through Twitter to see that Brand Nolan has an innate ability to get under people’s skin. I confess I worry about the health of commentator Tim McKane who has made it his life’s mission to call Brand Nolan and the BBC to account.
McKane’s main bone of contention is the platform given to fringe unionist Jim Allister, and loyalist activist Jamie ‘some of my best friends are Catholics’ Bryson. The BBC stands accused of over-promoting Allister, an irritant on the body politic, and Bryson, whose main contribution to public life is a conviction for taking part in unlawful protests.
McKane is not alone in having concerns about the BBC’s approach.
Witness the cavalier treatment of the Green Party, with twice as many seats as Allister’s TUV (okay two) in the last assembly, and which is now having to fight to put its message across to the electorate on the BBC.
The corporation has form. When Brexit’s history is written, some of the blame will be laid at its door. Without question Nigel Farage was feted by broadcasters who relied on him for the type of knockabout that increases ratings
The BBC – and BBC Northern Ireland in particular – is often the target of criticism, some unjustified. We live in an increasingly polarised world, the stakes are high, and time on air is coveted.
But it’s not good enough for the BBC to claim that it must be doing something right because it is attacked from all sides. That is too simplistic.
Its response to criticism is to stonewall. The lack of transparency over the airtime given to interviewees is incomprehensible. And in the case of BBC Northern Ireland it is unacceptable.
As the Social Change Initiative demonstrated this week, the BBC, with vast resources (it spends close to £100m a year in Northern Ireland) has become the dominant media voice, at the expense of newspapers, commercial broadcasters and producers of online content.
It is an enormous whale in a very small pond – and what it does has a disproportionate effect on society here.
What might be seen as political knockabout elsewhere, can have a deeply destabilising impact on a society as divided as this one.
In essence, we have a publicly-funded media organisation, using its near monopoly position against competitors (of which, in the interests of transparency, this paper is one).
That’s bad enough, but if it fails to address the legitimate concerns of its critics, it risks becoming one of the corrosive influences undermining peace on these islands and rendering itself unfit for purpose as a public service broadcaster.
Let Allister and Bryson have their 15 minutes of fame. But not at the expense of other voices who may not be good box office, but who have something constructive to say.
The BBC’s motto is ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’; in Northern Ireland there is a perception it is in a bubble speaking only to itself.
