16
I joined the BBC in 1967 – probably about forty years too late with the benefit of hindsight. One or two things had already changed since the very early days and not necessarily for the better. Certainly not for the staff. Stuart Hibberd, one of the first announcers, described what life was like when he signed up in the 1920s. In those days the BBC (the British Broadcasting Company as it was) was based at Savoy Hill in one of the swankiest parts of London. Here’s his account of a typical day: ‘We broadcast only a little in the afternoon, mainly schools and teatime music and no news bulletin was permitted to be broadcast before 7 p.m.’ Importantly, Hibberd wrote, the schedule ‘allowed the announcers to go across to the Savoy Hotel where we could dance if we wanted to’ (having first changed from the dinner jackets worn at work) and ‘an excellent supper was provided by Monsieur de Mornys, the Savoy Entertainments Manager in a private room upstairs’.
Hmm … I’m not sure the basement canteen in New Broadcasting House quite matches the cuisine at the Savoy. Then again, making sure one’s bow tie was properly knotted must have been a bit of a pain. I did once wear a dinner jacket to work – I was more than usually bleary-eyed at 3.30 a.m. and mistook it for an old blazer – and wondered why I got a slightly strange look from the security guard in reception. But I think the overnight editor was rather impressed.
In his wonderful memoir This is London, Hibberd puts his finger on something that’s a tad more relevant to the BBC of the twenty-first century than dancing at the Savoy or even the supper provided by M. de Mornys. He writes that in 1933 the BBC broadcast a report which referred to Poland ‘spending thirty per cent of her revenue on armaments’. This was a hugely important story, given that a nervous Europe was struggling to recover from a terrible war that had ended only fifteen years earlier. A hungry, resentful Germany had just been taken over by a megalomaniac intent on restoring her greatness. The implications of the report were all too obvious and the Polish government protested to the BBC about it. The dispute, we are reliably informed, was ‘amicably’ settled. But that led to a perceptive comment in the highly respected ‘Scrutator’ column in the Sunday Times. The author was worried that the BBC might ‘retract what it had reported’ and he asked this:
Those three questions are as relevant for the BBC today as they were almost a century ago.
The BBC’s motto – adopted around about the time that Stuart Hibberd was adjusting his bow tie in front of the unseeing microphone – is ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’. An ambitious but hopelessly quixotic aspiration. Perhaps if we were to replace the word ‘peace’ with ‘truth’? Equally quixotic, but perhaps more relevant to the BBC’s mission. I wouldn’t mind seeing ‘fearlessly’ in there somewhere too. Again too ambitious I suppose. Individual warriors can perform acts of bravery even at risk of their own lives but that option is not available to organisations. The first and perhaps the only truly inviolable rule for any organisation is its own survival.
Obviously the BBC does not have to worry about customers in any conventional sense because its income is guaranteed through the licence fee. Nor does it have shareholders – although it now has a ‘chief customer officer’ to develop a ‘more personal relationship with consumers, licence-fee payers and those signing in to BBC services’. Her role, she says, is ‘putting the customer at the heart of what we do’. I’ve never understood the difference between ‘consumers’ and ‘customers’. Isn’t everyone a ‘consumer’? But I’m also deeply puzzled by the notion of putting ‘customers at the heart of what we do’. As opposed to what?
So the BBC is a public corporation owned by the licence payers. But clearly they can’t exercise direct power over the managers. If they could we’d probably end up with fewer managers attending fewer meetings. The modern BBC does, though, have to pay heed to one supremely powerful body which determines the size of the licence fee and the future of the charter. And if the BBC is doing its job properly it will, sooner or later, find itself in conflict with that body. That body is the government.
According to Winston Churchill the BBC’s darkest hour came in 1940. France had fallen to Nazi Germany. The British army had to be rescued by small boats from the beaches of Dunkirk. The threat of invasion was real. And the BBC, according to Churchill, was doing more harm than good to the nation’s morale. He described it as ‘the enemy at the gate’. It’s hard to think of a more serious charge from a man who would ultimately lead the nation to victory. But let’s balance that against something said by a man nobody outside the BBC had even heard of. His name was Noel Newsome and his job was news editor of the BBC’s European Service. Here’s what he told his staff: ‘What we have to do … is to establish our credibility. If there is a disaster [for our forces] we broadcast it before the Germans claim it, if we possibly can. And when the tide turns and the victories are ours, we will be believed.’
Newsome was right. Credibility is everything. The real enemy at the gate is news we cannot trust. I recall reporting from Moscow at the height of the Cold War, a time when the Kremlin was relentlessly extolling the achievements of the corrupt and failing communist regime through the columns of Pravda. Its title was Russian for ‘truth’ but its content was pure propaganda. Self-defeating propaganda. When I first arrived I was puzzled by the number of people who carried empty shopping bags everywhere they went. Eventually I was told by my guide (foreign journalists weren’t allowed to go anywhere without an official guide) that almost nobody left home without one – just in case they happened to spot a shop that happened to have something on sale that they needed. Such as food.
Day after day I watched shivering Russians standing in endless queues hoping that the shop would not have run out of bread before they got to the counter. Some were holding a copy of Pravda, which breathlessly reported that, yet again, the USSR had broken all records for grain production. Small wonder they never believed a word they were told. Newsome understood what Churchill did not – at least seemingly not at that stage in the war. If the people are lied to once they will not believe you the next time when you may be telling the truth. And there is a profound difference between sowing confusion in the minds of the enemy about, say, an imminent invasion and lying to your own people to improve morale. Apart from anything else, it doesn’t work.
What did work was Newsome’s approach. In 1943, four years into the Second World war, the great British historian G. M. Young said the BBC’s news broadcasts had given it ‘a standing without rival on the European Continent’. It may seem such an obvious point to make but it bears repeating often and forcefully. If the BBC is not trusted it is nothing.
So the idea of being the ‘servant of official policy’ in international affairs or anything else for that matter is antithetical to everything the BBC stands for. Yet history tells us that governments do not trust the BBC when its own interests are at stake. There have been endless occasions since its birth when the BBC has been called to account for daring to question government policy in time of crisis or taking a particular stand on foreign affairs. In the 1930s there were questions in the House complaining about our coverage of Spanish politics which led to the devastating civil war and the rise of General Franco. The BBC was accused of ‘red bias’.
In the 1950s, during the Suez Crisis the prime minister Anthony Eden accused the BBC of ‘giving comfort to the enemy’. When Harold Wilson was fighting the general election in 1970 he repeatedly harangued the director general of the BBC for allowing programmes to present him in an unfavourable light. The programmes included not only the usual suspects like Panorama but also Woman’s Hour and, rather bizarrely, Sportsnight.
In the 1980s Norman Tebbit, chairman of the Conservative Party at the time, produced a detailed and unfavourable analysis of the BBC’s reporting of the American air-force raids on Libya. In the 1990s John Simpson was fiercely criticised for his supposedly ‘biased reports’ about the impact of NATO bombing on Belgrade. And this century the BBC came under sustained attack from some of the most senior figures in the Labour government for allegedly acting as ‘a friend of Baghdad’ in our reporting of the Iraq War.
Richard Sambrook was the director of News at the centre of the row over the BBC’s coverage of the Iraq dossier which I wrote about in an earlier chapter. He makes the point that it’s the job of the BBC to ‘shine light in dark places’. The use of intelligence by the Blair government in the run-up to the war was a very dark place indeed. Long after the crisis was over Sambrook talked about it with Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian:
I think the BBC could have done it in a different way and in hindsight I regret that we didn’t manage it properly. But if the BBC says to the government that fundamentally there is rot at the core here, that’s a big problem. And the BBC has to be very, very careful, because it is in the end dependent on a political deal to exist … You can only do so if you have the courage of your convictions – if you have done your journalism properly – and if you are properly able to weigh up the consequences of your actions. If the BBC is weak, or lacking in confidence, or isn’t sure about its editorial judgements and methods, then it runs the risk of being pushed around … of losing independence in all but name.
One of the biggest stories of 2013 had been delivered by a former American CIA man, Edward Snowden. Snowden became a computer programmer for the National Security Agency in the States and had access to a vast databank containing the names and whereabouts of thousands of American spies. He stole the lot. It was the biggest leak of top-secret documents in history. He did it, he says, because he was worried about the extent to which intelligence agencies and Internet companies were spying on countless millions of people around the world. Some called him a hero, some a traitor. But whatever the verdict on him personally, his action had exactly the effect he had hoped for. He handed the computer files to the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which gave them massive coverage in the weeks and months to come. Snowden himself went into hiding in Russia and remains there to this day.
But what if he had taken his story to the BBC, to Newsnight or Panorama perhaps? How would we have dealt with it? Could we have done what the Guardian did? That’s a question Sambrook has often asked himself and his answer is intriguing:
No. No, they couldn’t … They might have been able to do a piece at a meta level, a headline level, but they could not have done what the Guardian did with Snowden. I find it uncomfortable to say that, but it’s the truth.
So what does that tell us about the BBC? Here’s what Sambrook says: ‘It tells you that in the end there is a limit to its independence – some would call that public accountability. It is a wonderful news organisation. It does fantastic journalism every day. But there is a limit to it. And I think in the end that was part of a miscalculation in the Kelly story. We thought we were genuinely independent. And we weren’t.’
So there is a thread of events here that suggests that the BBC’s independence, which it prizes and fights to defend in its daily decision-making, is always potentially under threat – especially when the government of the day is coming under pressure on different fronts.
The struggling Labour government of the 1970s wanted to ‘do something’ about the BBC and Cabinet records show it considered getting rid of the licence fee and making its financing part of general government expenditure. That would effectively turn it into a state broadcaster.
But even confident governments with a solid majority facing a weak opposition have sometimes felt the urge to take on the BBC. As its official historian Jean Seaton records, the challenge from the Conservative administration elected in 1979 and by a large majority in 1983, was fundamental:
For the first time, the legitimacy of BBC values as well as their practice was directly contested. The government in the short term calmed licence-fee negotiations by taking the ‘permanent revolution’ out of them. But it began to articulate a series of arguments: that the licence fee was a state handout inimical to free expression; that funding by advertising and greater ‘choice’ between channels would be more democratic; that impartial news was a deception and ‘responsible national interest’ a better value; that to articulate opposing views was biased and sometimes treacherous; that the BBC was part of an establishment that needed to be re-engineered.
History tends to repeat itself. A generation later the question of the licence fee returned to haunt the BBC. It had made what turned out to be a devil’s pact with the government. In return for a new licence-fee settlement and charter renewal, which would last until 2027, it agreed to take responsibility from 2020 for free licence fees for people over the age of seventy-five. The bill – roughly £750 million – had been paid out of government funds. In 2019 the BBC announced it could not afford to pay it and the pensioners would have to cough up – or, at least, those who were not receiving pension credit. They might as well have announced that all pensioners should be rounded up, carted off to Dover and shipped out to the Falkland Islands. The country went ballistic.
After months of angry newspaper campaigns led by some of the best-loved (ageing) celebrities in the land, the director general Tony Hall appeared before a select committee of MPs – a pretty heated appearance. Hall raised a few eyebrows when he acknowledged that a great deal might change under the new charter agreement. He raised the possibility of the BBC switching from the licence fee to a voluntary subscription model – something like the Netflix arrangement – and accepted that it would be ‘very very different to the sort of BBC you have now because you would be giving subscribers what they want, not the breadth of the population’. As for his own views on that, he said: ‘I would argue that that’s the wrong model for supporting the BBC.’
He could have gone much further, in my view. He could have said that such an agreement would be the death of the BBC as we understand it today. The licence fee is more than just a funding model. It’s entirely possible that subscription would enable the BBC to continue doing much of what it has always done. But not everything. The BBC might very well survive – but it would be a very different BBC.
All newspapers and media organisations strive to be part of the society on which they report. Apart from anything else it’s good for business. But the BBC has a problem in this regard. Unlike its commercial competition, it is seen as part of the establishment – a bit like the Church. Every so often the Church will make headlines for a day or two with, say, a controversial report claiming that the government is allowing children to suffer because it cares about the rich more than the poor. Or maybe the latest archbishop will want to prove his peace-loving credentials by criticising the nation’s warlike policies. Whatever it is, the government makes either sympathetic or slightly irritated noises and takes not the blindest bit of notice. The relationship with the BBC is rather more complicated and potentially much more problematic.
James Harding discovered that the hard way. For nearly five years he was the editor of The Times, the newspaper that had once been at the nexus of power in this country. A century ago there would have been little difference between the august Times and the equally stately BBC. Both were run by upper-class gents who’d been educated at the same schools and Oxbridge colleges, dined at the same clubs and were pretty much indistinguishable from each other. They were part of the establishment, even though that word was not yet commonly used to describe the ruling elite. And then Rupert Murdoch – the ‘Dirty Digger’, the scourge of the old-boy network – arrived on the scene. Murdoch took over the News of the World, then the Sun and eventually, in 1981, The Times and Sunday Times.
He knew exactly what relationship should exist between him and the political leaders. He was the boss and he called the shots. He also knew what he wanted from his editors. Harding either could not or would not provide it and, for whatever reason, Murdoch moved against him. As Harding put it at the time: ‘If the proprietor has a different view from his editor it’s not the proprietor who has to leave.’ So Harding got the sack and joined the BBC.
The world he was joining might have dealt in the same commodity as the world he was leaving – news – but it had a very different relationship with the people in power. If a newspaper has a strong proprietor with an ego to match and he broadly approves of what the government is doing, everything is hunky-dory. If the government steps out of line it can expect trouble. In the bad old days of Fleet Street the tale was often told of Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor of the Sun at a time when it sold far more copies than any other paper in the land – so many that he didn’t care whom he upset. Neither did Murdoch. It was a Tory paper – a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher at her union-bashing best. MacKenzie was not so fond of her successor John Major. He enjoyed telling the story of how Major phoned him the day he decided Britain had to leave the European exchange rate mechanism and asked him how his paper was going to report the story the following day. This, says MacKenzie, was his reply: ‘Prime Minister, I have on my desk a very large bucket of shit, which I am about to pour all over you.’
I doubt there are too many BBC editors who have had similar conversations with the leader of Her Majesty’s Government over the years.
The relationship between the BBC and the newspaper proprietors has always been tricky. Most of them have long resented what they regard as the overweening ambitions of the BBC. Under Paul Dacre the Mail took the view that the BBC was a brilliant organisation – so long as it stuck to a couple of TV channels and Radio 4. There were people in Broadcasting House who quietly agreed with him.
Things got nastier when the digital revolution began to change the world of journalism. Papers like The Times and the Mail watched with growing frustration as the BBC began setting up its enormously successful websites and, as they saw it, creaming off vast numbers of readers and damaging their commercial interests. They argued that it was using public funds to compete in a commercial market. It was not a level playing field. Again, they had a point. But the real enemy has been the explosion of social media. The circulation of all the newspapers is in a downward spiral and the frightening success or, if you prefer, sheer greed of YouTube, Facebook and the like are largely to blame.
Much of their content consists of material they have taken from newspapers and magazines. The papers have always argued that they should pay to use it. After all, the reporters who provided the stories had to be paid. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg claimed from the start that they should not. They argued that they were mere platforms and not publishers – which is nonsense. Even more damaging has been the effect of social media on newspapers’ revenue from advertising, their biggest source of income. They simply cannot compete. YouTube is by far the largest video-sharing platform. By early 2019 more than 400 hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. Its target in terms of viewing those clips was set at a billion hours a day. By the time you read these words it may well have passed that target.
When Harding took over BBC News he seemed a bit baffled by the corporate bureaucracy. If you run a newspaper, editorial meetings are a vital part of the day – but the shorter and fewer the better. If you run anything in the BBC (or even if you don’t but hope to one day) meetings are an end in themselves.
I once knew the chief executive of one of the early digital technology companies. It did brilliantly for a few years and then sales started dropping sharply. He announced that all meetings were to be cancelled for a month except those directly involving customers. During that month sales bounced back. The problem with doing something similar in the BBC, say the cynics, is that a third of the bosses might have nothing to do so they’d have to be sacked. Harding abhorred the meetings culture.
More important even than that, he had to cope with keeping the politicians sweet almost as much as he worried about giving the audiences what they wanted. There has always been a sense of entitlement on the part of certain senior politicians. Some believe it is perfectly proper that they should try to influence the content of news programmes – even their running orders – and the BBC should listen to what they say. It simply would not occur to them to try the same approach with other media organisations. They wouldn’t dare.
There was a blatant example of that in the general-election campaign of 2015. With just over a week to go before polling day David Cameron’s director of information, Craig Oliver, wrote to the BBC warning that there would be a ‘major complaint’ from Number 10 if BBC news bulletins did not make a Conservative promise on taxes their lead political story the following morning. The BBC did not reply. Oliver must have known the inappropriateness of his warning – he had been the editor of the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News before he went to Number 10. When Cameron resigned he gave him a knighthood.
Mostly the BBC has been pretty robust at dealing with that sort of thing and with the day-to-day political pressure. At an operational level on a programme like Today it tends to come from relatively junior figures such as ‘SPADs’, special advisers to ministers and senior MPs. If they’re trying it on they will demand that their boss get the 8.10 interview, insist that there must be no question of taking part in a discussion with the opposition and (if they’re very new to the game) even ask for the questions in advance. Not that any self-respecting interviewer has such a list. Usually the next question depends on the previous answer – or at least it should.
Not all politicians rely on assistants to do their dirty work for them. Paddy Ashdown was one of those who liked to fight his own battles. Almost literally on one occasion. I remember one morning when he burst into the Today editor’s office during the news break, so angry that I thought he was going to rip the editor’s head off the way he’d been trained to do when he was in the Special Boat Service in his youth. His language would have made a drunken squaddie blush. It was all rather frightening but he calmed down eventually. Some misunderstanding, apparently, as to whether he’d actually been booked for the slot he thought he’d been booked for. It took the editor a while to recover.
Mostly relations between the poor bloody infantry who man the phones day and night on a programme like Today and their Westminster equivalents are reasonably cordial. They have their jobs to do and they get on with it. It’s inevitable that there will be clashes. The reason the politician will refuse to do an interview is often because he’s in trouble – which is precisely the reason we think he should do it. And often vice versa. He wants to boast when things are going well. We tend to be less impressed. It all becomes more serious when the integrity of the government is being called into question. The invasion of Iraq was easily the gravest example of that during my years at the BBC.
Unlike commercial news operations the BBC has a unique institutional position at the intersection of politics and journalism. If it tries to break free of those bounds, or puts a foot wrong in the process, then the damage can be real and lasting. Such crises have become an inevitable part of the BBC’s history. Three out of the last seven directors general have lost their jobs: Alasdair Milne in 1987, after political pressure from the Conservative government, Greg Dyke, and George Entwistle. What history tells us is that when the BBC is under real political pressure or is facing a dangerous clamour in the press, it will put its own survival ahead of any consideration of the impact on its employees, even those at the very top.
If I’d had to put money on the first woman in the BBC’s long history to become director general I’d have had not a moment’s hesitation: Helen Boaden. She rose through the ranks to become the controller of Radio 4 and then the director of BBC News. She was thoughtful, clever, articulate, charming and ambitious. But she had the fatal misfortune to be running News during the Savile affair and was hung out to dry. She and her colleagues were subjected to the multimillion-pound investigation I mentioned earlier in the full glare of publicity with the chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten, even likening it to the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking. Of course, as we’ve seen, the central charge – that the BBC had conspired to drop the investigation into Savile in order to run a tribute programme – was proved to be nonsense. But by then it was too late, or at least it didn’t matter. The BBC had survived, at the cost of terrible reputational damage to some of its staff. As she put it in her leaving speech: ‘Like all institutions, there is a chip of ice at the BBC’s heart.’
Survival is not a dishonourable ambition: the BBC is, after all, a mighty force for good. Our democracy needs it. But the danger is that it survives by making too many cosy compacts with the establishment, the better to ensure its future. Where to strike the balance between ‘safe’ and edgier journalism? Robert Peston, steeped in the newspaper world, felt strongly after his years as the BBC’s economics editor that the BBC was a risk-averse organisation: ‘When the BBC wants people who can break stories it has to look to recruit from outside. When the BBC is training young journalists, it starts by telling them about the regulatory restraints: it starts with the rules and says: “Don’t you dare break them.”’
The BBC’s relationship with the royal family is a good example of how it prefers not to challenge certain established institutions. Here’s an illustration. In early December 2018, Kensington Palace contacted our ‘royal liaison officer’ (yes, there really is such a post) about a BBC News Online article that carried artwork from a far-right website depicting Prince Harry with a gun to his head and some highly stylised blood behind him. This sounds alarming and it was: the report was the result of a long investigation by BBC News which led to three men being arrested. The BBC felt it was important for the audience to understand the kind of shocking and violent material that the men had produced. It tried to include the image of the prince in a responsible way, by informing the audience in the top paragraphs of the story about the nature of the content. There was another reference in the story to the men engaging in racism and misogyny and glorifying violence and cruelty. Before readers could see the image of Harry there was a warning that one of the violent images to which the article referred would be shown.
The BBC has a team of editorial policy advisers who had cleared the image for publication, but when the word from the palace reached the director general, who happened to be abroad at the time, he ordered the image to be removed. He hoped, I suppose, that because the BBC had done its bit the row would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, Kensington Palace pushed its case and wrote to complain officially about the use of the picture. This presented a peculiar problem for the BBC. The News division stood firmly behind the use of its picture. So did the director of editorial policy. In the end, in an episode redolent of the comedy programme W1A, Lord Hall had to agree that BBC News should send a letter explaining that it was right to use the image, even though it had in fact been taken down.
The fact is, the BBC treads very carefully in its relations with the royal family – far too carefully in my (admittedly republican) view. My father could never see the point of the monarchy and, as the proverb goes, the apple never falls far from the tree. So maybe I have him to blame for my reaction to Today’s triumphal announcement that Prince Harry, no less, was to be one of our ‘guest editors’ in 2018.
That’s fine, I said grumpily, just so long as we get to ask him some proper questions and don’t allow him to use the programme as a PR exercise for himself and his family. Nobody took a blind bit of notice of me. He did exactly that, of course, and the programme was a great success. By which I mean that the audience loved it and so did the newspapers. So I was wrong – and I remain grumpy to this day.
There was, at least for me, one minor consolation some months later: a royal bid that failed to strike gold. Sarah Sands was our editor at the time and, in lots of ways, a brilliant one. We happen to share an interest in trees and she was very keen that I should interview Prince Charles about them. At least that was the ostensible reason. She wanted him on the programme because it’s good box office. And this was as good a ruse as any. How could he refuse to do an interview about such an important subject that lies so close to his nature-loving heart? Quite easily, as it turned out. He’s pretty savvy when it comes to the media and, try as she might, Sarah never did manage to persuade his minders that I would stick strictly to the script. Which I wouldn’t have.
Let’s state the obvious. The Queen herself does a good job and has done for a very long time and maybe King Charles will too. But that’s not the point. The BBC should not treat the whole royal-family apparatus as though it is beyond criticism. We should treat them with respect – but not with kid gloves. It’s a relatively small example of the nature of the BBC’s relationship with the establishment but, I think, a revealing one.
On any given day, on any given issue, the BBC must decide whether to stand or fight or just give in when it feels it is being challenged by powerful interests. Sometimes it does both. In 2014 the BBC used a helicopter to film a police raid on the home of Sir Cliff Richard. He was not there at the time. He was deeply upset and later won substantial damages from the BBC. The Home Affairs Select Committee questioned the BBC director general Tony Hall about it. One MP suggested it had been ‘OTT’. Lord Hall said: ‘Looking at the output was it used disproportionately? No … It was a proper story for us to cover, in the right matter, proportionately, which I think is what we did. I wasn’t surprised the police didn’t ask us not to broadcast the story.’
Rightly or wrongly it was a classic example of the man in charge defending his news team. The BBC was standing up for itself.
Four years later, however, he told MPs the coverage had indeed been over the top: ‘I think the helicopter was overdoing it … it was something to report but down the bulletin,’ he said.
His fleetness of foot went unnoticed by the press, and the later position was almost certainly the right one to adopt. But it shows that to survive at the top of the BBC, and for the BBC itself to survive, the DG has to make editorial judgements within the context of not just the attention of the licence-fee payers, but politicians too. There is governmental machinery that needs oiling simply because it is the BBC that is involved, rather than any other media organisation. This breeds a certain caution.
The BBC was barely out of its nappies when it faced the first real test of its independence. It was 1926 and the general strike was threatening to bring the nation to its knees. The man charged with protecting the economy was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a certain Winston Churchill. If any politician recognised the importance of connecting with the masses by delivering the right message speedily and directly into the home of the citizen, it was Churchill. He recognised that the fledgling BBC was capable of influencing its audience in a way that newspapers could not – even those few that just about managed to keep printing during the nine days that the strike lasted. When the Daily Express thundered its opinions in big, black headlines everyone knew they were the views of its owner Lord Beaverbrook. Almost all the press lords were, like him, rich and powerful men with a vested interest in the outcome of whatever it was they were reporting. The BBC was different.
Churchill had recognised as much when he was Home Secretary. That’s why, according to John Reith who was the BBC’s managing director, he ‘wanted to commandeer the BBC’ for the duration of the strike. The prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who could see the value of the BBC being seen to be independent but in truth having Reith on his side, refused.
For the first time in its short history the BBC broadcast its own news bulletins three times a day during the strike and the BBC’s official history notes that Reith himself vetted almost all of them. He also dealt with the ‘political aspects’ of the strike as well. He refused a request by the archbishop of Canterbury to appeal for an end to it but he did allow the reporting of statements from the TUC to be broadcast.
Even more controversially, he helped Baldwin to write a speech to the nation, which was delivered from Baldwin’s own home in Westminster. Hardly the action of a truly independent BBC – not least because Reith coached the prime minister in what he should say and how he should say it. And when the leader of the opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, asked for a right to reply Reith referred his request to Baldwin. Baldwin said he did not think it would be a good idea and Reith, apparently reluctantly, refused the request. A curious way for him to demonstrate impartiality, you might think, but it paid off. The day before the strike ended Baldwin ruled that the BBC should remain independent. Churchill summed up his view of that in one word: ‘Monstrous.’ But when the strike was called off, it was Reith who wrote a homily about it which ended with Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’. As the final words were read an orchestra swelled up in the background.
Later, Reith mused on whether he should have let Churchill get his way and commandeer the BBC but he concluded ‘it would have been better for me, worse for the BBC and worse for the country’. He believed that it would destroy the BBC’s reputation for independence and impartiality and that his victory would signal to the country that there was a fundamental difference – a clear dividing line – between being the national broadcaster and the state broadcaster. But Reith was nothing if not a canny operator. In her account of those early days Charlotte Higgins wrote: ‘The prime minister, the reassuring, tweed-clad figure of Stanley Baldwin, adopted a subtler position than Churchill, his chancellor. A Cabinet meeting on 11 May, according to Reith’s diary, took the view that the government should be able to say “that they did not commandeer [the BBC], but they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial”. In other words, it was seen that there were advantages in retaining at least the appearance of an independent BBC.’
And Reith had his critics – even among his own senior staff. Hilda Matheson was the first director of Talks at the BBC. She chose her words carefully: ‘It is not suggested that the weight of the BBC was not thrown preponderatingly on the side of authority; the important point, for the social historian, is that a degree of independence and impartiality could be preserved at all.’
More forceful was Rex Lambert, the first editor of the broadcasting periodical the Listener: ‘I have heard Sir John Reith many times express his pride in the part played by the BBC in supplying the public with “unbiased” news during the strike. But Labour circles received these boasts with scepticism; the only point of general agreement being that the cessation of newspapers during the strike had given broadcasting its first big opportunity of showing what it could do to influence a steady public opinion in a crisis.’
So both Matheson and Lambert, in their different ways, had their doubts about the BBC’s ability ever to be truly impartial. They recognised that there was a difference between impartiality and independence. What Reith’s approach had done was help pave the way for the BBC’s transformation, just months later, from the British Broadcasting Company to a public service corporation – with a mission ‘to inform, educate, and entertain’. When the BBC was granted a new royal charter ninety years later it repeated those three obligations but added another promise: ‘To act in the public interest, serving all audiences with impartial, high-quality and distinctive media content and services.’
So it’s worth returning to those three questions posed in The Times in light of how the BBC has evolved in the ninety years since they were first asked.
First, should the BBC ‘be as free to express opinion as the printed word or is it always to be the servant of official policy in international affairs?’
There is, as I say, a constant tension with politicians over the BBC’s reporting. It’s a necessary tension. Neither side should be overly strong or weak in the tug of war between politicians and journalists, which is an essential part of democracy. But if the BBC’s independence sometimes falls short of what it might hope for, what about its commitment to impartiality? There is a clear difference between the two. Most journalists can never be entirely independent of their financial backers – whether those backers be the proprietor of their newspaper or the BBC licence payers – but as far as the BBC is concerned its journalism must be entirely impartial. So the answer to the question of whether the BBC should be free to express opinion is obviously no – for the very good reason that the BBC, unlike the ‘printed word’, does not have its own opinions. How could it? Whose opinions would they be? The view of the individual correspondent on whatever story they happened to be covering, or some corporate view on the world in general handed down from on high? In fact, various editors in radio and television have flirted over the years with the idea of their programme having the equivalent of a newspaper’s leading article. We tried it out in the 1980s on the Nine O’Clock News with Gerald Priestland.
Gerald was about the last of a dying breed: one of those very distinguished old-school correspondents (Charterhouse in his case) whose appearance and manner were more that of a high-court judge or diocesan bishop than cynical old hack. If Gerald told you something it would not occur to you that he might be exaggerating for the sake of a headline, let alone inventing it to stand up his story. You believed him. So we sent him off around the world to give us his views on everything from the virtues of democracy to the existence of God or the culinary merits of fish and chips. He was never less than interesting but there was something about it that didn’t feel right. It became obvious pretty quickly what that was. BBC News is not, cannot be and never should be a vehicle for its journalists to give the audience their opinions. Their analysis: certainly. But not their opinions. That must be left to the people we interview or invite to present authored documentaries or commentaries clearly labelled as personal viewpoints.
The second question raised by The Times in 1926 was whether the BBC should ‘hold the balance between the parties in domestic politics’. And the answer is no. It should not even hold a view as between the parties. Too purist? I don’t think so. Many of us in the News division were uneasy at the fuss made over the appearance of Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP) on Question Time in 2009.
I happen to find Griffin and his views repugnant. I shared the views of the then Home Secretary Alan Johnson that the BNP was a ‘foul and despicable’ party and so, I’m pretty confident, did the vast majority of BBC staff. So what? There are others who approve of it. The BBC does not hold the balance: it tries to establish where the balance of public opinion lies. A party with a demonstrably large level of support will get more airtime during elections than one with a much smaller level. It really is that simple. Griffin had a right to make his case on Question Time and he did. And it backfired on him. Good.
The last Times question is the trickiest. It is an ‘either/or’: should the BBC lean towards the support of the government in power or should it have a mind of its own? That first bit is easy. Of course it should not ‘support’ the government. There might possibly be an exception if it were, for instance, a government of national unity formed in wartime when the security of the nation was at risk. Even then the BBC would have to be free to broadcast views critical of the government. But ‘a mind of its own’? If that means refusing to be dictated to by the government in power, then the question answers itself.
But does the BBC actually have a mind of its own? It is a huge news machine, bigger now than ever. It has an enormous number of different outlets from local radio to the World Service, the Today programme to Newsnight. Obviously some have vastly bigger budgets than others, but none of them is so well resourced that it can operate independently of the central machine. They must all depend on it to a greater or lesser degree.
By and large editors are allowed to edit – just so long as they realise they are part of the machine. It’s a machine that makes decisions influenced, if only subconsciously, by what it has done in the past. It can too often be willing to settle for the status quo, settling into the same lines of thought. This, even more perhaps than the charges of overt liberalism that are laid at the BBC’s door, may explain why sometimes it fails so badly to spot a change in the nation’s mood in hugely important areas. As we’ve seen, immigration was one of them. Euroscepticism was another. It’s no coincidence that they are closely linked.
Financial Times
26 January 2012
There is a wide streak of sentimentality running through old journalists. They tend to go all misty-eyed when they describe the Linotype machines in the printing room spewing out their slugs of hot metal and the building shuddering slightly when the presses started up. Those were the days, eh? When men were men (women need not apply) and it took real skill and a lifetime’s experience to compose a new front page on the stone with the deadline minutes away. Not like these days when any ten-year-old can do it with fifty quid’s worth of software and a bog-standard laptop.
What gets lost in the nostalgia fest is that the ten-year-old’s effort may actually look rather good and a modern newspaper makes its hot metal counterpart seem as enticing as a spam sandwich. As with newspapers, so with broadcasting.
When I left print journalism to join the BBC in the 1960s, television newsrooms were staffed almost entirely by refugees from newspapers – and how we chortled at the quaint old ways of our colleagues left behind. We were the future. Why would anyone want news that was at least twelve hours old when we could deliver it live? What a contrast between the old printing room where the soles of your shoes stuck to a century of spilled ink on the floor and the surgical spotlessness of the TV studio.
Look at these state-of-the-art cameras you sad old hacks and weep in frustration. Gawp at the BBC’s iconic buildings: the majestic prow of Broadcasting House, its statues of Prospero and Ariel created by the great Eric Gill as God and Man. No false modesty here. Or Bush House: marble-pillared and porticoed. Even the unlovely Television Centre, dominating the wastelands of White City and flaunting the technology that we really thought had the papers licked. We were at the cutting edge.
Well … up to a point.
We were wrong when we thought we would kill off the newspapers. They adapted to meet our threat. If they could not beat us on speed of news delivery they could – and did – slaughter us on the features pages and in the opinion columns. They chose a battleground on which the national broadcaster, shackled by guidelines that demanded impartiality and balance over polemic and opinion, could not compete.
The real threat to newspapers turned out to be not television, but the Internet: too much information and opinion too freely available to too many people. With a bit of luck, deep pockets and strong nerves some of the papers will eventually make it work for them, but the Internet threatens broadcasters too.
The danger will come if viewers no longer see any value in television channels. You hear people saying: ‘I’m a Radio 4 listener’. You tend not to hear them say: ‘I’m a BBC1 viewer’. I asked a group of bright sixth-formers at a school in Birmingham what television they watched and they said they didn’t. They watch their computers instead.
The BBC points out that the death of family viewing has been much exaggerated and we still settle down happily enough in the living room to watch Strictly or Sherlock at the weekend. Perhaps, but we probably tend to overestimate the short-term effects of new technology and underestimate the long-term effects. Who knew the iPlayer would become this popular? And who knows what effect IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) will have? At the very least, it will test to the limit the ingenuity of the channel bosses.