Five fi lters of the news process
▶Laura Melvern, Th e End of the Street (Methuen,
1986).
Flow See programme flow.
Fly on the wall Popular title given to a genre of
documentary fi lm-making, for the cinema or
TV, in which the camera remains concealed, or
is handled so discreetly that the subjects forget
they are being fi lmed. Richard Denton, producer
of the BBC documentary series Kingswood:
A Comprehensive School (1982) described the
approach in ‘Fly on the wall – designed to invade
privacy’, Listener (13 January, 1983), as attempting
‘to remove the process of fi lming so far from the
consciousness of the contributors that they will,
in theory, forget its existence and so behave in
a markedly more natural, truthful and realistic
manner’.
Denton speaks of two distinct problems:
‘The first concerns the question of accuracy
and context ... Th e second, and probably more
important, problem concerns privacy.’ Outstand-
ing examples of the fly-on-the-wall approach
were the BBC’s Police series (1982), the work of
Roger Graef and Charles Stewart, and Channel
4’s Murder Squad (1992). Of particular interest
for fly-on-the-wall documentarists has been
family interaction. First in the UK to win fame by
exposing their lives to the eye of the camera were
the Wilkenses of Reading, featured in the BBC
series Th e Family (1974). In 1999 Granada Televi-
sion screened the lives of a mixed-race family
from Leeds, in Family Life. Later observational
documentaries have meticulously and intrusively
closed in on the lives and opinions of neo-Nazis
(100 White, Channel 4, 2000), the ‘realities’
of giving birth in a hospital environment (One
Born Every Minute, Channel 4, 2009) and SC4’s
documentation of the glories (and otherwise) of
the Caernarvon Town FC (2010).
Sam Leith in a UK Guardian online article,
‘Fly on the wall has become surveillance TV: Big
Brother didn’t die. Its many cameras are pointing
at all of us’ (21 November 2010) refers to ‘rigged-
up’ documentaries, and compares current
approaches to the genre, with the Panopticon
conceived by nineteenth-century philosopher
Jeremy Bentham.
Th is was a design for a prison (see panop-
ticon gaze) in which every minute of an
inmate’s life was subject to constant scrutiny, the
theory being that prisoners would modify their
behaviour according to corrective expectations.
However, in the case of fl y-on-the-wall docu-
mentaries, there is the intervening variable
of the need for such fi lms to be entertaining; in
other words, misbehaviour (as in reality tvgreater impact. This is known as the recency
eff ect, because it is the more recent information
that is the more infl uential. See topic guide
under communication theory.
Five fi lters of the news process See consent:
manufacture of.
Five myths of deregulation See deregula-
tion, five myths of.
Flak Term used by Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Media (Pantheon, 1988;
Vantage paperback, 1994), to describe a ‘negative
response to a media statement or programme,
and this may resemble fl ak in its wartime sense: a
blitz taking the form ‘of letters, telegrams, phone
calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills
before Congress, and other modes of complaint,
threat, and punitive action’.
Th e authors argue that ‘if fl ak is produced on
a large scale, or by individuals or groups with
substantial resources, it can be both uncom-
fortable and costly to the media’. Used by the
powerful such as the great corporations, fl ak is
intended to inhibit media activity, or bring about
the cessation of that activity. Flak can be aimed
at media activity indirectly as well as directly
‘by [in the case of corporations] complaining to
their own constituencies (stockholders, employ-
ees) about the media, by generating institutional
advertising that does the same, and by funding
right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations
designed to attack the media’. See consent:
manufacture of.
Flashback A break in the chronology of a narra-
tive in which events from the past are disclosed
to the reader, listener or viewer, and which have
a bearing on the present situation. Flashback
was a device used very early in the history of the
cinema: D.W. Griffi th’s epic Intolerance (1916) is
made up of four fl ashbacks. Used with a narrator,
the form achieved its greatest popularity in the
cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane (1941) is made up entirely of a
dazzling series of fl ashbacks; equally inventive
is the fl ashback narrative of the Ealing comedy,
Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
Flat earth news See churnalism.
Fleet Street Until the 1980s, the home of most
of Britain’s major national newspapers; indeed
the name had become the generic term for the
nation’s press; a fi gure of speech (see meton-
ymy). Th e advent of new technology linked with
the cost-cutting ambitions of newspaper owners,
both of which led to bitter confl ict with the print
unions, caused an exodus from ‘Th e Street’ of all
the major titles.