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Hastings on Hutton (Read 2350 times)
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Hastings on Hutton
Jan 31st, 2004, 11:09am
 
Max Hastings, touted as a possible Chairman of the BBC, offers a trenchant view of Lord Hutton's findings in the Guardian.  It begins:

The longer I think about Hutton, the angrier I get. It is hard to dissent from his conclusions about the BBC's failures. Yet the damage done by his grotesquely lopsided report vastly outweighs the gravity of the offence. The corporation, guilty of lapses of journalistic judgment, has been treated as if its reporter had committed perjury in a court of law. Lord Hutton seems to expect from working journalists the standards of proof he would demand from witnesses on oath.

Lord Hutton seems unable to grasp a simple truth: all journalism is conducted against a background of official obfuscation and deceit, which does much to explain our blunders and omissions. It seems remarkable not how much journalists get wrong - a great deal - but that we are able to retrieve from the Whitehall swamp fragments of truth, and to present the waterlogged and bedraggled exhibits to readers and listeners.

I say this with regret. I am more instinctively supportive of institutions, less iconoclastic, than most of the people who write for the Guardian, never mind read it. I am a small "c" conservative, who started out as a newspaper editor 18 years ago much influenced by a remark Robin Day once made to me: "Even when I am giving politicians a hard time on camera," he said, "I try to remember that they are trying to do something very difficult - govern the country."

Yet over the years that followed, I came to believe that for working journalists the late Nicholas Tomalin's words, offered before I took off for Vietnam for the first time back in 1970, are more relevant: "they lie", he said. "Never forget that they lie, they lie, they lie."


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