THE NATIONAL FILM Theatre is to hold a series of debates and films about censorship. I hope the discussions about television are not too late to galvanise real opposition to one of the most blatant, audacious attempts to impose direct state censorship on our most popular medium.
The arts minister, David Mellor, has described a proposed amendment to clause six of the Broadcasting Bill – due to be published this week – as ‘British and sensible’. Mellor is a lawyer; he will understand that the corruption of language is the starting point. Indeed, there is something exquisitely specious about the conduct of this affair. Censorship is never mentioned. The code words are ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’; words sacred in the wordstock of British broadcasting, resonant with fair play and moderation: words long abused. Now they are to provide a gloss of respectability to an amended bill that is a political censor’s mandate and dream.
Until recently, lobbyists within the industry believed they had secured from David Mellor ‘safeguards’ to protect quality programming from commercial domination as ITV was ‘de-regulated’. Mellor was duly anointed ‘civilised’; and the lobbyists did not watch their backs, or the House of Lords.
In July, the home office minister in the Lords, Earl Ferrers, announced that the Government wanted to amend the Broadcasting Bill with, in effect, a code of ‘impartiality’ that would legally require the television companies to ‘balance’ programmes deemed ‘one-sided’. Moreover, the amendment would ‘include the ways in which impartiality could be achieved within a specific context . . .’
The point about this amendment is that it has nothing to do with truth and fairness. Charlatans and child abusers, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, all will have the legal right to airtime should they be the objects of ‘one-sided’ journalistic scrutiny. But control is the real aim. The amended bill will tame and, where possible, prevent the type of current affairs and documentary programmes that have exposed the secret pressures and corruption of establishment vested interests, the lies and duplicity of Government ministers and officials.
Thames TV’s Death on the Rock exemplified such a programme. Unable to lie its way to political safety, the government tried unsuccessfully to smear both the producers of Death on the Rock and the former Tory minister whose inquiry vindicated them.28 The amendment is designed to stop such programmes being made.
All this has clearly come from Thatcher herself, who, the record is clear, has done more than any modern British leader to use the law to limit basic freedoms, notably freedom and diversity of expression. She achieved this distinction (the Official Secrets Act, the Interception of Communications Act, the Contempt of Court Act, the Criminal Justice Act, etc.) while protecting and honouring those who have done most to damage and devalue modern journalism.
It is hardly surprising that a Government majority in the Lords saw off a very different kind of amendment to the Broadcasting Bill. This would have forced Rupert Murdoch to have relinquished control of Sky Television in 1992. It would have brought him into line with proposed rules that prevent any national newspaper owner from taking more than a 20 per cent stake in Sky’s rival, BSB, and in any new domestic satellite broadcasting service.
A skilful political game has been played. Thatcher’s stalking horse in the Lords has been Woodrow Wyatt, whose brief career on BBC’s Panorama was marked by his obsequious interviews with Government ministers. Mostly, he is remembered for his red-baiting in the electricians’ union. His prejudices are now published in Murdoch’s News of the World and The Times.
Wyatt’s refrain has been that broadcasting in Britain is a quivering red plot: ‘left-wing bias’ he calls it. In the Lords, he tabled an amendment to the Broadcasting Bill that would ‘define impartiality’. He and Thatcher agreed this at a meeting in Downing Street. When Earl Ferrers picked up the scent and replied that the Government would table its own amendment, Wyatt and his backers withdrew theirs.
At last month’s Royal Television Society dinner David Mellor went out of his way to describe the Wyatt proposal as ‘unworkable’.29 For this he received appreciative applause from television’s liberal establishment. However, the publication last week of the amendment shows that Mellor’s speech was massage and misleading.
The amendment gives Thatcher and Wyatt much of what they want, and is to be rushed through Parliament. The haste is likely to intimidate broadcasters in time for the next election; or that is the hope. Such obsession with political control stems mainly from a significant shift in how the establishment and the public regard the media. In many eyes television has replaced the press as a ‘fourth estate’ in Britain. This alarms those who believe television is there to present them, their ideology and their manipulations in the best possible light.
In contrast, much of the public now looks to television current affairs, documentaries and drama documentaries to probe the secrets of an increasingly unaccountable state. Every survey shows public approval of television current affairs, and offers not the slightest justification for new restrictions. Television’s successes have been notable. The Guildford Four might not be free now had Yorkshire Television’s First Tuesday not mounted its original investigation. For more than a quarter of a century Granada’s World in Action has exposed injustices, great and small, and made the sort of enemies of whom serious journalists ought to be proud.
Not surprisingly, the series has borne the brunt of the Thatcher/Wyatt wrath. This has come lately from the ‘Media Monitoring Unit’. Last March the MMU was exposed by the Independent on Sunday as little more than a propaganda shopfront following a series of well-publicised attacks on Radio 4’s Today programme for its ‘anti-government bias’.30 The MMU’s founder is Lord Chalfont, a pal of Thatcher, who appointed him IBA deputy chairman. Chalfont is also a pal of Wyatt, whom he supported in the Lords debate.
Factual programmes are expensive, particularly investigations that require time and patience. Under the new bill, how many companies will now risk controversy if it means having to make two or more ‘balancing’ programmes? What happened to Ken Loach’s Questions of Leadership in 1983, to be shown this week at the NFT, is salutary. Loach’s four films demonstrated how the trade union leadership often collaborated with government against the interests of millions of working people. After months of circuitous delay and decisions taken in secret, the IBA decided that each of the four films would need ‘balancing’ and that another longer programme would be made to ‘balance’ that which had already been balanced. Arguing against this absurdity, Loach maintained that because his films provided a view of trade unions rarely seen on television, they themselves ‘were the balance’. They were never shown.31
In 1983, David Munro and I made The Truth Game, which sought to decode the language of nuclear inevitability and to illuminate the history of nuclear weapons as an exercise in keeping information from the people the weapons were meant to ‘defend’. The IBA decided that The Truth Game could not be shown until a ‘balancing programme’ was made. Central Television approached several ‘pro-bomb’ names but they refused. Finally, Max Hastings agreed to make a separate programme but not to do as the IBA wanted: to rebut our film virtually frame by frame. The Truth Game was made when television reflected the bellicose establishment view of the ‘Russian threat’; this was a time when Washington’s ‘first strike’ strategy included the possibility of a ‘limited’ nuclear war. Thus, like Questions of Leadership, our film provided modest ‘balance’ to an overriding ‘imbalance’ in the coverage of the nuclear arms race. Under the new amendment, it probably would not have been made.32
That Britain already has television censorship ought to be enough to alert us to the nature of the demands of Wyatt and Co. This is known as ‘prior restraint’, a nod-and-wink system instituted in the name of Lord Reith, founder of the BBC. In 1937 Reith boasted that he had ‘fixed up a contract between Broadcasting House and the Home Office’, and had ‘made it clear that we must be told ahead of things that might cause trouble’.33 When in 1988 Home Secretary Douglas Hurd decided to make criminals of TV and radio journalists who interviewed members of certain Irish organisations, including those elected to Parliament, he first informed the BBC as was customary. ‘Impartiality’ is spoken about at the BBC as a ‘Reithian principle’. The irony is usually unintended.
Anti-bill lobbyists have argued that British television is among the best in the world. Yes, but this reputation derives, in great part, from those very ‘dissenters’ who are the amendment’s target. Wyatt and Co. would certainly have wanted to ‘balance’ John Grierson, Denis Mitchell and Norman Swallow. And great journalists like Ed Murrow and James Cameron would have been seen off, along with the likes of Cobbett, Swift and Dickens.
The Thatcher Government is not ‘misguided’, as some have suggested. Its assault on free journalism has got this far because Thatcher and her acolytes have encountered only polite and confused opposition. The politeness should end. If broadcasters and the public do not defend the public’s right to know, who will?
October 8, 1990