This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  He went on:

  If Edward Snowden had contacted Panorama or Newsnight could they have done what the Guardian did? No. No, they couldn’t. They might have been able to do a piece at a meta-level, a headline level, but they could not have done what the Guardian did with Snowden. I find it uncomfortable to say that but it’s the truth.

  So what does that tell you about the BBC? It tells you that in the end there is a limit to its independence – some would call that public accountability. It is a wonderful news organisation. It does fantastic journalism every day. But there is a limit to it. And I think in the end that was part of a miscalculation in the Kelly story. We thought we were genuinely independent. And we weren’t.

  Where does BBC journalism stand in the post-Hutton era? James Harding, the former Times editor who joined the BBC in August 2013 as head of news, took the opposite view from Sambrook. ‘The BBC has over the years shown it is entirely independent. There are always debates about coverage. But the independence of the BBC and the BBC journalists I think is central to the public’s trust in the BBC. That’s the reason why it has the support it does,’ he told me.

  Nick Robinson, who was at ITV at the time of the Hutton inquiry, and who went on to become the BBC’s political editor, was more optimistic than Sambrook when we spoke. Hutton ‘didn’t have the chilling effect it might have done’, he said. He had never bought the idea, he said, that the BBC was ‘being cowed’. Robert Peston, the BBC’s economics editor, agreed: ‘I have not felt haunted by Hutton,’ he said. When he broke the story of the failure of the bank Northern Rock in 2007 – withstanding complaints from senior politicians, the Financial Services Authority and others ‘who were claiming I was somehow out to destroy the British economy and I should be shut down’ – he felt completely supported by the BBC.

  Far more crushing, Robinson said, to the temper and spirit of BBC news had been the aftermath of the troubles at Newsnight – the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine affairs and the resignation of George Entwistle. ‘It produced an atmosphere of flatness at best and despair at worst. If organisations can be depressed, it was depressed. Our organisation stood accused first of suppressing a major story then of carelessly libelling a public figure.’ The arrival of Hall and Harding had, he said, ‘freed people from the introversion – until the next crisis rolls along, of course’.

  When I visited Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East editor, at home in London between trips to Syria in the violent spring of 2014, he fondly remembered Harding as a young reporter on the Financial Times who stayed on the couch in his room in the El Rancho hotel during ‘a long stakeout’ in Port-au-Prince in 1994. The point was: Harding had earned his spurs; he had done his time as a reporter in the field, Bowen felt. Harding himself told me, when we met in May 2014, that he was committed to investigative journalism: ‘I think the issue with investigative journalism is that it takes a lot of time, real resources, and a lot of discipline in pursuing the story, addressing every angle, thinking it through. And we live in a world where there are quite a lot of litigious people. You’ve got to be able to take those pressures on.’ Investigative journalism was, he said, ‘one of the central roles in everything we do in current affairs. And should be true across all of our news output.’ That summer, though, it was announced that the editor and deputy editor of Panorama, the BBC’s flagship investigations show, would be leaving their roles, and shortly afterwards its four dedicated reporters were made redundant.

  How far is the BBC willing to take its journalism up against the establishment – and the government, which in the end seals the BBC’s fate? Others I spoke to within the BBC were much less confident than Harding. ‘The BBC is at its highest levels concerned with not offending the establishment, not making enemies in important places. Its core purpose – independent and impartial journalism – clashes with its survival instincts, and that goes back to the beginning,’ said one senior journalist who, in a time of job losses, asked not to be named.

  Another took an even bleaker view: ‘Newsgathering – covering the stuff that is happening in the world – we do that brilliantly. The BBC newsgathering operation is genuinely a wonder to perceive. But digging out original stories? No, sorry. Nor has it ever done. When push comes to shove, senior people at the BBC consider themselves part of the establishment.’

  The journalist saw the problems at Newsnight – the failure to run Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones’s investigation into sex-abuse allegations against Jimmy Savile, and the mistaken identification of Lord McAlpine on social media as a paedophile – as symptomatic of a bloated, anxious management, their timidity exacerbated by the fact that few had themselves worked as field producers or reporters. The employee called such managers, as well as the departments in charge of editorial policy and compliance, ‘journalism deterrence squads’ who were strangling the efforts of colleagues ‘like Japanese knotweed’. Journalists were afraid of not being backed up by the BBC, added the employee, when the pressure was on – and compared the corporation’s approach with the much more bullish, confident and ‘cheeky, risk-taking’ stance of Channel 4 News. ‘The BBC always buckles, always folds. You feel that as a journalist, they will abandon you; if you take a risky story to them it’s as if you are actively trying to get them into trouble. There is an institutionalised anxiety and mistrust.’

  Peston, who started his career in newspapers, said, ‘There is a risk-averse culture that means when the BBC wants people who can break stories it has to look to recruit from outside. When the BBC is training young journalists, it starts by telling them about the regulatory restraints: it starts with the rules and says, “Don’t you dare break them.”’ Bowen paid tribute to an organisation ‘in which there’s a great deal of creativity, where programme-makers really believe in what they’re doing, and in which people, despite everything, are proud to work’. But he, too, believed that the BBC was ‘overly bureaucratic’. At times, he said, he has felt the BBC has ‘lost sight of our core business, which is broadcasting. It’s the British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s not the British Management Corporation.’ He added, ‘I think things are changing, but we have also been too worried about what other people think, particularly the Daily Mail. There are times we could have, instead of apologising, stood up for ourselves a bit more strongly.’

  A combination of anxiety and bureaucracy had led to some absurdities. As a senior correspondent of thirty years’ standing, Bowen had, in 2013, been required to undertake an online multiple-choice training course, ‘which had a scenario in which I was doing the morning shift on a local radio station in the Manchester area, and reports were coming in from the police of two Manchester United players involved in an incident in a nightclub’. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I could have been trying to find out what was going on in Syria while I was doing that. That’s absolutely insane, that kind of stuff.’

  I asked another senior journalist whether the BBC had moved to the right, as some would argue. There was laughter. ‘Undoubtedly. You’re not supposed to read the Guardian at the BBC, because it confirms everyone’s prejudices. For years it has been more important at the BBC to be seen reading the Telegraph or The Times.’ Peston agreed. The BBC is often characterised as having an institutional bias to the left, but, he said, ‘What actually sends BBC news editors into a tizz is a splash in the Telegraph or the Mail, rather than one in the Guardian. Over time the criticism of the Mail and the Telegraph that we are too left-wing has got to us. So BBC editors feel under more pressure to follow up stories in the Telegraph and Mail than those in the Guardian.’ He added, ‘For example, for a long time I was saying that the phone-hacking scandal [pursued by the investigative reporter Nick Davies of the Guardian] was a huge story. Basically, I was talking to people who didn’t want to hear. It took us a long time to get stuck in. The fact is that we don’t get criticised for not following up the Guardian, but we do get criticised if we don’t follow up the Mail or Telegraph. There is no institutionalised bias to the left – if anything,
it is a bit the other way.’

  I also wondered whether there was what Birt might have once called a bias against understanding in BBC news and current affairs: I was thinking of the almost invariably aggressive tone of its news interviewing. Being tough on politicians was one thing; assuming that all-comers were, to paraphrase Jeremy Paxman ‘lying bastards lying to me’ was, surely, deflating rather than aerating of debate. News interviews, especially political interviews or those with a strong streak of controversy in them, seemed to have become unhelpfully one-note, with subjects ironing out all subtlety in their answers in order to project their ‘message’ and interviewers interrupting them at every turn. Hall, when I discussed this notion with him, rejected it. ‘We give the British public more of a platform to understand what’s important in the world than any other broadcaster and it’s one of our prime purposes. And you do that in all sorts of different ways and different styles,’ he said. But Hall acknowledged the aftermath of his predecessor’s reign. ‘After the last two to three years the organisation’s taken a real battering and I think it did at times lose its sense of confidence,’ he said. ‘I want to ensure that the BBC has got confidence to do great journalism, bold journalism and journalism that people admire.’

  What was clear to me is that no other news organisation existed under the pressure that BBC news withstands. An honestly made mistake at a newspaper such as the Financial Times or Telegraph, or even at a broadcaster such as Sky or Channel 4 News, might lead to embarrassment. But the BBC, at the centre of our culture, funded by the public, has its own magnification effect. It is, as Hugh Carleton Greene put it as far back as 1969, ‘the universal Aunt Sally of our day’. At the BBC, a mistake can lead to humiliation in the national press, to employees being doorstepped by newspapers, to questions in parliament, to multimillion-pound semi-judicial inquiries. The whole edifice can tremble; the well-being of the entire organisation can founder; its future funding can be imperilled.

  Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that the BBC has often resembled a damaged, bullied child, defensive and afraid. The stakes for BBC news are immeasurably high. If we believe in the BBC as a beneficial ideological intervention in our lives, if we believe in it as the greatest, and best-loved, signifier of Britain there is, then things have to change – outside the BBC as well as inside it. The whole culture that surrounds it needs to become less vituperative, more mature. As one of the journalists I spoke to said, ‘The fact is, you are more likely to be bullied if bullies think they can bully you.’

  8

  Enemies at the Gate

  Some of the most outspoken critiques of the BBC come from within it. One cold sunny morning in early 2014 I visited Jeremy Paxman in his flat in west London. As he padded around in his socks, filling the cafetière, he railed against what he described as the BBC’s ‘closed corporate culture’. He said, ‘It is smug. I love the BBC in many ways, but at the same time it has made me loathe aspects of it, and that’s a very odd state of affairs. When I see people being given £1 million merely for walking out of the door’ – he was referring to the payments made to executives such as former deputy director general Mark Byford, who was awarded £949,000 in 2011 – ‘when I see £100 million being blown on that DMI [digital media initiative] thing, a stupid technical initiative like that, I start wondering: how much longer are we going to test the public’s patience?’ Not long after we spoke he resigned from anchoring Newsnight, after working on the show for 25 years, though he continued as a presenter of, among other shows, University Challenge. On another occasion a prominent BBC broadcaster railed passionately to me against the ‘corruption’ of management, who had ‘helped themselves’. ‘The BBC’s greatest enemy’, he said, ‘is itself. They are handing people ammunition.’

  It has been observed that the nearer one gets to the centre of the citadel of the BBC the easier it is to dislike aspects of it. According to Lord Burns, the chairman of Channel 4, ‘I love the BBC. My life without it would be’ – he paused, and said with great emphasis – ‘terrible. But it is not an organisation that does very much to help itself: there is a strange situation where people love what the BBC does but the closer they get to the BBC the less attractive a place it seems.’ Paxman, like many critics of the corporation I spoke to, told me he believed the corporation was too big:

  There’s a pile of stuff on the BBC I can’t stand. My idea of hell is going down in one of the lifts in that ghastly new building [New Broadcasting House] in a lift which has Radio 1Xtra plumbed into it. I don’t quite understand why the BBC does Radio 1Xtra, I don’t really understand why it does Radio 1. Clearly, you can meet those needs commercially … the BBC has got an unfortunate history of never seeing an area of broadcasting, or increasingly a web presence, without feeling the need to get into it itself.

  He went on:

  There’s no argument that the BBC distorts the marketplace in online [news]. Hugely distorts the marketplace. And one understands of course that the Mail and the Murdoch empire dislike a commercial rival which they are obliged to compete with on unfair terms. And I don’t think that has been really sufficiently grasped at a senior level. It just happened, in the same way as has the proliferation of extra television channels, the proliferation of extra radio channels – and, going further back, the move into local radio. These things just happened because the BBC is institutionally unable to countenance something without wanting to have it for itself … I don’t tar Tony [Hall] with this because he hasn’t been there long enough, but the great smell that comes off those pay-off scandals – and I think they are scandals – is of an organisation which became complacent, preoccupied with the conditions of its senior staff, at the expense of a strategic vision.

  These were strong words from a star BBC presenter. From outside the BBC, however, comes a chorus of much more consistent and committed opponents of the corporation, many of whom husband their hatred of the BBC with the kind of single-minded tenacity that makes Paxman’s outburst of frustration seem mild-mannered.

  There are many variations, but the central objection to the BBC, from which many related critiques flow, arises from the fact that it is an intervention into the market, with a historical tendency towards expansionism. Martin Le Jeune, a free marketeer and a former director of public affairs at Sky, wrote, for example, in a pamphlet for the think tank Centre for Policy Studies: ‘Far from being a powerhouse of originality, the BBC is a persistent me-too broadcaster with a serial record of imitation. Pirate radio stations spawned first Radio 2 and then Radio 1. Sky News brought forth BBC News 24 (virtually until the moment of launch the BBC official line was that there was no need for rolling news) … The BBC is too often a parasite on other’s ideas to allow its claim of creative contribution to be taken at face value.’ The reasons for this ‘intellectual larceny’, he posits, are both psychological (the BBC’s unflinching self-belief and sense of mission) and a matter of policy. Because the BBC is funded by a ‘universal tax … it is under a corresponding obligation to seek to provide services of all kinds to all people’.

  Also noted by critics is its paradoxical position as both a publicly funded civic organisation and, in the shape of its for-profit arm, Worldwide, an aggressive business that exploits its brand ruthlessly in the commercial world – and from a highly advantageous position financially. Pure free marketeers also object to it as a paternalistic organisation devoted to giving audiences what they ‘need’ (rather than what they want). The market, these critics argue, is an excellent mechanism for matching broadcasting supply to broadcasting demand. Linked to that is an on-principle objection to the licence fee. By its critics this is seen as not only a regressive tax (everyone pays the same regardless of their means) but also intrinsically unfair, since one is obliged to pay it in order to watch anything on TV, even if one does not use the BBC’s services. (One must also own a TV licence, incidentally, to be able to watch live-streamed material from 4OD and ITV Player as well as the BBC iPlayer, though viewing on-demand services w
as not, at the time of writing, subject to the ownership of a licence.) Licence-fee evaders were, at the time of writing, subject to prosecution, a sanction regarded by critics as overly draconian and a drain on the resources of magistrates’ courts, though in September 2014 the culture secretary, Sajid Javid, announced a review into the law making non-payment a criminal offence.

  Frequently appended to these overarching criticisms is the notion that the BBC, through its very constitution and nature, is unconsciously statist in outlook, a worldview that it inevitably reflects, especially its news coverage. Furthermore state funding and lack of a bottom line lead inevitably to complacency and an overgrown bureaucracy, it is argued – and in recent years to highly inflated pay deals at the top. According to Le Jeune, ‘Anyone who has had to spend much time with its managers and numerous lobbyists struggles to remember [its] glorious record in the face of so much intellectual self-satisfaction and so little sense of obligation or accountability for the vast wealth which the BBC has.’

  But such arguments hardly account for why passions against the BBC run so high. What fuels a loathing that seems for some to become almost a monomania? One of the most prominent critics of the BBC is the Daily Mail, which rages almost daily at the corporation, while simultaneously running avalanches of articles devoted to the clothing, diets and love affairs of the stars employed by it. Paul Dacre, the paper’s editor, politely declined to be interviewed by me, but sent instead a copy of his 2007 Cudlipp lecture, which, he told me, still accurately represented his views on the BBC.