Posted on 08/07/2003 7:54:56 AM PDT by knighthawk
The controversy surrounding the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons scientist, has touched upon a variety of subjects. Among others, it has rekindled the debate between the notions of public and government broadcasting.
This isn't the same as the debate between public and private broadcasting. That debate is alive and well, but it's about a different topic. The debate here concerns the question of whether a publicly owned broadcaster should be under the government's control -- as it would be in most countries -- or if it should, like the BBC or CBC, be independent from the government of the day.
A BBC-type public broadcaster is responsible only to Parliament. Unlike its counterparts in most continental European countries, public broadcasters in the British or Canadian tradition report to no ministry of culture or information. British governments, democratically elected as they may be, can't tell the BBC what to do. If the BBC wants to engage in partisan politics, if it feels like opposing, discrediting, or undermining the government, it's in a good position to do so. Although a government might control the BBC's purse-strings through Parliament, and may give the board of governors some headaches at licence renewal time, no cabinet minister can give the BBC directives about daily operations, or about what it should put on the air, and how.
The public can only pay the piper for a BBC/CBC-type broadcast system; it cannot call the tune. Elected representatives must rely on the professionalism of broadcast mandarins. Voters can only hope that such broadcasters will always be objective, impartial, and pursue no socio-political agendas of their own.
A BBC/CBC-type system would give French, German, or Russian governments the willies. Tyrannical or authoritarian governments find the idea of an uncontrolled press unnerving, of course, even when the press is privately owned, but even democracies feel uncomfortable obliging taxpayers to fund an institution, one with a profound influence on ideas and social climate, that's run by an unaccountable oligarchy over which a representative government has no control.
Most countries take no such chances. Their public broadcasters usually report to government ministries.
For North Americans, "government broadcaster" may conjure up images of Muhammed al-Sahhaf, the ridiculous fellow nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" and "Comical Ali" who represented Saddam Hussein's propaganda ministry. Al-Sahhaf would blandly look into the camera and say things like: "I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad," while the U.S. armour could be seen rolling in the background. Needless to say, government broadcasters in normal countries aren't like that. On the whole, one can rely on a government-controlled broadcaster in a European democracy for the straight news no less than on the BBC or the CBC.
One couldn't rely on such broadcasters, though, to refrain from putting the government's spin on public events. Europeans have enough sophistication to discount this. They would worry more about a supposedly neutral public broadcaster, such as the BBC, claiming to be even-handed and above-the-fray while pushing an undisclosed agenda of its own.
The idea of an independent public broadcaster is predicated on meticulous adherence to certain standards. For such a system to work, the broadcaster must rigorously guard itself against being captured by one side or another in a social or political debate. It must give equal weight to competing philosophies, competing academic trends, competing political parties, without allowing itself to be taken over by either wing, be it the "Left" or the "Right."
The BBC appears to have been captured by the Left, at least on the subject of the Middle East. The British public broadcaster has been pushing its own agenda for a long time, and never more so than after the defeat of Saddam. It has tried, in effect, to reverse the result of the Iraq war by suggesting that Prime Minister Tony Blair dragged Britain into the conflict under false pretenses. Barbara Amiel called it "an attempted coup d'état by the BBC" in the Daily Telegraph last week.
To recap events, a few weeks ago the BBC broadcast a program in which reporter Andrew Gilligan claimed a source informed him that Mr. Blair's right-hand man, Alistair Campbell, adapted unreliable intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to "sex up" the argument used by the Prime Minister to push Britain into the war. (Not so, as it turned out.) A leak from the Ministry of Defence revealed the source to be a research scientist named Dr. David Kelly. The scientist admitted talking to Mr. Gilligan, but denied telling Mr. Gilligan about the prime minister's office sexing up unreliable intelligence. As the controversy continued, Dr. Kelly cut his wrist.
Was it, in fact, the BBC reporter who sexed up his informant's story, or did the informant sex up his own story because he felt it was what the BBC wanted to hear? Even if it could be determined, it wouldn't matter much at this date. What matters is that public broadcasters breach the terms of their mandates when they pursue political agendas. The BBC has been doing it, and so, I believe, has the CBC.
The difference is that the British broadcaster has been at odds with the Middle East policies of the prime minister of Britain. One wishes that the CBC had been at odds with the policies of Canada's Prime Minister in the Middle East, but it has not. Mother Corp. might as well have been a government broadcaster in this regard. Not quite "Comical Ali North" perhaps, but close.
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