Hutton heat knocks Auntie out cold
http://media.guardian.co.uk/huttoninquiry/story/0,13812,1133462,00.html BBC chairman Gavyn Davies might have failed to act as the corporation's inquisitor-in-chief, but Andrew Gilligan's error was no 'Jayson Blair moment'
Emily Bell
Wednesday January 28, 2004
Gavyn Davies' resignation became inevitable from the moment the Hutton report rolled off the presses and was disseminated to the principals in the piece and, indirectly, to the political editor of the Sun.
Mr Davies rightly bore the brunt of responsibility for failing to make sure that the governors played their part as inquisitors as well as protectors of the BBC. It is clear from the damning Hutton report that this did not happen.
It is very sad, even for those of us who have been consistently critical of the governors' opacity and apparent lack of public service nous, that an essentially honest man like Davies departs in these circumstances. He undoubtedly did what he thought was right at the time, but in doing so left himself and his organisation more vulnerable.
It does not alter the fact that particularly after Hutton, the BBC needs strong and truly independent governance - and this should be delivered in the format of a reworked board of governors, rather than an immediate retreat to the untried Ofcom. (Though Luke Johnson must be kicking himself for taking up the chair at Channel 4 before knowing the 'big one' should come up).
Having taken its medicine almost immediately, the lingering question for the BBC is what now?
It can feel rightly aggrieved by some of the astonishing conclusions made by Lord Hutton. His narrow legalistic terms of reference allowed him to confer a magic immunity on government while simultaneously crushing the BBC. Lord Hutton was clearly inclined to the view that journalists who are loose with their language - and the civil servants who consort with them - deserve a plague on their houses. No mitigation was allowed for the post-hoc correction of Andrew Gilligan's 6.07am Today programme report.
Is the BBC's editorial system really 'defective'? Yes, there were defects in Gilligan's reporting, in the editing of the programme and in the managerial follow-up to the story. Greg Dyke and the director of news, Richard Sambrook, did not trawl through Gilligan's notebook in a forensic manner.
This was perhaps understandable, as their reporter had spent a great deal of the previous four months reporting for the corporation from Iraq. They were wrong not to protect themselves by being more rigorous with Gilligan whilst wanting to protect him. However, the persistent, vexatious and unfounded complaints from Downing Street over the impartiality of the BBC's war reporting had created an atmosphere which was not properly acknowledged in Hutton's conclusions.
BBC News and Gilligan did make one 'grave error' - at 6.07am, which it subsequently acknowledged, but the corporation refused to accept it was wrong to broadcast the story at all. Greg Dyke made a filmed apology for the incorrect content of 'part of the report', but was otherwise robust. This should not be the 'Jayson Blair moment' for Sambrook and Dyke - it is not the tip of an iceberg of dozens of fabricated reports, a la the infamous New York Times reporter. Gilligan's mistake might be indicative of an institutional arrogance that the BBC needs to address, but not of a generally slack attitude to news reporting. Anyone who doubts this should take into account the rigorous coverage the BBC gave to the Hutton report today, while Tony Blair was using the opportunity to demand yet more personal apologies and make smirking asides about the future governance of the BBC.
Alastair Campbell's ungraciousness in victory was even more marked, implying that a number of resignations ought to be fitting and would have happened had the criticism been towards the government.
The overall impression, albeit a highly personal and biased one, is that the BBC is still more concerned with the dissemination of unspun fact than either Mr Blair or Mr Campbell.