Tar pits? What tar pits?
Posted on 09/25/2003 11:28:53 AM PDT by OESY
Called in to anchor the BBC's coverage of the death of the Queen Mother last year, the broadcaster Peter Sissons made a simple choice that set off a complicated furor. Instead of the traditional black necktie traditionally worn by BBC presenters at times of national mourning, he wore maroon.
It was a tiny thing, really. But there were calls of complaint, indignant editorials, denunciations on talk shows, letters to the newspapers, all showing how important the BBC is to Britain's view of itself and how angry, even personally affronted, Britons can become when they disagree with it.
It is the sense that the BBC somehow belongs to Britain, that it both reflects and leads the nation, that has made the current wave of anti-BBC feeling so palpable. The putative cause is the now-discredited report on the "Today" radio program accusing the government of "sexing up" the dossier it gave to to Parliament as justification for an attack on Iraq.
But the complaints go far beyond that single incident to accusations of bias and irresponsibility, to questions of whether the BBC's mighty news and current affairs operation still inspires the automatic respect it once did. Even people who love the BBC worry that its status as Britain's most enduringly credible institution — more trusted than the government, more respected than the monarchy, more relevant than the church — is being frittered away by editorial blunders, an inability to negotiate the changing broadcast landscape, and an aggressively adversarial approach to the news among some correspondents that presents a striking contrast to the BBC's old style of measured politeness.
"We've got an institution that is being scrutinized, competed against and attacked as never before," said the veteran broadcaster Lord Bragg, who has worked for both the BBC and commercial competitors. "The British public feels an enormous amount of affection for the BBC, and they're tremendously fond of it. But it's a bit like the government: the BBC can lose an election by default. They can't any longer take for granted their position in the country." The BBC has been in tough spots before. Successive governments dating back decades have feuded with it and even tried to privatize it, but its position has rarely been so precarious. Its charter, whose wording must be agreed to by the government, is up for renewal in 2006, and it is bracing itself for a huge battle.
Announcing the formation of a charter advisory panel, Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, said last week that everything was up for grabs, including how the BBC "should be funded and regulated and whether it delivers good value for money."
The BBC, which is regulated and championed by its own independent board of governors, has few friends in politics, of any party. Having antagonized the government by its skeptical reporting on the war in Iraq, the national health service and immigration, among other things, it has also antagonized the opposition Conservative Party, which regards the BBC as incurably left wing.
"The BBC is supposed to stand between the two political parties, but how can you have an impartial organization if the perception is that it's to the left of the Labor Party?" asked John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament and the party's spokesman on culture and media issues.
As it invests more heavily in its commercial arm, including a big push into the United States, the BBC also finds itself on the defensive over the annual license fee, the $192 (£116) that every Briton with a color television set is required to pay (owners of black-and-white televisions pay $63, or £38.50) and that brings in the bulk of its $5.85 billion (£3.53 billion) annual income.
Its audience overall share was 38.6 percent in 2001-2, meaning that more and more viewers are turning away.
"An increasing number of people do not watch or listen to the BBC, yet they're being taxed heavily to pay for it," said Jon Snow, who anchors the influential 7 o'clock news on Channel 4, a rival, commercial broadcaster. "It's ludicrous to charge someone who lives in a tenement block in Glasgow £116 for something that they won't use."
The BBC is also facing accusations that it is no longer an impartial monitor of the world's most important events, that its desire to be commercially competitive in a more opinionated media climate has distorted its values. Some of its anchors and correspondents, critics say, are as aggressive and obnoxious now as everyone else's, and there is concern that a basic sense of fairness, vital to a publicly funded institution, has been undermined.
"The BBC is no longer relied on in the way it was," said Gerald Kaufman, the Labor member of Parliament who, as chairman of the Commons committee on culture and the media, has emerged as one of the BBC's most vocal opponents. "It's placed itself in a situation where its word isn't accepted automatically anymore. It's gone from being an institution to just another broadcaster, and a shoddy one at that."
It would be hard to overstate the cultural importance in Britain of the 81-year-old British Broadcasting Corporation, as it is officially called. (Unofficially Britons call it Auntie, or the Beeb.) In an era of channel surfing and TiVo, the BBC's flagship television channels, BBC 1 and BBC 2, still command, at least among older Britons, that elusive thing known as brand loyalty.
"The BBC has been the dominant cultural institution in the country since the Second World War," said Will Wyatt, the former chief executive of BBC Broadcast. "It's the place where the country will very often look to see itself reflected, on anniversaries of great events, at big occasions, at the deaths of important people. People look to the BBC to uphold the country's values."
Until its first commercial competitor, ITV, came on the air in the mid-1950's, the BBC was a monopoly, the only game in town, and for many years was so uncritical of the establishment that it was seen as almost a government arm. During the general strike of 1926, Lord Reith, its first director-general, said, "Assuming the BBC is for the people and that the government is for the people, it follows that the BBC must be for the government in this crisis too."
Today's news operation is a far cry from those compliant days. While its traditional deference began to die with the advent of competition in the 1950's, the BBC in recent years has developed a reputation for aggression and antagonism, personified by John Humphrys, the pugnacious host of the "Today" radio program, and Jeremy Paxman, the combative presenter of the television program "Newsnight."
The BBC World Service, whose influential radio network is financed entirely by the British Foreign Office and which reaches 150 million listeners every week, has also become more aggressive and confrontational, especially on topics like the Iraq war and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. In the United States and Europe people who listen to the service's "Newshour" program say that interviewers like Judy Swallow and Lise Ducette also seem markedly more contentious than their predecessors. Those who watch BBC World, a commercial 24-hour television channel that broadcasts around the world, say that there, too, the reports seem more partisan than those of competitors like CNN or the American commercial networks.
John Lloyd, the editor of the Weekend magazine at The Financial Times, said that the BBC was misguidedly taking its reporting cues from Britain's cutthroat newspapers.
"When Paxman gets hold of a politician, he will attack and go for the weak spots with the more or less explicit aim of getting a breakdown of some kind, an admission of failure, a direct lie or an obvious evasion," Mr. Lloyd said. "It's laser-guided interviewing."
While the corporation's previous director-general, Lord Birt, was known as a systems man who sought to bring some semblance of fiscal rationality to the company, his successor, Greg Dyke, is regarded by people in the industry as a market-driven ratings enthusiast who favors aggressive journalism in which the BBC tries to break stories instead of just reporting them.
This is the approach that appears to have landed Andrew Gilligan, the reporter on "Today," into trouble when he overstepped by claiming that the government had "sexed up" the Iraqi dossier.
Mr. Gilligan's broadcast is now being considered by the independent inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly, the government weapons expert who was a source for Mr. Gilligan and who killed himself after his name became public. It is still unclear what conclusions the inquiry, headed by Lord Hutton, will reach. But the incident has already inflicted untold damage on the organization, whose top executives have have been hauled before the inquiry panel and forced to account for the incident.
So far the evidence suggests that although there was unease among some in the British intelligence services about the claims in the government dossier, there was no evidence to support Mr. Gilligan's assertion that Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair's director of communications and strategy, who has since resigned, had personally insisted that the dossier be changed so as to make a stronger case for war. The evidence also suggests that Mr. Gilligan's bosses, straight up to Mr. Dyke, were so intent on standing firm against the government's counterattacks that they blindly defended Mr. Gilligan without knowing all the facts about his flawed reporting.
Bill Hagerty, editor of The British Journalism Review, said that the Gilligan episode reflected a new, unwelcome BBC approach. "Investigative journalism is one thing," Mr. Hagerty said. "But the relentless pursuit of exclusives is another, and it's not what the the BBC should be pursuing. It's gone too far in that direction, and it has to realize that it's a public-service broadcaster with an enormous amount of responsibility to the people it serves."
But Steven Barnett, a professor at the University of Westminster, argued that the Gilligan affair was a containable problem that was not representative of the BBC's vast news operation and would not hurt the organization in the long run.
There is also the issue of anti-government bias in general, a perennial complaint over the years from both Labor and Conservative governments. Supporters of the BBC — and there are many — say that the opponents either have their own political agendas or are direct competitors who would benefit from a neutered BBC. Given the commercial pressures that drive most news operations, the publicly financed BBC, with its vast resources, 27,000 employees, reporters in 44 countries around the world and formal obligation to fairness is the best option around, they say.
"While American broadcasting has moved to the right — and nobody would believe for a nanosecond that Fox News isn't promoting the Republican agenda — the point about Britain is that the BBC news, at its best, actually is fair and balanced," said Will Hutton, a columnist for the London newspaper The Observer.
Although the government complained bitterly about media bias against the Iraq war, a study of television coverage of the war last spring by researchers at the University of Cardiff concluded that the BBC "was the channel least likely to question the government's line."
But the Gilligan affair has given new ammunition to the BBC's print enemies, Britain's unashamedly partisan newspapers. These include The Times of London, The Sun and The News of the World — all part of Rupert Murdoch's News International empire. News International also happens to control a 35.4 percent stake in BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting Group), whose 200-channel satellite package is becoming the BBC's main broadcast competitor.
Other enemies are the populist Daily Mail, which regards the BBC as a breeding ground for politically correct left-wing agitators, and The Daily Telegraph, which says that the BBC's reports are colored by leftist prejudices and has recently begun "Beebwatch," a column that looks for BBC bias.
To the extent that the BBC has changed in recent years, said Tim Luckhurst, a former BBC correspondent and producer and the author of "This is Today: A Biography of the `Today' Program," it has merely reflected broader trends, in society and in reporting.
"The BBC suffers from a massive deference deficit," he said. "It doesn't have a great deal of respect for institutions, but very few British journalists do. The accusations of irreverence and lack of respect used to be made more often against the commercial broadcasters than against the BBC. Until recently the BBC was accused of being very stuffy indeed."
Tar pits? What tar pits?
I miss Smartertimes.com, but the NY Post had a good Times Watch op ed today. See new post.
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 Schadenfreude  |
Even people who love the BBC worry that its status as Britain's most enduringly credible institution — more trusted than the government, more respected than the monarchy, more relevant than the church — is being frittered away by editorial blunders, an inability to negotiate the changing broadcast landscape, and an aggressively adversarial approach to the news among some correspondents that presents a striking contrast to the BBC's old style of measured politeness.
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