Posted on 07/21/2003 4:27:24 AM PDT by HennepinPrisoner
THE death of Dr David Kelly is a sombre event in itself and should be a cautionary signal both to the BBC and the government. It surely ought to draw a line under the wrangle between the BBC and the government about the allegations by the BBC’s reporter, Andrew Gilligan, concerning the dossier issued by the government to add strength to its justification for going to war with Iraq.
If Dr Kelly did indeed kill himself, then his death must without doubt be ascribed to this confrontation. And the instigator of that confrontation was undoubtedly the BBC.
What cannot be denied is that the BBC grew disproportionately obsessed with the story of the government’s dossier, returning to it repeatedly, almost incessantly, like a dog returning to its vomit. Giving evidence last week to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, which I chair, the BBC’s director-general, Greg Dyke (right), sought to compare his organisation either to the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail.
It is not to denigrate either that I say that the BBC should not be comparing itself to either of these privately owned, privately financed journals of news, comment and opinion.
The BBC is not a newspaper, but an independent public sector, publicly financed broadcasting organisation which should provide entertainment and news but should not have any opinions of its own on any subject of public controversy.
That was the key criterion laid down by the BBC’s first and greatest director-general, Lord Reith, and it is a criterion from which the BBC has been departing dangerously and increasingly. I do not mean that the BBC has a party-political allegiance in the way that both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail have. I mean that, on issue after issue that figures in the news, the BBC pursues an agenda.
After its coverage of the May local election results, it admitted to deliberately downplaying the extent of Conservative gains and playing up the resignation from the Tory front bench of some obscure spokesman. It has not admitted pursuing an agenda over the Iraq war, but it is widely believed that the BBC was opposed to that war, and that its coverage reflected that opposition.
Though by no means an unquestioning supporter of that war myself, I became so concerned at what I regarded as bias in the BBC’s presentation that on several occasion I wrote to complain to the BBC’s chairman, Gavyn Davies, and its head of news, Richard Sambrook. In particular, I was astounded by a whole series of instances, on the day that the statue of Saddam Hussein was hauled down in Baghdad, of BBC news and current affairs programmes claiming that rejoicing in Baghdad was confined to a small area of the city and a small minority of its population. Davies and Sambrook both brushed aside my protests. There is no doubt at all in my mind that the extent and prominence of the BBC’s coverage of the dossier story reflected a continuation of that anti-Iraq war agenda.
I believe that the way the BBC has been conducting itself, in the last year or so in particular, is not only deplorable in itself but endangers its own future. By this I do not mean that the government is planning to punish the BBC as revenge for the way it is handling news. I do believe that, in placing at hazard its Reithian values, the BBC is undermining its own future as a public-sector, publicly-funded broadcasting organisation.
Not much more than three years remain of the BBC’s current charter. Some time in 2005 at the latest the government will have to decide whether to renew the charter and funding by the licence fee. The case for that renewal weakens as the proportion of viewers of the BBC’s channels falls.
Early this year, BBC1 and BBC2 combined had nearly twice as many viewers as the satellite and cable subscription services. By last month, that proportion had fallen to three-to-two. The proportion will continue to fall. Many viewers are coming to ask why they should pay a compulsory, regressive tax to fund a service that two-thirds of them do not use.
I was struck, last week, after the Culture, Media and Sport committee held a public evidence session with the BBC's bosses, how many both Labour and Tory MPs used the occasion to make adverse comments to me about the BBC; even a year ago such comments would have been unthinkable. In particular, the unquestioning support by the BBC governors for the handling of the dossier issue has left many with the view that the BBC should be fully accountable not to those governors but to the new regulatory body, OFCOM, to which all other broadcasting organisations will be fully accountable.
If the BBC has much to learn from the events which have culminated in the death of Dr Kelly, then the government, too, needs to take a long, cool look at the way it has handled its efforts to justify the Iraq war. I make clear that I do not believe that Tony Blair and other ministers, together with Alastair Campbell, have behaved in any way improperly. I certainly do not believe that any of them should resign. I do believe that they have over-exerted themselves in their efforts to justify the war in a way which, paradoxically, has undermined that justification.
The government tried to be too clever and came a cropper. It failed to realise that the clever thing was to be simple, and that complicated arguments never win the same credence as straightforward arguments.
After six years in office these blunders are unpardonable.
This line had me in stitches....'dog vomit' perfectly describes the output from the BBC news department.
I bet! Imagine if some liberal here in the US wrote an article sternly criticizing NPR (which is guilty of exactly the same things, although it is nowhere near as powerful as the BBC).
BBC. A publicly funded subdivision of Al Jazeera.
Mr. Davies conceded that there were "some individual errors along the way," but said that research showed the BBC to be the most trusted information source in Britain.
BBC audience figures in the United States are rising, but BBC news correspondents are more aggressive and contrarian in their interviewing techniques than their American counterparts, a characteristic that can expose them to charges of taking sides among people who are accustomed to the media taking a less hectoring approach to public figures. BBC officials have responded to the criticism about their war coverage by saying they are appealing to an international audience that demands a perspective from both sides.
Israel took its action against the BBC after the network broadcast a documentary in the spring about the secretiveness of the country's nuclear program. "It was a propaganda film of the very lowest level with a minimum of journalistic ethics or standards," said Gideon Meir, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's deputy director general for media and public affairs. "It was a clear attempt to show Israel as belonging to the world of dark dictatorships."
Interviewed by telephone from Jerusalem, Mr. Meir said the program was the "final straw in a campaign the BBC has been waging for the past three years bashing Israel and its government." As a result, he said, "We are not cooperating with the BBC, we don't give them any talking heads, we don't brief them and we don't invite them to press conferences."
The Israelis brought their attitude with them to the corporation's headquarters city last week. When the visiting prime minister, Mr. Sharon, held a news media breakfast in London, the BBC was barred from attending.***
Indeed the same can be said of all American broadcast licensees of the government--never mind PBS.But given that "half the truth can be a very big lie," how in fact can any broadcaster which cannot know, let alone say, absolutely everything possibly be sure to exclude "any opinions of its own on any subject of public controversy"? The answer is that it cannot.
Thus the BBC in Britain, and all licensed broadcasting in America, is a fundamentally flawed concept. In this case the BBC, in the case of the "Gore Wins Florida" calls of the 2000 election all American broadcasting, have patently made "opinions" dominate fact. The issue is not whether malfeasance is afoot, but how to bring this runaway process under even the slightest modicum of control.
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