Can We Trust the BBC?

For my family and

all those friends and colleagues

who helped and supported me

during its long gestation

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

1 The Best Broadcaster in the World?

2 A Reporter’s Progress

3 Blowing the Whistle

4 Who are these People?

5 The Best European

6 The Despised Tribes

7 Today at War

8 The Moral Maze

9 Testimonies: ‘A Foghorn Bellowing at the Nation’

10 Conclusion

Abbreviations

Introduction

Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, is a marvellously sharp satire on the human capacity for self-delusion and the perils of group-think. If you remember, the Emperor, an early fashion victim, is duped by two unscrupulous tailors who tell him they have made a wonderful cloth, more beautiful and finer than any other. One of the special things about this fabulous fabric is that only clever and intelligent people can see it – to the ignorant the cloth is invisible. The Emperor, and all the people in his realm, sign up to this seductive nonsense and the silly Emperor goes strutting around the place stark naked until a child speaks up and says that the great man has no clothes on. The collective delusion is pricked by the boy’s innocent remark, the people take up the cry – the Emperor is revealed to be stark naked – and the scales fall from everyone’s eyes.

The story is, of course, wonderfully adaptable as a metaphor because it illuminates a universal truth about human beings – the way in which we repeatedly prove our gullibility by believing in what later comes to be seen as preposterous fallacies. It also offers an immensely comforting notion about the redemptive power of simple truth, plainly spoken; it only took that one little boy to speak as he found and all was put right. Alas, in the real world, the spell cast by plausible lies is not so easily dispelled. In the real world, one suspects, no one would have paid any attention at all to the little boy. We hold on to our collective delusions tenaciously, perhaps because the alternative is so much less comfortable.

When this book was first published in 2007 it seemed that it too might suffer the likely fate of most embarrassing insights; there was little to suggest that the BBC, or the wider world, was prepared to accept its central argument – that the Corporation’s much vaunted impartiality was largely mythic, that in fact the BBC promotes a largely one-sided view of the world to which it holds steadfastly. However, a few months later there are grounds for believing that, perhaps, change is possible and has even, in some small measure, begun.

For many years (certainly throughout my quarter-century in its employ) the BBC stoutly refused to debate its own impartiality, at least in public. Of course, in private, BBC people did sometimes talk about it – but the strict rule was ‘never in front of the children’. It was all very well for sophisticated programme-makers to discuss these things between themselves, but to invite public discussion of the topic was all but unthinkable. Not that there was ever that much discussion inside the BBC – people tended to get very bashful when the subject came up.

Later in this book I detail my laborious attempts to get the BBC to face up to the fact that its own strong institutional bias taints and colours its news output. I got no thanks for that and, indeed, was comprehensively ignored. But, suddenly, in the summer of 2007 the BBC broke cover on impartiality. It became newly fashionable within the Corporation to allow some cautious debate on the issue. That is a real departure and a very hopeful sign for the future.

The most significant development came with the publication by the BBC Trust in June of a report, rather cumbersomely entitled ‘From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel – Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century’. It is a careful piece of work, thoroughly researched and written by John Bridcut, an independent programme-maker who began his career at the BBC. In it he contemplates the nature of impartiality, what it means and how it can be achieved, and on these things he has many useful and insightful things to say. But the report is no institutional mea culpa; indeed, far from admitting that there have been lapses it reasserts over and again that the BBC is impartial – even when the evidence the report itself presents seems to contradict that assertion. That invisible cloth still looks damned fine to many people.

But the Bridcut report repays careful study. For one thing it sets impartiality right at the centre of the BBC’s mission (which should prove useful in the future when critics try to hold the Corporation to account) and it sets out twelve ‘guiding principles’ as to how it can be achieved. From now on, anyone who wants to complain about impartiality has a newly minted set of standards to measure the output against. Principle Number One starts off with the ringing declaration ‘Impartiality is, and should remain, the hallmark of the BBC …’, which begs many questions. For instance, if impartiality is already the ‘hallmark’ of the BBC, why does it need such thorough investigation? The attentive reader will find the answers buried in the data that Bridcut has assembled so painstakingly.

The report notes that, far from being a straightforward matter, impartiality is not easily achieved and that it is not possible to satisfy everyone. It does not offer a precise definition of impartiality but sets out its necessary components: ‘Impartiality involves a mixture of accuracy, balance, content, distance, evenhandedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth.’¹

That is quite a list of virtues for any human being to possess; in the BBC’s case it is a list which every one of its journalists should aspire to, which tells you something of the difficulty of achieving impartiality. And the evidence which Bridcut lays out shows that the audience is well aware that impartiality is often not achieved at all. For instance the polling data which accompanies the report shows that while 84 per cent felt that impartiality was important, 44 per cent of those questioned believe there is no such thing as impartiality.² Furthermore, 61 per cent agreed with the proposition that ‘broadcasters may think they give a fair and informed view, but a lot of the time they don’t’, which suggests that there is a lot of scepticism out there. This impression is strengthened by other results; for instance while 83 per cent agreed with the proposition that ‘broadcasters should report on all views and opinions, however unpopular or extreme some of them may be’, 57 per cent of the same people agreed that ‘broadcasters often fail to reflect the views of people like me’.

This last response is particularly interesting and chimes exactly with my own experience. The people who feel this most strongly are those for whom broadcasters, as a class, feel least sympathy: middle-aged people in the lower socio-economic groups (C2DEs in the jargon). These are the people who most strongly – and correctly – feel ignored by the BBC. By contrast, the people who agreed least strongly were up-market Liberal Democrat voters; entirely predictable given the sort of opinions that prevail within the editorial ranks of the BBC.

The pollsters put another proposition to respondents which the report describes as ‘contentious’; it was that ‘broadcasters should mainly focus on reporting opinions that are reasonably widespread or that many people believe’. You might wonder why such a notion could be considered ‘contentious’. The answer is that this is not what the BBC does. Consider how different BBC output would sound if its reporting reflected what most people believe: the tone on crime and punishment, immigration, welfare payments, school discipline, human rights and a host of other issues, would be much tougher, reflecting the robust common sense of the nation at large. It would strike a very different note from the current output where a superior ‘enlightened’ liberal attitude means that the BBC always challenges the commonsense position from a politically correct stance. It is why organizations like the ‘human rights watchdog’ Liberty, and the Prison Reform Trust are so wildly over-represented on Radio Four’s output.

The Bridcut report is most illuminating when it comes to enunciating the ‘twelve guiding principles’ of impartiality. Some of these seem fairly anodyne (number two, for instance, which proclaims that ‘impartiality is an essential part of the BBC’s contract with its audience’ which is something most of us always took for granted), but some would prove revolutionary if conscientiously acted upon in BBC newsrooms. Take number nine, for example, which reads:

Impartiality can often be affected by the stance and experience of programme-makers, who need constantly to examine and challenge their own assumptions.

It goes on to discuss what this might mean and there are sharp and illuminating comments from named BBC people. Director-General Mark Thompson is quoted saying that ‘bias can be as much a matter of the questions you ask or the assumptions you bring to a particular topic as it can be of the final shape of the transmitted piece’.

Andrew Marr, formerly the BBC’s political editor, says that the BBC has a disproportionate number of young people, gays and people from ethnic minorities which, he rightly notes, ‘creates an innate liberal bias within the BBC’.* Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington correspondent, says that when talking about America ‘… we have a tendency to scorn and deride. We don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts’. These three quotes show a refreshingly self-critical attitude, previously absent from the Corporation’s public deliberations.

Then the report goes on to speculate about how a liberal ‘comfort zone’ (it is not admitted that such a thing exists, Bridcut merely posits it as a hypothetical possibility) might have affected output. In a coy turn of phrase he says ‘the BBC has come late to several important stories in recent years’. The ones he has in mind are monetarism (in its early stages), Euroscepticism and immigration. These, he says, are ‘off-limits in terms of the liberal-minded comfort zone’. We should be quite clear – because Bridcut is not – exactly what is being said here. ‘Coming late to the story’ makes it sound as though, in a fit of absent-mindedness, the BBC collectively overlooked, in some way, these major political stories. In fact the BBC deliberately ignored or misrepresented these stories for years. They did so because in each case the developments (which challenged and threatened to overturn conventional bien pensant wisdom) were resented and resisted by BBC journalists most of whom, as Bridcut implies but does not state, operate in that liberal comfort zone. Later in this book there are extensive references to all these three stories; I was aware of the bias and mendacity of the BBC regarding these issues a decade and more ago and I repeatedly tried to draw attention to the fact. It has taken the Corporation some time to catch up, but it seems past failures are now being faced up to at last.

The principles Bridcut sets out seem comprehensive and useful; they may be counsels of perfection which cover every broadcasting eventuality but at least they set a clear framework. However, the report itself is in a peculiar and disfiguring state of denial about the reality of day-to-day life within the BBC. If one was to come fresh to it without any prior knowledge of the BBC or its output, one might conclude that all was well (and the very fact that the BBC itself commissioned an inquiry into its own impartiality might seem like some sort of guarantee, at least of good intentions). But throughout its 80-odd pages Bridcut makes quite implausible assumptions about the Corporation. He asserts at one point that ‘the BBC is generally seen as impartial’,³ but it is difficult to reconcile that judgement with the opinion poll evidence presented in the report. The responses can more easily be construed as showing a majority which thinks impartiality is not achieved.

Again, Guiding Principle Four states that ‘Impartiality involves breadth of view and can be breached by omission’. It goes on: ‘It is not the BBC’s role to close down debate.’ Discussing this at greater length in the text Bridcut says ‘The BBC does not, and should not suppress or end the discussion.’ This touches on the idea of the BBC as the ‘gatekeeper’ of the national debate, in which role it largely determines what is on the political agenda. Obviously, because this is a crucial function, the BBC should not suppress debate, but to say that it does not is wildly inaccurate. One of the ways that the BBC’s institutional bias most distorts the national debate is how some favoured topics get almost limitless airtime while others hardly figure at all. In the past few years, for instance, we have had an avalanche of talk about poverty in Africa, childhood obesity and global warming (to take just three examples). By contrast, other topics hardly get mentioned at all. An example would be capital punishment: all the available polling evidence shows that there is still a majority in favour of it in Britain 50 years after its abolition but it rarely figures as a topic for discussion. No wonder that so many people in the poll felt the broadcasters ‘often fail to reflect the views of people like me’.

It is fair to note that there is a wider political failure here; Parliament has steadfastly refused to reintroduce hanging despite the clear public demand for it. But the interaction between the BBC and politicians is a crucial component in determining how parties construct their policy manifestos. Any politician who declares himself in favour of hanging will be treated as a moral retard by BBC journalists who, nearly to a man, are opposed to capital punishment. They don’t agree with it and they don’t want to talk about it, or encourage others to think and talk about it, which is why it never figures on the news shows. There is one exception to this, which is capital punishment as an object lesson in moral backwardness; BBC producers, as a general rule, like nothing better than to gaze, horror-stricken, at capital punishment in countries like the USA where they actually put murderers to death! That gives everyone the chance to bask in the warm glow of our own, supposed, moral superiority. So it is simply not true to say that the BBC does not close down debate on certain issues – that is clearly what it has done for many years, and still does on a daily basis. But for Mr Bridcut the Emperor is still magnificently turned out. His report assumes that the BBC is in a permanent state of grace regarding impartiality. He writes this, for instance:

Impartiality for the BBC is not in question. It is a given – a legal requirement, just as it is for other broadcasters in Britain. It is practised day in, day out, by BBC journalists who have an impartiality gene implanted in their earliest days at the Corporation.

I love that ‘impartiality gene’, don’t you? Suggesting as it does that BBC journalists are genetically incapable of bias. Alas this is moonshine; later in this book are many examples of where BBC practice has fallen woefully short of lofty theory. Nowhere more strikingly perhaps than the example of the Panorama programme detailed in Chapter 8. A squalid example of vicious bias and misrepresentation. Presumably its production team somehow missed out on the impartiality gene. But I do not wish to be too hard on the Bridcut report – it would be quite unrealistic to expect the BBC to commission and publish a report that comprehensively trashed its reputation for impartiality. The report is, in fact, an organizational manoeuvre designed to placate the critics; and, in its way, a very creditable one. The main problem with it is that it pretends that the BBC ethos of impartiality is still intact, while at the same time hinting there may have been occasional lapses in the past. However, by applying Bridcut’s new ‘guiding principles’ to actual programmes we can now judge whether this is really so. What follows are three examples of BBC output noted over a few weeks in spring/summer 2007. They are all taken from Radio Four and are typical of its output – certainly you can hear this kind of stuff on a daily basis. Let us run Bridcut’s impartiality slide-rule over them.

The first is an interview on Today on 16 May 2007 with John Bolton, the feisty American conservative who was grilled by John Humphrys, the programme’s uber interrogator. A few words of background: Bolton is one of those people who arouse a special ire in the hearts of bien pensant opinion. President Bush appointed him as the US ambassador to the United Nations where