Can We Still Trust the BBC? Robin Aitken
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 3
10/04/2013 13:55
First published in Great Britain 2013 Copyright Š Robin Aitken, 2013 The moral right of the author has been asserted No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the Publishers would be glad to hear from them. A Continuum book Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781472900890 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 4
10/04/2013 13:55
Contents
Abbreviations vii A Confessional Preface ix Prologue xv Cultural War 1 The Nightmare on News Street 15 Sex with Auntie 35 The Best Broadcaster in the World 45 A Reporter’s Progress 55 Blowing the Whistle 73 Who are these People? 99 The Best European 117 The Despised Tribes 139 Today at War 159 The Moral Maze 185 Testimonies: ‘A Foghorn Bellowing at the Nation’ 219 13 Conclusion 229
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Index 243
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 5
10/04/2013 13:55
Thank you to all those who helped me research this book. And especial thanks to my wife Sarah for her constant support.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 6
10/04/2013 13:55
Abbreviations
BBC NI
BBC Northern Ireland
CFFC
Catholics for a Free Choice
CPS
Centre for Policy Studies
EEC
European Economic Community
IPPF
International Planned Parenthood Federation
IRD
Information Research Department (Foreign Office)
NGOs
Non-governmental organizations
TVE
Television Trust for the Environment
TWTW
The World this Weekend
UNAIDS United Nations AIDS programme UNFPA
United Nations Fund for Population Activities
WATO
The World at One
WMD
Weapons of Mass Destruction
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 7
10/04/2013 13:55
A Confessional Preface
Any author who writes a book which poses a question in its title risks getting an answer they didn’t particularly want to hear. So it was when I wrote and had published my original book Can We Trust the BBC? in 2007. The BBC itself comprehensively ignored it. After a short flurry of interest, things went very quiet and I concluded that the answer to the question was clear enough; Yes, most people did trust the BBC. My strictures were of little or no concern to the majority. The BBC sailed on majestically, still the most important news source of the nation, still its favourite entertainer, and still overwhelmingly, the most important cultural institution in Britain. In the years following publication I reviewed my own position and decided that I should move on: I had had my say, given my honest opinion but few people seemed interested and no grand debate had ensued. I decided it was time to get on with life. I didn’t want to become obsessive about the BBC (some friends had gently intimated that perhaps this point had already
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 9
10/04/2013 13:55
x
A Confessional Preface
been reached). Nothing more embarrassing than a man riding his hobby horse in a theatre the audience has vacated. And so, disappointed and somewhat sadder and wiser, I turned to other matters: I remained a more than averagely interested spectator in matters BBC but I relegated it to the mental drawer marked ‘historic interest’. But my book turned out to have an unexpected afterlife. In 2012 I was contacted by several BBC people – once to take part in Radio 4’s The Moral Maze – to talk about public service broadcasting and once to give evidence to an internal inquiry into impartiality. It seemed that, after all, not all my criticisms had been had been dismissed out of hand. And then, in the autumn of 2012, the BBC found itself embroiled in fierce controversy and the thought occurred that some purpose might be served by revisiting the subject. I do so with trepidation but what gives me some confidence that the exercise is not entirely without merit is that this time I am writing against a background where the BBC’s reputation and standing – and the trust that the audience places in it – suddenly loom much larger in the public debate. We cannot foretell, at this juncture, what consequence the various scandals will have but I think – even at this stage of the drama when we have, as it were, had Act 1 and are awaiting Acts 2 and 3 – that the BBC will not emerge unscathed. Public trust has been jeopardized and in ways that I, for one, never foresaw. For who would have
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 10
10/04/2013 13:55
A Confessional Preface
xi
predicted that – of all things – it would be a sex scandal that rocked the foundations at Broadcasting House? It is the question of trust that lies at the core of the current crisis. The Corporation has been quite explicit about the central importance of trust stating that its aim is to become the most trusted broadcaster in the world. Indeed by many reckonings the BBC has already achieved this lofty ambition. More people listen and watch more BBC output around the world than can be claimed by any other broadcaster; what is more this output is held in high regard by most of the audience. The BBC is the greatest cultural export of the modern British nation. So the question which must now be exercising the Corporation’s top managers is whether the current scandals are likely permanently to damage that trust – or is this a little local difficulty which will fade with the passage of time leaving little trace? Furthermore – if trust has been damaged how can it best be restored? The justification for this book is that in some way it clarifies and aids what is a crucial debate both for the BBC and for us, its audience and paymasters. No one who cares anything about the BBC should be indifferent to this. My aim is to put the current problems at the BBC in some context. I will endeavour to explain how the BBC got to where it is. My original book concentrated on the lapses and shortcomings of the BBC’s doctrine of impartiality. It was heavily infused by my own belief that certain strands of opinion,
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 11
10/04/2013 13:55
xii
A Confessional Preface
certain groups, do not get a fair hearing from the BBC. In the light of current developments that might seem a somewhat quaint, even irrelevant side-issue. But it remains an important – I would argue the most important – question in relation to trust in the BBC. In that first book I criticised the way the BBC reported some of the major issues and stories of the past three decades. Most of this material is included in this book but I have excised some which no longer seems relevant or has been overtaken by events. In addition I have included at the end of each chapter short contemporary appraisals of how things have changed, in my opinion, since the book first appeared. For change there has been and the BBC now, in my view, does a somewhat better job of representing a broader range of opinion. Here I must enter a caveat. Proving bias, or lack of even-handedness on the part of a broadcaster is a task that is not amenable to statistical analysis. Hard facts and figures are almost impossible to come by. Proof – in the sense that a mathematician or scientist would understand the term – is not available to us. The subject relies on impressionistic judgements which will always be open to dispute; the reader may object that personal judgement, anecdote and hearsay are a poor substitute for facts and figures. I agree but unfortunately it is, mostly, all that are available. In the conclusion to this book I will attempt to draw some of the strands together and look to the future. The BBC is not in existential crisis: we will not awake
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 12
10/04/2013 13:55
A Confessional Preface
xiii
tomorrow to find it disappeared from the scene. It will continue to play a leading role in national life. But it has been damaged. The task for it now is to react constructively to the problems that have come to light. There has to be some process of renewal – but this is a permanent task facing every human institution. And that sage advice ‘never waste a good crisis’ is especially pertinent in this case. The Corporation has just appointed a new Director General – a man who, providentially, seems in possession of a rare range of qualities. All his skill will be needed to restore confidence and stability to an organization deeply troubled by recent revelations. However if the BBC can emerge, humbled probably, but determined to regain its lost good name then its current travails might even be put to good use. Oxford March 2013
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 13
10/04/2013 13:55
Prologue
The British have a deep reverence for institutions and take comfort in the notion that the nation is built upon solid institutional foundations. There is the monarchy, parliament, the armed services, the Church of England, and so on; and there is also the British Broadcasting Corporation, which is the subject of this book. A relative newcomer – only 80 or so years old – it is, in many ways, the most familiar of all. The BBC makes and shapes us as a nation in a way no other institution can. For many it is an ever-present companion: from breakfast-time to bedtime, from childhood through to old age, there it is telling us about ourselves and the wider world, amusing and entertaining us. No other institution in the country – not even the NHS – can claim to be so deeply embedded in so many lives; in any one week more than 90 per cent of us use some part of the BBC’s output. Because of this ubiquity, and because it is generally admired – loved even – it is difficult to see it as it really is. And yet it is essential that we do so. The BBC is the
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 15
10/04/2013 13:55
xvi Prologue
main conveyor of the national debate and it dwarfs every other media source in the country. If it were one day suddenly to fall silent, think of the gap there would be in our national life; an end to a host of ‘virtual’ institutions – from pap like The Archers, Dr Who and EastEnders, to serious news-fodder like Yesterday in Parliament, the Ten o’Clock News and Today. These programmes have worked their way into our hearts and minds, and the BBC thereby has become a great power in the land. Which raises the question can we trust it? And this is a particularly difficult question to ask about the BBC because it is the organization that we expect to hold other institutions to account; no government minister or private corporation or public body can consider itself immune from investigation by BBC journalists. This function, of holding people and organizations to public account, is the most important thing the BBC does. But who holds the BBC to account? Can we expect it to ask hard questions of itself? Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (But who is to guard the guards themselves?) – Juvenal’s question is as pertinent as ever. The dusty institutional answer is that the BBC Trust makes sure the Corporation does its duty under the terms of its Royal Charter. The charter ordains that the BBC must operate without bias or favour towards any individual, organization, or group. This is the quid pro quo for the licence fee – that extremely valuable privilege which frees the organization from normal financial pressures.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 16
10/04/2013 13:55
Prologue
xvii
The BBC had an income in 2011 of just over £5 billion £3.6 billion of which came from the license fee. No other UK media organization – and few in the western world – enjoy such a stable, predictable and generous income. But because everyone pays for the BBC, everyone has the right to fair treatment. The BBC Trust, under the chairmanship of Lord Patten of Barnes is supposed to be the guarantor of fair play but the Trust already seems to be suffering from the same problems as the body it replaced – the BBC Governors. The Trust was breathed into life by a White Paper published in 2006 in the aftermath of the confrontation between the government and the BBC over allegations made in 2003 by Today reporter Andrew Gilligan. The thinking behind this change seemed to be that the old Governors had become cheerleaders for the Corporation, not guardians of the public interest. But in this regard the Trust has been something of a disappointment because during the crisis over Jimmy Savile in the autumn of 2012 it seemed to be suffering the exact same confusion as did the governors: did it speak for the BBC or the public? At one moment it seemed to be speaking for the BBC, the next as its regulator. But to act effectively in the latter role would require there to be a more obvious separation in the public mind between the two things. The Trust would, in other words, have to be much tougher on the BBC. The establishment of the BBC Trust was supposed
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 17
10/04/2013 13:55
xviii Prologue
to mark an important reform – but now looks more like ineffectual tinkering with the governance of the institution. All institutions benefit from time to time from a bracing overhaul, but reforms must get to the heart of the problem to be effective. As Alcoholics Anonymous say, the first step is to recognise that you have a problem. For many years the BBC adamantly refused to acknowledge there was any truth in the claims of critics who said it was not impartial. But in 2005 the BBC grudgingly admitted that its coverage of the European Union debate had fallen short of its advertised standards. Since then there have been signs of a real effort to correct that pro-EU bias and the BBC’s coverage of the debate today seems better balanced than it was. But in many other parts of the BBC’s output the old doubts remain about whether the BBC is living up to its charter obligations. Now, overlaying these concerns, there is the Savile affair which has opened up for scrutiny other aspects of BBC culture – scrutiny which is likely to be very uncomfortable for an institution whose claims on public trust have always rested on its manifest decency. These two things – Savile and impartiality – might seem to be completely separate but public perception will not necessarily make the distinction. The BBC might well discover that public trust is indivisible; the stain of the Savile scandal will make it harder for the Corporation to dismiss criticism that it has fallen short of the ideal of impartiality it espouses.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 18
10/04/2013 13:55
1
Cultural War
By and large Britain’s intellectual classes don’t prosecute the culture war with much vigour; at least not in comparison with their American counterparts. Since the 1990s the ‘culture war’1 has been a staple of American political debate where the division between left and right on a broad range of social issues is held up for examination and clearly seen for what it is. In many ways the culture war is the heart and guts of US politics. This has led to two decades of rancorous disputes and entrenched positions where consensual progress has proved all but impossible. Not so in Britain. Though the term is sometimes deployed by British commentators, our version of the war is muted – more of a skirmish with small arms fire than the clash of armies with heavy artillery. This has its advantages of course. It keeps the tenor of our political discourse more civilised – and gives us another opportunity to think ourselves superior to the brash verbal bellicosity of the Yanks. But appearances can be deceptive; the struggle for supremacy in the cultural debate in Britain is also fierce
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 1
10/04/2013 13:55
2
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
– though often cloaked in euphemism and camouflaged by courtesy and public good manners. And in the autumn of 2011 there was a major engagement in Britain’s Culture War which proved irresistible to the political classes in general and the BBC, in particular. The Leveson inquiry2 was of all-consuming interest to parts of the media; a journalistic smorgasbord which brought together a cast list of politicians, policemen, celebrities and low-down tabloid hacks. With its overtones of the corruption of power and the casual trading of that power between the various players it was an Eldorado for the BBC. It would be crass to say that the Corporation’s reporting of Leveson was a settling of old scores but the relish with which proceedings were reported, the prominence afforded to each new witness testimony and the unflagging devotion to the story over months of hearings could have left no viewer or listener in any doubt that the BBC considered Lord Leveson’s inquiry to be of the very highest importance. Whether the average person agreed with that news judgement is debatable and anyway irrelevant: in news the professionals – not the audience – call the shots. It is not difficult to understand why the Corporation was so happy to be reporting those proceedings from the Royal Courts Of Justice. A succession of witnesses – some prominent actors and performers, others private individuals only known to the rest of us because they got caught up in big news stories – went into the witness box and pointed the finger at the journalistic practices
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 2
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
3
of News International. And in Britain’s (never openly declared) culture war, the BBC and the company Rupert Murdoch created stand clearly opposed to each other. The history of this antagonism is long and complicated but it is a fact that in the four decades during which Murdoch became the dominant force in British print media his papers have proved themselves time and again hostile to the BBC. Any failing, or perceived failing, by the Corporation, any scandal involving BBC people, has routinely attracted maximum coverage, some of it hypocritical. The thing which galls Murdoch’s empire most, it seems, is the underlying centrality of the BBC in the British media – a position guaranteed by the solid financial underpinning of the license fee. For selfinterested reasons to do with the wish itself to become the biggest player, Murdoch’s empire would like the Corporation cut down to size. The BBC’s response to Murdoch’s challenge has, of necessity, been muted. Unlike News International the BBC cannot explicitly repudiate a competitor, nor impugn its motives, nor be seen publicly to engage in a wrangle over the rights and wrongs of BBC funding. That is not the BBC way. But for anyone who has any insight into the Corporation’s secret life, and who understands its institutional thinking, it is clear that the antipathy of the Murdoch press for the BBC is reciprocated in full measure. The BBC does not like Murdoch, does not like his papers and considers him, and them, to be a negative influence on British life.3 Given this
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 3
10/04/2013 13:55
4
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
background it is difficult to envisage a more satisfying turn of events – from the BBC’s point of view – than the establishment of the Leveson inquiry. And when it got going it proved to be the gift that goes on giving. Day after day the hurt, the wronged, the calumniated went into the witness box and the dirty, underhand and shameful practices of News International’s hacks were made public. As an added bonus, conspiracy theorists were delighted to have published the details of embarrassingly chummy communications between politicians and journalists suggestive of improper influence peddling in the highest reaches of the establishment. The BBC had a field day. And why not? Here were the wrongdoings of some of Murdoch’s journalists being exposed, in forensic detail; by comparison the BBC could hold its head up high. None of its journalists had hacked phones, it had not cruelly pursued individuals who, through misfortune or bad judgement, had been offered up for public scrutiny, its managers were not revealed to be in anyone’s political embrace. On the contrary its journalistic hands were clean and it was only too happy for the comparison to be made between its practices and ethos and those of News International. As the Leveson inquiry hearings continued into the New Year the comprehensiveness of the BBC’s coverage hardly slackened. Even for those of us fascinated by such things (and the suspicion was always that the most assiduous followers of events were journalists themselves) there was a feeling of surfeit. However over
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 4
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
5
the Christmas and New Year period at the end of 2011, in one of the Corporation’s many newsrooms, something was afoot that would dwarf News International’s transgressions and trigger the worst crisis in the BBC’s ninety year history; something that imperilled the Corporation’s reputation and jeopardised the trust of its audience. The editor of Newsnight – the programme which for 30 years has been a prominent standard bearer of the BBC’s current affairs television output – decided not to run a story about the recently deceased Jimmy Savile. To those in the know this must have seemed, at the time, fairly unremarkable. Story ideas on busy programmes get spiked every day. What turned this from being run-of-the-mill to scandalous was what happened next. In January and February of 2012 the story of Newsnight’s change of heart appeared in a couple of newspapers. In March a longer, better informed and more detailed account appeared in The Oldie magazine. Still, on the face of it this was one of those media insider stories which are of limited interest to the wider world. This one, however, turned out to be the exception to the rule; those few short paragraphs set in train events which culminated in the avalanche of problems which later in the year rained down on the Corporation’s head. Many people, I suspect, have become inured to the phrase ‘crisis at the BBC’. I can imagine it eliciting a groan from the audience thinking to themselves ‘there they go again – gazing at their navel’. And in recent years
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 5
10/04/2013 13:55
6
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
the scandals have come so thick and fast that it has sometimes seemed that crisis at the BBC is a permanent condition. However it is worth remembering that there was a time when the BBC was not controversial in any major sense; halcyon days when the words ‘BBC’ and ‘crisis’ did not go together like a horse and carriage. If you were to plot a graph of controversies involving the BBC through the nine decades of its existence it would flatline for about two thirds of the timeline. The Corporation was – in the main – determinedly un-controversial. From the 1920s through the 1970s there was remarkably little in the way of noteworthy public debate about BBC wrongdoing. Of course the BBC was constantly ‘in the news’ but looking back through the archives most of the stories concerning it were about fairly routine matters; sometimes programmes that tested the boundaries of public taste or the occasional BBC star who strayed or intermittent political criticism that the BBC had breached its own impartiality rules. But the striking thing is that the BBC itself was not, to any substantial degree, subject to heavy criticism either by politicians, or statutory authorities or by newspapers. Its status and position – as a trusted and even loved – mainstay of British cultural life and wider society was largely unquestioned. It is true that from the sixties onwards there was a steady drumbeat of criticism (mainly from the right-wing press) about the BBC’s role as a promoter of what was then termed the ‘permissive society’, but the Corporation shrugged
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 6
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
7
it off and as underlying moral attitudes changed that criticism died away. But from the 1980s onwards the graph starts taking off and, it seems, at an ever steeper level of incline. In the 1980s there began a series of controversies which pitted the BBC publicly against the government of Margaret Thatcher. This was not coincidental because – as I recount later in this book – the great majority of BBC people felt an instinctive hostility to her and her ‘project’. In that atmosphere a series of programmes were commissioned which challenged the government in spectacular ways. There was, for instance, a Panorama in 1984, Maggie’s Militant Tendency, which accused several Conservative MPs of links to far-right, neo-fascist, organisations. [Two of the MPs* named sued for libel – and won.] Then came a very public confrontation after the BBC commissioned a series of documentaries by the left-wing investigative journalist Duncan Campbell. Remarkably this climaxed in a police raid on BBC offices in Glasgow and the offices of the New Statesman in London. By this point relations between the Government and the BBC were very poor and the era culminated in 1987 when the Director General Alasdair Milne was sacked by Marmaduke Hussey, the newly appointed chairman of the BBC governors. The government had struck back. * The MPs were Gerald Howarth and Neil Hamilton.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 7
10/04/2013 13:55
8
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
The nineties, by comparison, were a time of relative calm. Certainly any quarrel between the BBC and the government was conducted in a lower register. However within the BBC itself it was a time of upheaval thanks in large measure to the ministrations of John Birt who had been appointed Deputy Director General in 1987 after Milne’s sacking and then got the top job in 1992. Later in this book some of the consequences which flowed from what came to be known as ‘Birtism’ are analysed but there is one toxic legacy from his time in charge which has grown into a longrunning scandal. When Birt took over from Michael Checkland (Director General 1987 – 1992) salaries paid at the BBC were modest – at least by today’s standard. In those days the BBC did not publish the pay of senior people but when Alasdair Milne was DG his salary was about £80,000. Lower down the ranks the pay offered to editors, producers and reporters – the Corporation’s foot soldiers – was sometimes very modest. However this was in a long BBC tradition and most accepted the trade-off: work for a decent organisation but don’t expect a big pay packet. By the 1990s this trend had gone too far and it was John Birt who sought to rectify what had become a clear unfairness where people were not being properly rewarded for what they did. During the 1990s salaries in the BBC increased across the board and brought the Corporation more into line with the rest of the industry; this was right and proper. But what subsequently
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 8
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
9
happened to top salaries at the BBC was a scandal – and one which dogs it to this day. In 1993 The Independent reported the astonishing fact that Mr Birt was being paid by the BBC as a ‘freelance consultant’ – a ruse which enabled him to dodge paying proper income tax. His salary then was £160,0004 or thereabouts – double what was paid to the DG five years previously. And that trend of generous increases for the top brass continued over the next decade and a half. The BBC became infected with a culture of greed. The pay packets of senior managers became magnificently generous. It was the decade of excess, the fat years before the crash. In the City colossal bonuses were routinely handed out; the pay of senior managers in the private sector rocketed; in Westminster Blair was in his pomp. The culture of easy money and big pay for the top bosses was transported wholesale into the BBC [it was not alone; the same phenomenon occurred right across the public sector]. It wasn’t just the salaries themselves that changed – so too did the salary structure. In the BBC of old this had mirrored – indeed was modelled on – a Civil Service remuneration scale. Birt swept all that away so people were paid partly ‘on merit’. What that meant, in practice, was that the BBC set up a murky structure of remuneration committees advised by consultants and this merry-go-round resulted in large, year-on-year pay rises for senior managers. At the same time, and as another consequence of Birtism, the number of senior mangers at the Corporation exploded
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 9
10/04/2013 13:55
10
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
in line with Lord Birt’s belief that the BBC was chronically under-managed. By the middle of the first decade of the New Millenium the situation at the BBC was this: the number of senior managers had multiplied several times over – and their pay had reached heights a previous generation of BBC people would have found unimaginable. This issue has been a festering sore within the BBC ever since. If you talk to BBC people in the middle grades – the people who actually make programmes – there is a real bitterness about what has happened which has corroded the trust between them and their managers. People might be more forgiving if BBC had managed to recruit a cadre of supermen and women who had improved programme quality, kept morale high, were brave and high-minded and who expertly steered the BBC away from controversy and scandal. It is an understatement to say this is not what has happened. Privately BBC people will say some very disobliging things about their bosses. Talking about his superiors one experienced BBC correspondent I know spoke of ‘corridor crawlers’ and a managerial culture which was all about self-advancement. The kernel of this issue is about fairness and the proper use of public money; doubtless those lucky few who enjoyed such undeserved largesse can justify their salaries to themselves and their families but they have never convinced their colleagues or the wider public. For people who so loudly proclaim the virtues of public service it would be good to know that
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 10
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
11
some of them now understand how their cupidity has damaged that concept at the BBC and feel ashamed of it. Somehow I doubt they do. I knew many gifted journalists at the BBC but very few gifted managers; one or two stand out but they were outnumbered by the weak and mediocre. Thankfully a start has already been made on tackling this issue – some senior managerial posts have been scrapped and Lord Hall, the new Director General is being paid slightly more than half what his predecessor Mark Thomson earned. At £450,000 it is still a handsome package but if any role deserves the epithet ‘full-time job’ the Director General of the BBC must surely be it; he will have to devote himself heart and soul to the task if he is to restore some lustre to the institution. If he manages to do so he will have earned his money. Is there any connection between better paid managers and the core performance of an organisation? The idea has been tested to destruction in the past 20 years for it was during the period when BBC pay got so out of control that the organisation experienced its decade horribilis. 2003 saw the greatest convulsion the BBC had ever experienced with the death of Dr David Kelly and the subsequent Hutton report.5 What distinguished this scandal was the way it pitted the BBC directly against the elected government of the day whereas later scandals were arguably less weighty. However they all, in their different ways, touched on the central question
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 11
10/04/2013 13:55
12
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
of audience trust. In 2004 the BBC instigated an investigation into its own coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict following a long campaign by interested parties who claimed the BBC was biased.6 The Balen Report, named after its author Malcolm Balen a senior BBC journalist, remains unpublished. In 2007 the good name of the revered children’s programme Blue Peter was dented by the revelation that a phone-in and a competition to name a cat had been rigged; in the same year a much more serious issue erupted over the programme A Year With The Queen. This was commissioned from an independent production company, RDF Media, and the problem with it was that the editing played fast and loose with the chronology of events. The reversal of two clips showed the Queen – in the words of BBC1 Controller Peter Fincham – ‘losing it a bit and walking out in a huff’. This had not happened, it was sleight of hand by the programme makers. Though the main fault lay with RDF Media, poor Mr Fincham carried the can and resigned. In 2008 there was a high volume media storm around the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross prank phone calls row to the actor Andrew Sachs. Brand had called Mr Sachs claiming to have had sexual relations with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie. Perhaps no great issue of public policy was involved but the whole affair underlined how coarse and bullying some BBC ‘comedy’ output had become. Jonathan Ross left the BBC as a result.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 12
10/04/2013 13:55
Cultural War
13
There were a few passing squalls in the years running up to 2012 – the year which will surely go down as the darkest in the Corporation’s history. Even before the Savile scandal erupted the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee attracted scathing notices. The Corporation’s expert, entertaining and yet dignified coverage of major public events had once been its hallmark and one of its glories but its handling of this historic celebration was a disaster. Michael Buerk, a notable BBC correspondent blessed with a penetrating intelligence and not one to mince his words, lambasted the performance as ‘cringingly inept’. A succession of ‘daytime airheads’, he said, gossiped with ‘vacuous D-list celebrities’. His overall verdict was damning: ‘the one enduring British institution was mocked by another that had shamefully lost its way.’7 However even this misjudged, misguided and embarrassing episode paled in comparison with the Jimmy Savile imbroglio. The appalling revelations about this man and the BBC’s calamitously incompetent handling of the fallout from them moved the Corporation into uncharted waters. Suddenly the question ‘Can We Trust the BBC’ acquired a new, worrying resonance.
Notes 1. The terms is a translation and a borrowing from the German Kulturkampf first coined in the 1870s 2. The Leveson Inquiry was announced in July 2011 with the remit to examine the role of the press and the police in the
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 13
10/04/2013 13:55
14
3.
4. 5. 6.
7.
CAN WE still TRUST THE BBC?
phone hacking scandal. Hearings began in November 2011 and part One of Lord Leveson’s report was published in November 2012. The second part of his inquiry will begin once all police investigations and any resulting prosecutions are concluded. For anyone who thinks I might be exaggerating this institutional antipathy, there is a record of bad blood between Murdoch and Lord Patten. At the Leveson inquiry he revealed that Mr Murdoch’s publishing arm had refused to publish his book on China because he was afraid of souring his commercial relations within the People’s Republic. He accused politicians of ‘grovelling’ to Mr Murdoch and, when the Sunday Times in an editorial in November 2012 called on Lord Patten to resign as Chairman of the BBC Trust because of the fallout from the Savile scandal, he told an interviewer on Sky News ‘….I am not going to take my marching orders from Mr Murdoch’s papers.’ In passing I would observe that there is nothing particularly surprising – or in my view wrong – about this sparring between the BBC and the Murdoch operation. Both are large, self-interested media organisations, in competition with each other for audience share (and affection and trust). They are also ideologically opposed, taking different views of the world and how society should be organised. It is inevitable that, at the very least, there will be detectable schadenfreude when each reports the others’ difficulties. Mr Birt was ennobled in 1999. This is covered in greater detail in later chapters. Both sides made these claims but it was the pro-Israel lobby which felt most aggrieved and it was due to their pressure that the inquiry was begun. Published in the Mail on Sunday December 30th 2012.
9781472900890_txt_print.indd 14
10/04/2013 13:55
CAN WE STILL TRUST THE
The BBC is Britain’s most important cultural institution and plays a vital role in national life but in recent years it has become scandal-prone and embroiled in a deep institutional crisis. The BBC says that trust is at the heart of its contract with us, the audience, but the Jimmy Savile scandal and its fallout have severely undermined that trust. This book details the crises that have beset the Corporation in recent years and analyses what the organisation’s response to them tells us about it. It also casts a critical eye over the institutional culture at the BBC and examines the way that journalistic ‘group-think’ colours its view of the world. It argues that the current crisis at the BBC should be viewed as an opportunity for reform – and a chance to restore faith in an organisation vital for the health of democratic debate in Britain. Robin Aitken is a former BBC correspondent who spent 25 years at the Corporation. Starting in local radio he worked across a range of BBC radio and television programmes ending his career on the Today programme. He has an intimate understanding of the BBC and brings unique insight into its workings.
www.bloomsbury.com
9781472900890_cov_app.indd 1
£12.99
ROBIN AITKEN 10/04/2013 11:21