This New Noise (13 page)

The crux came at 6.07 a.m. on 29 May 2003, when Andrew Gilligan reported on the
Today
programme that, according to a source, the Joint Intelligence Committee report on Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons capability had been ‘sexed up’ by the government to include a claim that such weapons could be activated within 45 minutes of an order. That there had been any deception was fiercely denied by the government, and it was amid the ensuing maelstrom that the man eventually revealed as the story’s source, Ministry of Defence weapons expert Dr David Kelly, took his own life. Lord
Hutton’s controversial and contested report into Kelly’s death was deeply critical of the BBC and precipitated the resignation of both the director general, Greg Dyke, and the chairman, Gavyn Davies. That simultaneous toppling of the twin titans of the BBC was an unprecedentedly traumatic event in the history of the corporation. It was made all the more bitter by the fact that the struggle was fratricidal: Dyke’s appointment as DG had been controversial because he had been a donor to New Labour, and an old friend and neighbour of the Blairs. It was a deeply shocking event: the national broadcaster’s DG and chairman both brought down by a government from which it was supposedly independent, and a left-of-centre government at that. But it has always been foolish to assume that left-of-centre governments are more intrinsically sympathetic to the BBC than Conservative ones. Marcia Williams, in her memoir of working at Downing Street, had this to say about Harold Wilson’s relations with the BBC, for example: ‘It is untrue to say that Harold has an obsessive dislike for the BBC as a whole. He is exasperated by the bureaucracy … What he has often objected to, and will no doubt continue to do so, is the way it has been administratively run …’ Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Looking back, it is Sambrook’s view – one that would not be uncontested among his former colleagues, nor indeed among the dramatis personae of the Labour government – that ‘what Kelly told Gilligan was right, was the right story. Unfortunately Gilligan was sloppy in the way he reported it, the
Today
programme was sloppy in the way they handled Gilligan and by the time the row was
happening the BBC was at full defensive mode with its old tactic of “Let’s put up a wall of defence and shelter behind it.” But the mood within Downing Street was not going to put up with that.’

He continued, ‘I suppose in a sense what I’m saying is that Kelly was a kind of mini-Edward Snowden story.’ Sambrook was referring to the whistleblower who, in 2013, had provided the
Guardian
with information about US and UK government surveillance of phone and Internet connections, sparking a worldwide debate about surveillance and security. ‘Kelly was saying that actually this intelligence has been completely misused, and many people inside the tent knew it and were uncomfortable about it. 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.’

Sambrook and I were talking over indifferent coffee in the faintly shabby bar at the top of the high-rise St George’s hotel, next door to Broadcasting House. He left the BBC in 2010, and later became professor of journalism at the University of Cardiff, applying his mind to the academic study of the mechanics and ethics of news. He gazed distractedly out of the window, down on to the city far below. ‘After Hutton, I’d say it was about two years till I got over it. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I went to bed at night, every single day. What happened
there? What could I have done differently? To what extent was I culpable, or not culpable?’

He went on:

Where does BBC journalism stand in the post-Hutton era? James Harding, the former
Times
editor who joined the BBC in August 2013 as head of news, took the opposite view from Sambrook. ‘The BBC has over the years shown it is entirely independent. There are always debates about coverage. But the independence of the BBC and the BBC journalists I think is central to the public’s trust in the BBC. That’s the reason why it has the support it does,’ he told me.

Nick Robinson, who was at ITV at the time of the Hutton inquiry, and who went on to become the BBC’s
political editor, was more optimistic than Sambrook when we spoke. Hutton ‘didn’t have the chilling effect it might have done’, he said. He had never bought the idea, he said, that the BBC was ‘being cowed’. Robert Peston, the BBC’s economics editor, agreed: ‘I have not felt haunted by Hutton,’ he said. When he broke the story of the failure of the bank Northern Rock in 2007 – withstanding complaints from senior politicians, the Financial Services Authority and others ‘who were claiming I was somehow out to destroy the British economy and I should be shut down’ – he felt completely supported by the BBC.

Far more crushing, Robinson said, to the temper and spirit of BBC news had been the aftermath of the troubles at
Newsnight
– the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine affairs and the resignation of George Entwistle. ‘It produced an atmosphere of flatness at best and despair at worst. If organisations can be depressed, it was depressed. Our organisation stood accused first of suppressing a major story then of carelessly libelling a public figure.’ The arrival of Hall and Harding had, he said, ‘freed people from the introversion – until the next crisis rolls along, of course’.

When I visited Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East editor, at home in London between trips to Syria in the violent spring of 2014, he fondly remembered Harding as a young reporter on the
Financial Times
who stayed on the couch in his room in the El Rancho hotel during ‘a long stakeout’ in Port-au-Prince in 1994. The point was: Harding had earned his spurs; he had done his time as a reporter in the field, Bowen felt. Harding himself told me, when we met in May 2014, that he was committed to
investigative journalism: ‘I think the issue with investigative journalism is that it takes a lot of time, real resources, and a lot of discipline in pursuing the story, addressing every angle, thinking it through. And we live in a world where there are quite a lot of litigious people. You’ve got to be able to take those pressures on.’ Investigative journalism was, he said, ‘one of the central roles in everything we do in current affairs. And should be true across all of our news output.’ That summer, though, it was announced that the editor and deputy editor of
Panorama
, the BBC’s flagship investigations show, would be leaving their roles, and shortly afterwards its four dedicated reporters were made redundant.

How far is the BBC willing to take its journalism up against the establishment – and the government, which in the end seals the BBC’s fate? Others I spoke to within the BBC were much less confident than Harding. ‘The BBC is at its highest levels concerned with not offending the establishment, not making enemies in important places. Its core purpose – independent and impartial journalism – clashes with its survival instincts, and that goes back to the beginning,’ said one senior journalist who, in a time of job losses, asked not to be named.

Another took an even bleaker view: ‘Newsgathering – covering the stuff that is happening in the world – we do that brilliantly. The BBC newsgathering operation is genuinely a wonder to perceive. But digging out original stories? No, sorry. Nor has it ever done. When push comes to shove, senior people at the BBC consider themselves part of the establishment.’

The journalist saw the problems at
Newsnight
– the failure to run Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones’s investigation into sex-abuse allegations against Jimmy Savile, and the mistaken identification of Lord McAlpine on social media as a paedophile – as symptomatic of a bloated, anxious management, their timidity exacerbated by the fact that few had themselves worked as field producers or reporters. The employee called such managers, as well as the departments in charge of editorial policy and compliance, ‘journalism deterrence squads’ who were strangling the efforts of colleagues ‘like Japanese knotweed’. Journalists were afraid of not being backed up by the BBC, added the employee, when the pressure was on – and compared the corporation’s approach with the much more bullish, confident and ‘cheeky, risk-taking’ stance of
Channel 4 News.
‘The BBC always buckles, always folds. You feel that as a journalist, they will abandon you; if you take a risky story to them it’s as if you are actively trying to get them into trouble. There is an institutionalised anxiety and mistrust.’

Peston, who started his career in newspapers, said, ‘There is a risk-averse culture that means 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.”’ Bowen paid tribute to an organisation ‘in which there’s a great deal of creativity, where programme-makers really believe in what they’re doing, and in which people, despite everything, are proud to work’. But he, too, believed that the BBC was ‘overly bureaucratic’. At times,
he said, he has felt the BBC has ‘lost sight of our core business, which is broadcasting. It’s the British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s not the British Management Corporation.’ He added, ‘I think things are changing, but we have also been too worried about what other people think, particularly the
Daily Mail.
There are times we could have, instead of apologising, stood up for ourselves a bit more strongly.’

A combination of anxiety and bureaucracy had led to some absurdities. As a senior correspondent of thirty years’ standing, Bowen had, in 2013, been required to undertake an online multiple-choice training course, ‘which had a scenario in which I was doing the morning shift on a local radio station in the Manchester area, and reports were coming in from the police of two Manchester United players involved in an incident in a nightclub’. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I could have been trying to find out what was going on in Syria while I was doing that. That’s absolutely insane, that kind of stuff.’

I asked another senior journalist whether the BBC had moved to the right, as some would argue. There was laughter. ‘Undoubtedly. You’re not supposed to read the
Guardian
at the BBC, because it confirms everyone’s prejudices. For years it has been more important at the BBC to be seen reading the
Telegraph
or
The Times
.’ Peston agreed. The BBC is often characterised as having an institutional bias to the left, but, he said, ‘What actually sends BBC news editors into a tizz is a splash in the
Telegraph
or the
Mail
, rather than one in the
Guardian
. Over time the criticism of the
Mail
and the
Telegraph
that we are too
left-wing has got to us. So BBC editors feel under more pressure to follow up stories in the
Telegraph
and
Mail
than those in the
Guardian
.’ He added, ‘For example, for a long time I was saying that the phone-hacking scandal [pursued by the investigative reporter Nick Davies of the
Guardian
] was a huge story. Basically, I was talking to people who didn’t want to hear. It took us a long time to get stuck in. The fact is that we don’t get criticised for not following up the
Guardian
, but we do get criticised if we don’t follow up the
Mail
or
Telegraph
. There is no institutionalised bias to the left – if anything, it is a bit the other way.’

I also wondered whether there was what Birt might have once called a bias against understanding in BBC news and current affairs: I was thinking of the almost invariably aggressive tone of its news interviewing. Being tough on politicians was one thing; assuming that all-comers were, to paraphrase Jeremy Paxman ‘lying bastards lying to me’ was, surely, deflating rather than aerating of debate. News interviews, especially political interviews or those with a strong streak of controversy in them, seemed to have become unhelpfully one-note, with subjects ironing out all subtlety in their answers in order to project their ‘message’ and interviewers interrupting them at every turn. Hall, when I discussed this notion with him, rejected it. ‘We give the British public more of a platform to understand what’s important in the world than any other broadcaster and it’s one of our prime purposes. And you do that in all sorts of different ways and different styles,’ he said. But Hall acknowledged the aftermath of his
predecessor’s reign. ‘After the last two to three years the organisation’s taken a real battering and I think it did at times lose its sense of confidence,’ he said. ‘I want to ensure that the BBC has got confidence to do great journalism, bold journalism and journalism that people admire.’

What was clear to me is that no other news organisation existed under the pressure that BBC news withstands. An honestly made mistake at a newspaper such as the
Financial Times
or
Telegraph
, or even at a broadcaster such as Sky or
Channel 4 News
, might lead to embarrassment. But the BBC, at the centre of our culture, funded by the public, has its own magnification effect. It is, as Hugh Carleton Greene put it as far back as 1969, ‘the universal Aunt Sally of our day’. At the BBC, a mistake can lead to humiliation in the national press, to employees being doorstepped by newspapers, to questions in parliament, to multimillion-pound semi-judicial inquiries. The whole edifice can tremble; the well-being of the entire organisation can founder; its future funding can be imperilled.