When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  It’s hard to look at some of these pictures. Harder to tell the story of Ahmici without them. What happened here can frankly not be shown in any detail. But the room is full of charred remains of bodies and they died in the greatest agony. It’s hard to imagine in our continent and in our time what kind of people could do this.565

  If one accepts Richard Sambrook’s 2012 definitions the logical conclusion is that Martin Bell was right in maintaining that his 1993 Panorama did not ‘cross a line’. He had been both objective because his judgement was based on facts and evidence and impartial because he had not been biased. He had also avoided ‘value-free moral equivalence’.

  Echoing that conclusion the current BBC guideline on impartiality says that BBC staff ‘may offer professional judgements rooted in evidence. However it is not normally appropriate for them to write or present personal view programmes … on controversial subjects in any area.’566 Bell’s final piece to camera would appear to have been a ‘professional judgement rooted in evidence’ rather than a ‘personal view’ even if at the time his colleague John Simpson said it clearly was.

  Martin Bell has, however, owned up to one crossing of a line and his admission came in a rather unlikely place, on an imaginary desert island, between listening to ‘Rock of Ages’ by the ‘Queen of Gospel’, Mahalia Jackson, and ‘On the Road Again’ by the American country singer Willie Nelson. On Desert Island Discs in July 2001 Bell looked back on his career and explained how in 1980 he had been in El Salvador when fifty people were crushed to death after shots were fired at a crowd attending the funeral of the campaigning Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero. Bell said, ‘I reproached myself afterwards, saying surely you could have done something to help people.’

  So when in Bosnia he saw 20,000 people being driven from their homes,

  obviously I felt guilty that I was unable to help them. I was the only person there with a set of wheels, I convinced myself that it was important to get the story out and I was editing it and this UN official, Colm Doyle, who later became a very good friend of mine, an Irish army officer, arrived, checked in, I rushed down, I said look what’s happening, you can’t let it happen, go and see the Serbs, tell them to stop them doing it, and that’s not really a journalistic function … I crossed the line.567

  Twenty years after his Bosnia Panorama, Martin Bell was still prepared to stand up for what he said. He was still proud to be a member of the ‘something-must-be-done club’. He said, ‘I find the company I keep there more honourable, and easier to live with, than those who associate with the opposing faction, the “Nothing Can Be Done Club”.’568 There was no mention of a ‘Here’s what’s happening, I’ll leave it to you to decide’ club.

  As for any longer-term legacy of his work, Bell light-heartedly and rather modestly offered this forecast in a book of his poems:

  When I’m gone I hope you’ll pause a minute,

  And say, sadly not to my face,

  The world is a slightly less worse place because of my time in it,

  But just as probably you’ll recall,

  I made no bloody difference at all.569

  10

  SIDNEY BERNSTEIN

  On his way to a seat in the House of Lords, Baron Bernstein caused more trouble than anyone in the history of British commercial television. The evidence is in the files of past broadcasting regulators stored safely in the archive section of Bournemouth University.

  To the staff of Granada Television Sidney Bernstein was the founder of their company, a giant of a figure in their creative lives. But the archives reveal that, to the authorities, ‘all who work on Granada’s current affairs seem to some extent to carry the Bernstein chip on their shoulders’. This was to be a constant issue for two decades.

  An example is provided by a script for Granada’s regional news for the north of England on 24 November 1965. What was transmitted on Granada’s Scene at Six Thirty that day was out of the ordinary for a number of reasons.

  The script, read by two presenters in a studio in Manchester, had nothing to do with the north of England. It was about the next day’s elections in Northern Ireland.

  To produce an item, any item, about Northern Ireland politics on British television in 1965 – before the civil rights protests and the subsequent IRA campaign made global news – was most unusual; certainly the BBC discouraged network producers from enquiring too much into the politics of the province.

  Some of the terminology used in the script, such as references to Northern Ireland as the ‘six counties’, was that of the minority nationalist community.

  Importantly, the item was probably the most devastating critique of the province’s government ever broadcast at that time. It talked of the Unionist Party being ‘the political arm of the Orange Movement … which for forty-four years has ruled Ulster from Stormont’. Roman Catholics were described as being ‘victims of a religious apartheid which stops them from getting the best jobs or adequate living conditions’.

  An independent historian would probably conclude that, with hindsight, this was a fair analysis of the situation in Northern Ireland in 1965 as the leader of the Unionist Party, Captain Terence O’Neill, was making the very first tentative steps towards reform.

  But history also records that the then regulator, the Independent Television Authority (ITA), ‘concluded that the item failed to exercise due impartiality (Section 3 (1) (f) of the Television Act) and that it editorialised contrary to Section 3 (2)’. The broadcast had, after all, according to the ITA, ‘given great offence to the Government of Northern Ireland’.570

  Sidney Lewis Bernstein was never a reporter himself but as one of the major figures in the British media for three decades – from cinemas to TV and publishing – he fought a relentless battle with the authorities over what the journalists he employed could say on the air.

  Ray Fitzwalter, one of Granada’s most distinguished journalists, wrote that ‘Sidney Bernstein was born with a silver screen in his mouth, having inherited a small cinema chain’.571 It was 1922; Bernstein’s father, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, had died and Sidney, then aged just twenty-three, took control of the family’s twenty cinemas around Britain. He started Saturday morning film shows for children. The name Granada was, according to company mythology, inspired by a walking tour which Bernstein made of southern Spain.572

  Through the Film Society, which he founded in 1925, Bernstein got to know everyone who counted in the movie business and when war broke out he appeared to be a natural choice to become the film adviser to Winston Churchill and his coalition government. One of the roles was choosing films for Churchill to watch for relaxation at weekends. But the appointment was not so straightforward. MI5 was worried. A Security Service report from 1936 released from MI5 files in 2010 said, ‘Sidney Bernstein is now reliably reported to be an active secret Communist … He always cuts the news films in his cinemas so that Fascist scenes etc. which might make a favourable impression are removed. Items about Russia are given prominence.’573

  The MI5 dossier said Bernstein had helped the Soviet embassy to vet journalists applying to go to Moscow and had provided funds for a Czech-German agitator named Otto Katz. Bernstein renounced any links with the Communist Party in 1939 when the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression pact with Germany but MI5 said, ‘It would be unwise to accept this statement at face value.’574

  Bernstein undoubtedly had Communist friends and was involved in projects that had Communist support but there is no hard evidence he was ever a party member. He did belong to the Labour Party and was a local councillor in London in the 1930s.

  Despite MI5’s concern he was confirmed in the wartime film adviser role, and set about it with real vigour. The British government through the Ministry of Information (MOI) and the Foreign Office wanted to influence American opinion in favour of Britain, but the view in New York was that the Germans were much more effective in sending their newsreels over by air than the British. The German newsreels also had better war co
verage, partly because of what one British official called ‘the German system of placing cameramen (and killing them off) in the front line of every advance’.575 The British propagandists were very keen to monitor the output of their Nazi equivalents. Sidney Bernstein had the answer.

  He arranged that German newsreels sent to America via neutral Portugal would be intercepted in Lisbon, flown back to Britain and copied, and the originals then flown back to Portugal and put back into the distribution chain without anybody noticing. The idea worked for six months until a film-handler in Portugal spotted that the film had been through British hands from notes in English which someone back in Britain had accidently left attached to the film.576

  In 1945 Bernstein was with Allied troops who entered the Belsen concentration camp. He had been working with the Psychological Warfare Division of the Allied forces. He told his commanders, ‘My personal opinion is that we need a first-class documentary record of these atrocities and we cannot be content with the rather crude and un-thought-out newsreel so far shown.’ He wanted it to be shown to German civilians, who, in his view, were still in denial that they knew what had been happening in the camps. In the film he wanted, for example, to name the German companies who made the incinerators for the death camps. He called a friend, Alfred Hitchcock, for advice on the editing. No detail was overlooked, nothing was left to chance. But there was a problem ahead.

  The British government was initially in support of the project. However, as time went on some officials argued that as the British wanted the Germans on their side in rebuilding the country, why denounce them to their faces? Bernstein pushed on with the film but he was told there was ‘no hurry for it’. He ‘didn’t take kindly’ to this. The British government finally shelved the production and never showed it publicly. This probably wasn’t Sidney Bernstein’s first battle with authority about what should be shown on a screen, but it wouldn’t be his last.

  We beg to differ

  In 1948 Granada applied for a licence for a TV station but this was only ‘to transmit films to our various Granada theatres’ from a central control room. A clever idea, years ahead of its time and one which would have saved Granada a lot of money on prints and projectors, but not exactly a TV network as we know it. Nothing much came of it.

  In 1949 when the Beveridge Committee on broadcasting was set up, Bernstein’s politics overruled his business instincts. Instead of joining the growing campaign for a commercial, advertising-funded television network, Granada took the Labour Party line on the need for state control of broadcasting and argued that ‘the right of access to the domestic sound and television receivers of millions of people carries with it such great propaganda power that it cannot be trusted to any persons or bodies other than a public corporation or a number of public corporations’.577

  When in 1953 the Conservative government made it clear that it didn’t agree and that commercial television would be allowed, based on regional franchises, Bernstein did an elegant about-turn: ‘It seemed prudent to update our application for a licence, to keep it alive.’ When Granada duly won the licence for the north of England part of the new ITV network and went on the air in May 1956, Bernstein made a gesture to his previous belief in solely public broadcasting by ensuring that one of the first Granada programmes shown was a tribute to the BBC.

  Sidney Bernstein was now absolutely in his element. He had his own TV station with its own headquarters in the centre of Manchester. He talked as if he had his own country – ‘Granadaland’ – stretching from Liverpool to Hull. When in later years the franchise map was changed and the eastern half was hived off into a separate area from Granadaland, Bernstein observed, perhaps half-jokingly, that ‘if the territory of Granada is interfered with in any way we shall go to the United Nations’.578

  Not that the chairman of Granada needed to spend undue amounts of time in Granadaland. He would fly in on the Granada plane from Kent, spend two or three days in Manchester then fly home. For many years he refused to appoint any directors who lived locally in the region.

  Ray Fitzwalter has written that working for Granada ‘was like being employed by the Arts Council one week and a second-hand clothes shop the next’. Broadcasting was ‘a moral and cultural imperative’ delivered under rigid cost control. Bernstein would tell staff there was too much sand in the fire buckets and that pencils should be cut in half to get best value for money.579

  But Bernstein reserved his main fire for what was known simply as ‘the authority’. One colleague later reflected, ‘In Sidney’s view Granada was a sovereign state, proudly independent and morally at least the equal of any Broadcasting Authority.’

  The Independent Television Authority files at Bournemouth University are littered with exchanges of fire between the two sides, mostly arising from the statute which the ITA judged Granada had breached, not for the first time, when it transmitted its analysis of Northern Ireland to the viewers of northern England.

  The key clause was included in the first Television Act of 1954: ‘All news given in the programmes, (in whatever form) is presented with due accuracy and impartiality.’ This was the first time that such a requirement had been placed on any British broadcaster. Impartiality had to be observed on all programmes about ‘matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy’.

  The man in charge of enforcing this was the first director-general of the ITA, Sir Robert Fraser, an Australian who had come to Britain as a student at the LSE. Like Bernstein he had been a Labour supporter and had stood as a Labour candidate, in his case as an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament in 1935. He had also been a leader-writer on the Daily Herald. Like Bernstein he had worked for the Ministry of Information during the war, but whereas after the war Bernstein had gone back into private enterprise, Fraser had stayed firmly within the public sector. For the next decade and a half the two men were never to agree on what ‘due impartiality’ actually meant. As Bernstein once teased the ITA, if Granada made a programme on drunk drivers would there have to be one view in favour and one against?

  In May 1956, only a year after Granada first went on the air, the two men met face to face and Fraser warned Bernstein that the ITA was anxious about ‘an apparent overall bias to the left in Granada programmes’. Bernstein said ‘Granada aimed to bring a fresh eye to social and political issues’ but claimed this was not inconsistent with the Act and ‘could not be taken as imparting a socialist bias’.580

  Fraser said they would be watching carefully in the future but nothing much seems to have changed because two years later, on 18 March 1958, Fraser sat down and wrote a memo pouring out his troubles with Granada. He sent it to the ITA chairman, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had just taken the job after retiring as the top civil servant in the Foreign Office following the Suez crisis. The memo was headed ‘The Politics of Granada’.

  I think the time has come when I must commit to writing my increasing anxiety about the general political tendency of Granada programmes.

  One must begin by admitting that the evidence is not very easy to assemble. There are very few cases on which it is possible to lay one’s finger…

  The fact remains that no one watching Granada programmes over a long period could be left in any doubt that the company has its own political outlook and that this finds consistent expression in its programmes…

  Granada has lately had documentary and discussion programmes on the treatment of homosexuals, of murderers, and of coloured immigrants, and really one is left in no doubt that Granada is opposed to capital punishment, to the present laws about homosexuality, and to the way in which coloured people are treated…

  It is almost as if, while the rules of the road were generally observed, none the less the traffic always seems to come in the same direction.

  Fraser then moved on to the two groups of people who he felt sure would agree with him. One was the other franchise-holders, who were becoming ‘increasingly restless’ about showing controversial Granada pr
ogrammes on their regional stations. The other was the Conservative Party, whose members ‘have lately let me know in no uncertain terms that their anxiety is beginning to change to anger’.

  Having set out his views Fraser concluded by admitting, ‘I am at a loss to know what to do about it.’

  His chairman replied with a handwritten note at the bottom of the memo: ‘I also don’t know what to do.’

  Fraser decided that the ITA could at least keep a ‘consistent log of all Granada programmes with any kind of political content’. There is no sign of a log in the ITA files or further reference to it. But undoubtedly ITA executives were carefully monitoring Granada’s programmes.

  Tim Hewat first came across Granada folk in a bar in Manchester in the early hours of one spring day in 1957. An Australian, he was the northern editor of the Daily Express and when he finished work around midnight he would go to the Midland Hotel where Granada staff also liked to meet up after work. He was asked to meet Bernstein and hired to assist him on special projects.

  One Granada veteran wrote of him, ‘Tim liked to pose as a headlong ruffian of the Australian earth … he presented himself as the dynamic newsman straight from Ben Hecht’s The Front Page … he liked to be the coarse, totally truth-telling, appalling, shocking, rough diamond hillbilly.’581

  In 1961 Hewat went off to Cuba to shoot some films about the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, which had overthrown a pro-American regime. When he returned he wrote a note to Sidney Bernstein: ‘Cuba is a bastard and that’s a fact.’ He came back with the view that ‘the revolution was long overdue, is a good thing, and is popular with most of the people. It is now a Marxist revolution and aims to be more so. Cuba probably needed a hefty dose of Marxism. The country had been outrageously and stupidly exploited by the Americans.’582