Watts: 'BBC tried to mould my story'; felt compelled to seek separate legal representation!

Guardian ^ | 08/13/03 | Julia Day

[Pikamax]

Watts: 'BBC tried to mould my story'

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Julia Day Wednesday August 13, 2003

Newsnight reporter Susan Watts today denounced the BBC's "attempts to mould" her stories in what she believed was a misguided strategy to corroborate Andrew Gilligan's controversial report on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

In an extraordinary development at the Hutton inquiry today, Watts revealed she felt compelled to seek separate legal representation because of pressure from her BBC managers to reveal David Kelly as her main source in order to corroborate Gilligan's story - a move she felt "was misguided and false".

When the inquiry counsel, James Dingemans QC, had completed his questioning of her today, Watts said she wanted to explain why she had appointed her own QC.

"I felt under some considerable pressure from the BBC. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate Andrew Gilligan's allegations, not for any news purposes," said Watts.

Mr Dingemans then asked Watts whether she thought her Newsnight stories corroborated Gilligan's allegations, including whether Alastair Campbell had inserted the 45 minute claim into last September's Iraq dossier.

"No I don't," she replied. "I felt there were significant differences between my reports and his reports."

"I felt the BBC was trying to mould my stories so they reached the same conclusions [as Gilligan]. That's why I sought independent legal advice. I'm most concerned about the fact there was an attempt to mould [my stories] so they corroborated [Gilligan's stories] which I felt was misguided and false," Watts said.

She described how at two separate meetings with her Newsnight editor, George Entwistle, on Monday June 30, with and the BBC's news director, Richard Sambrook, three days later, she had been pressed to reveal whether Dr Kelly was the source of the stories she broadcast at the start of that month.

Watts said she refused to name him because she felt she had a duty to protect his identity.

She changed her mind following Dr Kelly's appearance before the foreign affairs select committee on July 15.

"When he gave evidence to the foreign affairs select committee I formed the view that he would have relieved me of my duty of confidentiality to him and I would have revealed my source if I had been called before the committee," she added.

Watts said she took her decision when she read Dr Kelly's response to a committee question asking him directly whether he was the source of one of her Newsnight stories and he had responded: "No".

"It was hard to discern his response immediately but, when I saw the transcript the next day, he appeared to deny he was the source. This factor relieved me of my obligation to protect," she added.

She then revealed Dr Kelly's identity as her main source on Friday July 18, the day the weapons inspector's body was discovered near his Oxfordshire home.

That day she spent most of that day in a BBC news suite along with her solicitor and other BBC executives and journalists.

The day was spent working on the statement, published on Sunday July 20, in which the BBC finally admitted Dr Kelly was the source of its stories about the Iraq dossier.

"For the whole of that day I was in the news suite where that process was taking place. I sat separately, with my solicitor, from the other people involved in a separate room," Watts said.

"I wouldn't complain about that process. Everyone was very upset. But I was concerned it might appear that it was Dr Kelly's death that prompted me to reveal his identity," she added.

In a morning full of extraordinary revelations, Watts also accused Dr Kelly of being "less than frank" when he gave evidence to the FAC.

Watts said she viewed Dr Kelly's evidence to the committee on the internet and also read his transcript the following day.

In his evidence, Watts said, he appeared to distance himself from the quotes he had given her and which she had used in her broadcast.

She added: "On listening to that evidence... I would have felt he had relieved me of my obligation of confidentiality to him."

She insisted she did not name Dr Kelly because of his death but because of his evidence to the FAC.

[mondonico]

The BBC is being revealed as the agenda-driven, unaccountable, elitist organization that it is.

NPR better take notice (they won't).

[thoughtomator]

How can anyone treat the BBC seriously now that they have run for months with a constant drumbeat based on a false story that had exactly one source??

[Cicero]

I think it was obvious from the time of his suicide that this guy naively leaked to the press for political reasons, got way in over his head when some careless remarks which he may have thought were off the record were blow up out of proportion, and he was revealed as a disloyal employee who had tried to undermine his bosses.

The BBC also got in way over their heads. When their source committed suicide it put them in a very bad light, and deservedly so. I hope they lose their huge government-sponsored tax monopoly. It's billions--far larger than any of the subsidies given to PBS.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I've mislaid today's Wall Street Journal but it has a letter to the editor from the BBC. The burden of the letter was that the BBC is no more anti-Republican than the British population at large, and slightly more likely than the rest of journalism to take the government at its word.

Well, what does that buy the listener if a lot of British citizens are WRONG? To that question we would expect to hear the Pontius Pilate challenge, "What is truth?"

That is all very well, in the fog of current events--but we can look back and critique journalism with hindsight. In retrospect, the dreadful sandstorm "bogged down" the coalition not at all. It simply gave the Iraqi army the illusion of safety, under "cover" of which they moved their forces. They thus revealed their locations to our radar and subjected themselves to uttter devastation by aerial assault.

Peter Arnet had the same defense; he claimed that his description of the "difficulties" our forces were faced with was simply the consensus of what journalists in Baghdad were saying. And that was a slightly less negative perspective of coalition progress than "Comical Ali" was promulgating on Iraqi TV. BUT IT DID NOT CORRESPOND TO REALITY ON THE GROUND. Anyone who didn't know that then has been in denial for a long time if they don't know it now.

Journalism systematically averts its gaze from the trail of fatuous errors it has made by systematically discounting what conservative people (e.g., military commanders) have told them. Journalism is the establishment in America, to the extent that it is able to systematically divert our attention from its errors.

Many closed-minded people take for granted that journalism is the pursuit of truth; it is not. Journalism is the pursuit of ratings via nonfiction entertainment. And that makes journalism essentially as superficial and self-important as the rest of the entertainment industry.

Urban legends are circulated on the Internet by people who find the stories too good to be passed up--but the same mechanism exists among journalists. The fact that those same stories are too good to be true is, in their thinking, beside the point. Apparently the "McCarthy era" myth fits that bill precisely; the story of the fearless journalists facing down the ruthless right-wing crackpot is so flattering to journalism that no journalist can resist it.

It seems to strike most historians the same way. But, according to Ann Coulter, all historical accounts of "McCarthyism" rely on the same "secondary sources" as the original journalism did. In other words, the whole thing is an urban legend.