Risk averse and running scared;BBC is already starting to cave in to government pressure

Guardian ^ | 09/26/03 | John Kampfner

[Pikamax]

Risk averse and running scared

The BBC is already starting to cave in to government pressure

John Kampfner Friday September 26, 2003 The Guardian

Whatever Hutton says about the government when he reports in November, the BBC will be found wanting - and the corporation's response to the verdict will determine the course of political coverage for years to come. It should accept criticism, change its procedures, but press full steam ahead with its efforts to set the news agenda, not follow it. A return to the craven days of old will alienate viewers and listeners and do further damage to our political process. The BBC is, in reality, a risk-averse institution. It hates accusations of bias. Managers open the Mail and the Telegraph with trepidation, desperate to read what they say about them and desperate to persuade their columnists to appear on programmes.

The same goes for the BBC's relationship with government. It only went out on a limb to defend its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, because of a constant barrage of complaints from Tony Blair's people. Alastair Campbell's battle with the BBC goes back a long way. In February 1999 he described the corporation as a "downmarket, dumbed-down, over-staffed, over-bureaucratic, ridiculous organisation".

He was right to say the BBC should strive to be high-minded, but that does not mean anodyne. He urged the BBC to turn away from an agenda set by national newspapers, which was also fair enough. But he then insisted that the job of the nation's broadcaster should be to allow "democratically elected politicians to speak for themselves, free and unedited". That speaks volumes.

I worked for two-and-a-half years as a BBC political correspondent, mainly on the Radio 4 Today programme. I was brought onto the programme, along with Gilligan, by Rod Liddle, the then editor, with a brief - I put it politely - to make waves. I quit at the end of 2000 because I found the corporation journalistically stifling. No sooner had I left than I was repeatedly asked back to offer my thoughts as a pundit. My experience is shared by others. What does it say about an organisation that trusts outsiders more than its own staff?

The default mechanism among many BBC journalists, editors and managers is to cause as little offence as possible. The medium of television and the corporate culture make it hard to dig for controversial scoops. Ah, the corporation's executives will retort, we have Andrew Marr, look how many stories he gets. So he does, but the fact that his is a household name demonstrates how much of an exception he is to the rule.

Journalists who get scoops at the BBC tend to be regarded as mavericks. Risk-taking is not a route to career advancement. One can already hear the crowing of those who are banking on the return to the days of safety first, when programmes would wait until a story has appeared in a newspaper before broadcasting it.

There are already signs of that. Interviews on Today and elsewhere seem to have become just a little softer. News reports on the occupation of Iraq are straining increasingly hard to give the US and British governments the benefit of the doubt.

I have had a taste of the new timidity myself. When I revealed that Jack Straw had sent Blair a memo on the eve of war suggesting that British forces not be sent into conflict, ITV and Channel 4 led their bulletins on it. The BBC gave it a two-line mention, asserting that the Foreign Office had denied the report (the Foreign Office in fact fastidiously did not deny it). I am told this one was deemed by editors to be "too hot to handle".

Were this to become a habit, were the BBC to run scared, it would be bad news indeed, and not just for the corporation. With newspaper circulation continuing to decline, more people than ever rely on the Beeb to tell them what's going on. Viewers want straight but also trenchant and original information. They have long ceased to be satisfied with the "on the one hand, on the other, only time will tell" variety that was the staple.

To encourage BBC journalists to take risks, editorial changes need to be made to reinforce a sense of confidence and collective responsibility. The procedures for correcting erroneous reports should be speeded up and tightened. Line management should be straightened to make clear where the buck stops. The governors, if they want to keep the BBC as a self-regulatory body, do have a responsibility to delve deep when a crisis breaks, and not confine their comments to the independence of the corporation. If more robust procedures are introduced, future Gilligans will be proven not 80% right but 100% right when they make serious charges on air.

Given what we now know about the deceptions on the road to war, BBC journalists, and journalists everywhere, should be asking themselves not why they questioned the government so hard, but why they didn't question it harder.

· John Kampfner is political editor of the New Statesman. His latest book, Blair's Wars, is published by Simon and Schuster

[potlatch]

If they'd just tell the TRUTH - ALL of it, there would be no problem.

[vpintheak]

Is that whining I hear?