THIS MAY not matter — you decide. There are all kinds of big things happening in the world, and the subject of this week’s column seems small in comparison. Except that if you can’t trust those who are paid to tell you about the big things, then how do you know they’re really happening?
So I’ll begin with the front cover of last week’s New Statesman magazine. The New Statesman has a patchily glorious history and a circulation in the low tens of thousands. Even so its editorship is a prized position within journalism and its articles sometimes do matter, especially when it breaks a new story that the wider outlets may have missed.
Last Thursday’s edition contained just such a story. The cover, depicting a TV with a white flag hanging from its indoor aerial, read “Broken, Beaten, Cowed — How Auntie lost her nerve”, with the byline of John Kampfner, the Statesman’s newish Editor.
The article dealt with the aftermath of The Times’s own tale concerning the BBC presenter John Humphrys and a colourful after-dinner speech he’d made. “According to a number of people involved,” Kampfner revealed, “Michael Grade, the BBC’s chairman, phoned several executives that weekend demanding that the Today presenter be sacked . . . (Mark) Thompson, the Director-General, was minded to agree with Grade but when, on the Monday, he saw the furious reaction to the government’s antics in the rest of the media, particularly the Daily Mail, he changed his mind.”
This was a very serious accusation, and the Commons Select Committee may well be questioning Grade and Thompson about it this afternoon down in Westminster. It’s serious because it suggests a degree of over-reaction, bordering on the unstable, to the original story; it indicates stupidity on the part of the Chairman of the BBC who must have known that he could not make such a demand without undermining the position of his Director-General; and it points to a craven desire by the two most senior people at the BBC to propitiate the powers that be at all costs.
“The claim,” said Friday’s Daily Mail editorial, “could hardly be more serious for the BBC’s independent reputation . . . it would confirm what is becoming more apparent by the day: that the BBC is in thrall to the Government.”
And there you have the combination: the immediate story — Grade demanded the head of Humphrys and Thompson almost delivered it — and the bigger back-story, of the post-Hutton BBC, desperate for its charter and its licence fee, in Kampfner’s words, “muzzling journalism and deliberately avoiding giving offence to the Government and the Establishment”.
I was disinclined to accept the Kampfnerian grand narrative and concerned about some of the details. But above all I couldn’t understand why there was no comment in the article whatsoever from the BBC itself. No explanation, no denial, nothing.
The first — and sometimes very handy — law of journalism is that you don’t reveal your sources. The second, less convenient rule is that you always check the facts with the subject of the piece. You do this because it’s fair. You do it because your readers will expect to see some comment from alleged villains. And, above all, you do it because you may learn something.
The only respectable reasons for not checking in this way are the fear of a gagging injunction or of a pre-emptive spoiling action, rendering your story stale and unprofitable. Neither of these reasons obtains in this instance. The BBC wasn’t likely either to injunct or spoil. Instead it was likely to deny. And deny it did — deny in more unequivocal terms than I can ever remember from the Corporation. No, said Mark Thompson, Grade had not called several executives that weekend. He had called only one — Thompson himself — and he had not demanded the firing of Humphrys.
Nor had Thompson been “minded” at all to sack the presenter, nor influenced by the press coverage to keep him. This was,“completely untrue — in fact a straightforward lie”.
So why hadn’t Kampfner called the BBC himself and obtained this denial? I e-mailed the Statesman Editor myself and asked him that question, along with four or five others. After a few hours I got a reply telling me that the New Statesman Editor “did not wish to comment further”. Mr Kampfner not wishing to comment further is as remarkable as a bonobo chimp saying no to a bunk-up. It may happen, but there has to be a bloody good reason.
My suspicion is that Kampfner didn’t call the BBC because if, God forbid, Thompson had convinced him that there had been no demand for the execution of Humphrys, then there would have been no front-page story, no splash, and all Kampfner would have been left with was a series of grumbles about BBC timidity.
What is extraordinary about this, however, is the response of much of the media world. Rod Liddle, in The Sunday Times, wrote: “I suspect that Grade did quite fancy sacking Humphrys, much as John Kampfner . . . had alleged in his magazine.”
“Much as”? Grade either phoned people up demanding the sacking or he didn’t, never mind “much as”. Steve Hewlett, in the Guardian media pages: “On the face of it the BBC’s statement appears credible.”
But. “But underneath all this, and here Kampfner is on to something, the BBC hasn’t got over Hutton.”
Kim Fletcher, also in The Guardian: “I do not think we will get to the bottom of it, but the story reflects a belief among many BBC staff that the corporation is over-anxious to avoid controversy. Since the Hutton inquiry, some BBC executives have found the whole business of news stories embarrassing.”
It is, in essence, the Gilligan defence again. Never mind the facts, the story fits the preconceptions, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not. The meta-narrative is still of a Government/Establishment that bullies dissenters, manhandles Jewish refugees, and terrorises the BBC into subservience. In this situation almost everything can be read as fitting the same template. The BBC reviews coverage of the Middle East? It’s been bullied by the Israeli Government, says Kampfner. Grade believes some BBC coverage is too pro-EU? Then it is cosying up to some part of the Establishment as yet unspecified and undiscovered.
No denials are permitted, because they ruin the lines of the piece and the readers wouldn’t be able to cope with that. One BBC figure who had spoken to Kampfner told me that he’d attempted to disabuse the Statesman Editor of his idée fixe. “I told him he’d come up with the wrong thesis,” this anonymous source told me. You won’t find this contra-indication anywhere in the article.
Immediately the story enters the journo-stream, and finds its place in the conventional tide. Last Friday The Guardian ran a piece by Tara Conlan (who used to write anti-BBC stuff for the Mail), concerning the BBC’s failure to go nap on the George Bush and God story. “Just 24 hours,” Conlan wrote, “after accusations that the Corporation’s news coverage was backing away from risk-taking, some of the BBC’s key outlets decided not to run an exclusive story unearthed by BBC2 about the US President.”
Actually the Bush story first appeared in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in June 2003. But why spoil a good thesis with anything as inconvenient as a fact? Perhaps, though, it doesn’t matter. You tell me.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
