The Observer
04.08.19 39Ken Bruce
BBC Radio 2
With a proportion of Radio 2 listeners
following Chris Evans to Virgin
(where Evans’s breakfast show has
increased listeners to a steady 1.1
million ), and others migrating to 6
Music’s Lauren Laverne, Zoe Ball has
done well to keep Radio 2’s breakfast
show above 8 million listeners. Th at
means, though, that Ken Bruce now
has the biggest show in the UK,
with 8. 5 million listeners tuning in to
his genial mix of well-known tunes
and even more well-known jokes.
Even the sniff y (like me) are fans of
Bruce’s Pop Master quiz. Retaining a
Wogan-esque relaxed charm, he is the
antidote to the bad news world.Nick Ferrari
L B C
LBC’s long-standing breakfast-show
provocateur has posted his highest
ever fi gures, with 1.4 million listeners ,
an increase of 240,000. Ferrari is one
of the best out there at dealing with
both politicians and voters, adept
at playing devil’s advocate without
making his interviewees feel foolish
or unacknowledged. In London, his
show is the No 1 commercial radio
show for “hours and share”: meaning
people listen longer to him than most
other hosts. Elsewhere on LBC,
Eddie Mair’s teatime show has added
119,000 listeners, with 804,000 tuning
in every week.(^) Union Jack
Jack Radio
Not shows, but stations without
traditional DJs, th is is one of the
Oxfordshire-based Jack FM network’s
two stations. Union Jack, which
plays British pop music, has had a
74% increase in listeners year-on-
year , up to 153,000. Jack Radio,
which plays only female artists, got
a smaller listenership of 32,000 , but
both stations are perhaps a forecast
of what is to come. Geoff Lloyd’s
Home town Glory , an interview show,
is played on the network and there is
live comedy too, but commercial DJs
may well be quaking in their boots.
Dig deep
behind the
big stories
Investigative journalism has been
a quiet stalwart of podcasting for
some time now, ticking over quite
nicely thank you, despite its brasher
subgenre true crime generating
more of the headlines. The best
true crime podcasts are, of course, a
version of investigative journalism,
driven by curiosity and dogged
reportage; it’s just that much of the
donkey work – the hours following
online threads or sifting through
reports or interviewing witnesses
- is kept away from the listener, in
favour of more salacious details.
So if you really want to fi nd out
how complicated, well-hidden
public interest stories are brought
into the light, then your best bet
is The Tip Off podcast. Winner of
best new podcast at the British
Journalism awards in 2018 , this
week it started its fi fth series. It
has a wide remit: in one episode it
will describe the tracking down of
the Isis jihadist “John the Beatle ”,
the next tell the tale of how British
women fl eeing domestic violence
are being let down because of a
lack of refuges. The new series
promises the behind-the-scenes
story of the Windrush expos é; the
tale of a Northern Irish journalist
who exposed police collusion; and
how a cross-border, open-source
investigation tracked down the
perpetrators of a massacre.
Presenter Maeve McClenaghan is
an investigative reporter herself, and
when I interviewed her a year ago
she told me three things that stuck
in my mind. First, that Linked In
is a great way to fi nd disgruntled
ex-employees willing to talk about
their previous workplace. Second,
that there are a lot of female
investigative journalists. (The
fi rst series of The Tip Off barely
featured any male reporters at all.)
And third, that no one can predict
how a story will land.
Sometimes investigations result
in a big media splash; sometimes
they make barely a ripple. The
opening episode of the new series,
which started this week, features
one story that did both. In it, we
meet Chicago Sun-Times journalist
Jim DeRogatis , who, with another
reporter, Abdon Pallasch , fi rst
reported on R&B megastar R Kelly’s
alleged sexual abuse of young
women. Their front-page story
was published way back in 2000 ,
to deafening silence. Over the next
17 years, DeRogatis reported on 48
women who alleged that Kelly had
raped or sexually abused them.
But these stories – backed up,
corroborated, evidenced – were
ignored by other media outlets.
Even a “crystal-clear” video of Kelly
abusing an underage girl, sent
to DeRogatis anonymously and
resulting in a legal case (Kelly was
acquitted), was joked about as a
“pee tape”. Only in post-#Me Too
2017, when Buzzfeed ran with
DeRogatis’s story of women being
held against their will at Kelly’s
home , did the wider world take
notice.
Kelly has recently been indicted
on 18 charges including child sexual
exploitation, child pornography,
kidnapping and obstruction of
justice. But, as yet, he’s not been
found guilty. You have to wonder,as DeRogatis points out, if this
story would have attracted more
attention if just one of Kelly’s alleged
victims had been white.
A new investigative journalism
offering is The Bellingcat Podcast.
Bellingcat is an independent
investigative website that uses open-
source journalism and social media
to probe a variety of international
stories. This is its fi rst podcast
and it concerns Malaysian Airlines
fl ight MH17 , which was shot down
in Ukraine in 2014. Presented by
Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder,
this is detailed stuff, with any
number of informed interviewees,
from reporters on the scene (the
opening episode is disturbing in
its eerie detail), to experienced
analysts of Russian and Ukrainian
politics. We’re three episodes in. In
episode 2, I was struck by political
expert Mark Galeotti , talking about
Russian online counter intelligence.
“It’s easy to attack each individual
lie... and prove it isn’t so, but in
the process it creates this sense
that truth is entirely subjective
and negotiable.” Bellingcat is all
about non-negotiable truth. The
podcast goes in deep, but for those
who wish to join in, it’s defi nitely
worth the effort.Three shows celebrating their Rajar ratings
Reporter Jim DeRogatis, whose
investigation into R Kelly is
explored in The Tip Off. APPodcasts & radio
Audio
The Tip Off stitcher.com
The Bellingcat Podcast
bellingcat.comMiranda
Sawyerthemselves as thus suffering.
Truly wow. That’s quite a doozy
of a number. And so while Ahsan
rightly made attempts to convey
the anguish of real depressions,
she also sought out the likes of
Professor S ami Timimi , an NHS
specialist in the fi eld , who spoke of
the wholly unplanned consequences
of successful destigmatisation,
chiefl y a new and utterly unfounded
fear of normal emotion (allied
presumably to the fact that when
everyone’s claiming mental ill
health, there’s diminished empathy
for genuine cases). “It’s as if, when
you experience intense emotions,
that’s a sign that you’ve got a mental
health problem, that’s a sign that
there’s something wrong with you,”
said Timimi.
It was way too short at just half
an hour, yet I fi nd myself head-
scratching over why no other
documentary strand other than
Dispatches has felt the need to
challenge the charitable orthodoxy
of the last few years: maybe now the
dam will break.Some of the
statistics
were truly
appalling for
those of black
or brown or
poor white
skin, with
brains and
charm
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