July 20, 2003

BBC has put self-regard ahead of the truth

Peter Mandelson deplores the poisonous and destructive relationship that has developed between politicians and the media

There is nothing so unjust and so unseemly as the media in Britain turning itself from judge and jury into splenetic lynch mob in order to pursue some hapless prey. I say this with some feeling following my own forced departure from the Government. Until you are at the centre of a frenzy of this kind yourself, with everyone falling over themselves to pass judgment before little attempt is made to establish the facts, you cannot imagine what it is like.

Kangaroo courts are not designed to get at the truth. Nor, it seems, necessarily are attention-seeking select committees of the House of Commons. If any good comes of what happened to Dr Kelly - a man of fantastic public spiritedness - it should lie in some timely reflection on the way people are treated when they wittingly or unwittingly stray into the public glare. But we also need to make this tragedy into a point of change in the poisonous and destructive relationship that has developed between politicians and the media. This relationship has never been worse and it cannot be allowed to continue like this. Politicians, in the main, have become defensive, suspicious and evasive in their dealings with the media. Journalists are now more aggressive, cynical and personal than ever before. Everyone is competing to get one over on the other, often with little regard for the truth. The casualty is the public's right to know who is doing what and why in their name and what it means for them.

Reading this, some in the media will be reaching for their keyboards in order to repudiate any attempt to defend the Government and the practices of its principal communications manager, Alastair Campbell. His bullish and untiring advocacy of the Government and its policies may not be to everyone's taste. Those who dislike his approach most are the Government's political opponents because he is the most professional and effective member of Labour's praetorian guard. But he is entitled to fair and honest treatment, not least because, in my view, it was the BBC's obsession with him that led more than anything to the breakdown in relations between the Government and Britain's principal public service broadcaster, with the result we have seen.

Campbell is no angel and is capable of making his own mistakes, as I have reason to know. But the BBC's fixation with him and its desire to 'defeat' him at all costs led it into two serious and damaging misjudgments. The first was its overreaction when Campbell accused the corporation of lying in its false allegation that he had 'sexed up' the September Iraq arms dossier.

You can get something wrong without necessarily lying about it, and his language, understandable in the circumstances, was none the less too strong. The BBC backed itself into a corner and chose to turn a resolvable disagreement into a pitched battle about its honour and independence as broadcasters, irrespective of its confidence in the story. Long before this stage was reached, the facts having been established, with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the head of MI6 prepared to back up Campbell, the BBC should have acknowledged the truth. The whole affair could have been laid to rest as inconspicuously as it blew up. Instead, the issue was driven hard, day after day, across almost every outlet, leaving the targets of the BBC's agenda with no alternative but to fight back.

The BBC's pretext for not letting up led it to make its second mistake. The BBC insisted that a general, negative verdict could be imposed on Campbell's role, even if the particular observation may not be right. This general verdict was that as he had been heavily involved throughout in the preparation of the public dossier - doing what is, after all, his job - he must have had an unreasonable influence over it, leading to exaggeration, to say the least, of some of its contents. In other words, the general justifies the particular in respect of the charge against Campbell.

But while this sort of presumption or inspired guesswork is par for the course in much of the press, it does not qualify as journalism fit for airing by the BBC. Yet, even now, if you challenge BBC executives on this, they insist in their defence that you do not have smoke without fire, even though the smoke was created by their own correspondent. In their view, if you put a 'spin doctor' anywhere near a factual report, you are entitled to assume that the contents will be dodgy, regardless of who testifies to the contrary.

That is simply not good enough. It has led the director-general and the chairman of the governors to stake their reputations on a story that has turned out to be untrue, punted by a journalist who many inside the corporation regard as controversial, whatever they say about him in public.

The fact is that the journalist in question, Andrew Gilligan, persuaded his managers that his one source was a senior intelligence official and few now believe this to be true. Dr Kelly was a scientist, not a spook, and when he told MPs, in his gratuitously bruising encounter with them, that he was not the BBC's source he should have been properly understood to mean that he was not the source for what Gilligan said about Campbell. Gilligan should have been big enough to admit that he did not have another source for his central claim and that he had stretched what he had been told to suit his own prejudices. Some good must come out of this shocking and avoidable state of affairs. The lesson for the Government - especially an apparently omnipotent one like this - is to be seen to bend over backwards in treating the media with scrupulous truthfulness and the BBC in particular with respect.

For the BBC, at the heart of this dispute is an issue of governance, not independence. Amour-propre should never be put ahead of the truth. The BBC is not a publicly funded lobby group, and someone in the BBC's management chain should have stepped in earlier and quietly to end the editorialising over Iraq.

As for the public, they are entitled to expect better from both sides. The viciousness that characterises the relationship between the media and politicians is turning people off politics and corroding our democracy. Everything in Britain is conducted in an overly adversarial way, from our courts to our Parliament, our industrial relations and our select committees. It is good theatre, but does it produce good outcomes? In this case, patently not.

This should be a cautionary tale for all of we "Yanks" as we are facing the same sort of situation between the [Liberal] media and the Bush Administration here in America as Blair's Britain is with the BBC.
If you substitute the name "Bush" for that of "Campbell" in the piece above, it totally works for our own mess.
Mercifully, we don't have the added problem of the media being owned by the government and being paid for by the people as is the case with the BBC.
Mr. Mandelson has gotten this exactly right and while he places blame for the Kelly suicide on both the the Blair government and the Beeb, it's clear that the BBC bears the lion's share.
Note that Mr. Kelly took his own life not on the evening of testifying in front of a Parliamentary committee (obviously comparable to a Senate hearing here), which many Brits are calling "brutal, grilling and horrific," but on the evening of the day that his Beeb contact Gilligan testified in front of the same panel and "changed his story."
IOW, it became clear between Kelly's and Gilligan's statements, that although Mr. Kelly was Gilligan's lone source for Gilligan's claim that the British government had "sexed up" their Iraqi WMD dossier by claiming that Iraqi missiles could reach Western Europe in "45 minutes," Mr. Kelly had told him nothing like that--it was pure invention.
Mr. Kelly apparently killed himself out of despair, either that he had been used by the Beeb, or if he was a true Leftist, that his attempt to keep Britain out of the Iraq war and/or to depose the Blair government by discreditation had failed.
In that President Bush is now embroiled with our media over equally invented lies about his statements regarding Saddam's WMD program in his January SOTU speech, we can only hope and pray that noone commits suicide over it here.
The NYTimes has been discredited of late because of another guy named Blair (and then there were others...).
The anti-Bush, anti-America bias is blatant at the WaPo.
CNN admitted that it lied and dissembled on all stories from Saddam's Iraq because they would have been thrown out if they hadn't.
And MSNBC had to fire Peter Arnett mid-war for supporting the Enemy.
ABC News just got some American GIs busted to permanent private for griping and whining on camera about their tours of duty in Iraq:
in fact, ABC and its reporters have been caught running down Bush and America so many times that Cannuck-born Peter Jennings is having to become an American citizen to "prove" he's really patriotic.
What else is there left to say, except "Don't believe everything you read in the paper or hear on TV."?
In fact, I suggest not believing any of it, until you've fact-checked their *sses!
We all used to laugh about that old saw, "It must be true. I read it on the Internet."
Well, if you're judicious and discerning in your web travels, this is becoming more true than you may know!
Thank God for the World Wide Web!
In the meantime, are the BBC, the NYSlimes, the Washington Post, et. al learning the difference between reporting the news and creating it out of Leftist political motivations?
I live in hope.
And before this story drones on for another monotonous week, can we all get it straight that Bush and Blair didn't lie about Saddam's WMD???
Thank you!

BTW, these Dimocrat clowns (most of whom are running as Donk candidates for Prez) who are all having a fuster-cluck over this 16-word sentence of Bush's were privy to most of the same intell as President Bush and many of them voted for the war back last fall, months before the SOTU!
And, of course, they believed the same statements about Saddam's WMD were true when their boy Klintoon made them in 1998.
But nobody seems to notice. Pity!