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Several people have commended this analysis of the BBC's problems by Ned Temko, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle. It appeared in the UK Press Gazette this week:
ALL THE PRIME MINISTER'S MEN
I come from a country which — for all its less savoury exports, from drive-by shootings and lethal injections to Britney Spears and Big Macs — has at least one abiding political glory: a genuinely free, and generally responsible, press.
Like most American journalists of my generation, I chose journalism not so much as a profession, but as a vocation, with a perhaps naïve sense of mission, in the aftermath of Watergate.
Later, as a foreign correspondent for 15 years, mostly covering wars and political upheavals in countries where “newspapers” were the propaganda organs of dictators, I came to rely on the daily bulletins of the BBC World Service as an island of dispassionate news, thoughtful analysis and balanced discussion. By all logic, in the continuing controversy surrounding the Hutton Report, I should be squarely in the corner of the now-departed Greg Dyke and all who sail in him. I certainly am on the side of those who voice alarm at the prospect of a cowed, or emasculated, BBC in the wake of Hutton. But I have also found myself cringing at the spectacle of the former director general — and even more so Andrew Gilligan — staging their public fight-back under the banner of press freedom.
I felt doubly uneasy after reading John Humphrys’ admirably loyal but tendentious arguments for the defence in his regular Sunday Times column.
Never in recent media memory can so much tripe about press freedom have been peddled with so little sense of what such freedom really means. Yes, the Hutton Report was astonishingly gentle towards Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon. Yes, it skated over the question of whether the intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s regime was accurate. And yes, as Humphrys and the BBC lawyers have noted, it failed to take account of evolving media law in suggesting that Beeb reporters and editors have a legal duty to verify every fact of an interview before broadcasting its substance, especially where public figures and the public interest are involved.
In this case, of course, the problem wasn’t the BBC’s failure to check the facts of what its source said. It misrepresented the source’s own comments, a matter that Dyke, Gilligan and Humphrys seem to want to forget. But the broader issue, surely, is whether the BBC was properly fulfilling the role of a leading news organisation in a free society. Their argument is that the Beeb had a duty to raise difficult issues —which it does — and to hold the Government to account — which it also does. But it has other duties as well, without which any news organisation risks seriously undermining the role, and credibility, of a free press.
Watergate remains an object lesson in how news media function at their best in a democracy. For month after month, my hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, did what Dyke and Gilligan and their allies would have us believe they were doing: digging into critically important issues and holding an elected government to account. But the Post (in a body of work which ultimately forced President Richard Nixon from office) assiduously checked every fact of every story, insisted on corroborative sources, separated news from opinion.
If not sure of one of the almost daily building blocks in the factual case it was building against the Nixon administration, the Post held the story. It did all this not because the law necessarily required it (coverage of public figures has always been less fettered under US law than in Britain), and still less because it anticipated the eventual equivalent of a Hutton Inquiry. But rather because it recognised that a free press ultimately lives or dies on a foundation of public trust.
No doubt there was a sense of in-house celebration when the newspaper got its man. But the banner Post headline when Nixon finally skulked out of office under the threat of Congressional impeachment is worth remembering. It was, simply “NIXON RESIGNS”.
The Dyke-Gilligan defence is that the Beeb was under sustained government pressure over its Iraq coverage (if they want a sense of real pressure, they might do worse than re-read the record of Watergate); that they had a responsibility as journalists in a free society not to buckle (so did the Post, and it rightly stood its ground); and that, in Gilligan’s words, “the vast majority of my story was true”.
Gilligan adds that “few BBC journalists could swear that they have never made a mistake”. I’d go further: no journalist, BBC or otherwise, can honestly make such an assertion. I also share Humphrys’ contention that “even the best journalists must sometimes be free to be wrong”. But that cannot be an excuse to get things wrong by cutting corners.
In his weekend column, Humphrys pointed with pride to his own scoop, three decades ago during Watergate, in reporting Nixon’s intended resignation hours before the president addressed the nation. His source, a Congressman who also happened to be a neighbour, had been in a prayer meeting with Nixon and was told by the president that he was planning to go on national television with “an important announcement”. Humphrys guessed this could only mean resignation. He is right to say that in getting the story right, he got lucky. It is worth adding, however, that no US newspaper editor of my generation — certainly not the Post’s Ben Bradlee during Watergate — would run such a story on a guess.
The flipside of the influence we command as reporters or editors hinges on telling our readers or listeners only what we know — in this case, that an important announcement was coming; and separating this from what we might speculate, in this case that the president might resign.
More broadly, we have a responsibility to recognise, and acknowledge, when we do get things wrong. Finally, we have a responsibility to remember that we — like the Post during Watergate — must distinguish between the job of reporting news and raising issues that a government may not like, and becoming in effect an opposition party.
Dyke, a few days after his forced resignation, released a letter to Tony Blair in which he eloquently, and quite properly, told the prime minister that, in a democracy, the role of a free news media was different from that of a sitting government. But in detailing steps that the corporation had taken to ensure balance, he cited a decision “to prevent any senior editorial figures at the BBC from going on the anti-war march”.
Maybe I retain the naïve sense of mission with which I entered journalism, but the very fact that such a question could arise — that top BBC staff would even contemplate joining a public protest on the most important single issue on their daily news agenda — seems to me nothing short of astonishing.
The Beeb is, of course, right to see itself as one of the critical checks and balances in British democracy.
Opinion polls by the whole range of the British news media since Hutton, moreover, have left little doubt that the country wants the BBC to fulfil that role.
So do I. But it can do so only by remembering that for a free press, particularly on stories with the impact of the war in Iraq and its aftermath, feeling vindicated by having been mostly right cannot be good enough; that when broadcast organisations or newspapers are wrong, it is in their own interest to say so; and that their role is to report the great controversies of the day, not become a protagonist in them.
Ned Temko is editor of the Jewish Chronicle. He was born and raised in Washington DC. Before becoming Jewish Chronicle editor in 1990, he was for 15 years a foreign correspondent, based in Beirut, Moscow, Jerusalem, Johannesburg and London for the Christian Science Monitor
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