When the row between Government and the Today programme erupted I felt
again that moment of nervousness that was familiar to me and, I suspect,
most of my contemporaries at Panorama. The fact that we were often
paranoid did not always mean that they were not out to get us. We might have
felt pleased and proud to have got a story on air but we knew there would be
repercussions, and sometimes we could not tell how far our colleagues and
our bosses in the BBC would support us. Occasionally, facing hostile reaction,
we might wish we’d told the story just slightly differently.
Relations between the government and the BBC will always be uneasy. A great independent broadcasting organisation with a Charter and a Board of Governors may be a sign of a truly grown-up society, something for our leaders to boast about at international gatherings, but in practice it often drives ministers mad. In private they are liable to complain that the BBC is, in essence, a wholly-owned subsidiary totally out of their control. Normally that is no more than a minor irritant to the broadcasters, but when the BBC takes an independent view on something the government is really jumpy about, then the situation quickly turns nasty. That happens quite often. It’s how the broadcasters handle it that matters.
Going to war is the classic case, and what happened at the time of the Falklands crisis in 1982 is a good example of how Panorama dealt with the sort of government pressure that the BBC’s Today programme has felt over Iraq. When the Falkland Islands, British territory, were occupied by Argentine forces, Mrs Thatcher’s Government had a strong case for sending a military task force to throw them out – far stronger than Tony Blair ever had for invading Iraq. But any dissenting voice was anathema to the Iron Lady. When Panorama put out a programme which included some Conservative backbenchers expressing doubts about the use of military force she was consumed with rage. As she told the Commons, she shared the deep concern that had been expressed about the programme – described by a loyal Tory MP as “an odious subversive travesty in which... BBC reporters dishonoured the right of freedom of speech in this country”.
This was only the beginning of a powerful attack on Panorama, and the BBC Chairman George Howard and Director-General designate Alasdair Milne were summoned to explain the corporation’s stand to Tory backbenchers. It was later reported that they had been “absolutely crucified”, and “roasted alive”, with “blood and entrails all over the place”. But it didn’t matter. Even though the situation was complicated by the resignation of Panorama’s presenter Robert Kee, who decided that he didn’t much like the programme either, the show went on. “Panorama returns to the subject of the Falklands crisis on Monday May 17”, announced the BBC Press Office.
That was all right: independent reporting of an issue of importance, which was not faulted for inaccuracy, was defended by the BBC bosses; the programme was not prevented from returning to the story and getting on with its job of finding out the truth of what was happening. What a contrast with Carrickmore, a few years earlier, when the BBC governors were seized with a blind and humiliating panic. In Northern Ireland a Panorama team, thinking they were being escorted to an interview with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, had instead found themselves filming armed men who had for a time taken over the village of Carrickmore. It was just an IRA stunt, and the film material had not even been viewed, let alone transmitted, when Mrs Thatcher heard about it. Nonetheless, a blast from Downing Street soon had the governors ordering the sacking of Panorama’s editor Roger Bolton – though he was soon reinstated – and the abandonment of a perfectly proper programme about the history of the IRA.
It is vital that when the BBC comes under this sort of attack, the bosses earn their money neither in blind defence of the indefensible, nor in panicky surrender, but in a well-judged response that carries conviction to listeners and viewers as the right course of action at a difficult time.
An excellent example of how judgments should be made dates from the time of an outstanding Director-General, Hugh Carleton Greene. In 1962, following Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives”, in which the prime minister had summarily sacked one third of his Cabinet, Panorama had presented a political discussion in which, as so often, Randolph Churchill had been extremely drunk. The next morning a complaint arrived from the highest reaches of the Conservative party, the Rt Hon Viscount Davidson, gcvo, ch: “...disgraceful...”, “...insult to the British public...” and so on. Greene made immediate inquiries and decided that surrender was the only sensible option. “I agree with every word you say,” he replied to Davidson. “This was an appalling error for which I offer no excuse whatever.”
But the same programme had included another item, on the drug thalidomide and the terrible effects it was having on the as yet unborn babies of mothers who had taken it. This item had provoked an equally outraged complaint from another peer, Lord Ferrier, a leading figure in the pharmaceuticals industry. In this case the BBC stood firm. The item had not been sensational or irresponsible, it maintained. Indeed, Kenneth Lamb, the “Chief Assistant (Current Affairs) Talks, Television” wrote : “I believe we would have been failing in our duty if we had not mounted such an inquiry. I am satisfied that it was treated responsibly and correctly.” The drug companies’ complaint was firmly rejected.
Maggie’s Militant Tendency, the Panorama which caused the biggest row in the programme’s history, was clearly going to be contentious; indeed, the editor had warned the D-G that there was trouble coming down the track. But the lawyers only got a real opportunity to assess the nature of that trouble at a viewing just two days before the programme went out. They found plenty to worry them. As an internal BBC report chronicling the row later put it: “In three-and-three-quarter hours of discussion, 42 separate legal points are raised.” There was scant time to consider them all properly before transmission.
It’s easy to say in retrospect, but programmes that make serious charges against people with a reputation to lose do need the most careful scrutiny before, rather than after, they have gone out. Maggie’s Militant Tendency was later described as “the best researched programme after transmission that there has ever been”. That is a gibe too far: the programme had been thoroughly prepared, and Director-General Alasdair Milne later described the research itself as “rock solid”. Indeed, when the Panorama team was eventually sued for libel, the BBC’s counsel thought they had a winnable case; they were therefore surprised to be told by a new BBC Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, to settle on any terms they could get, before the court had even heard Panorama’s evidence.
All the same, more time should have been made available before transmission to think about the likelihood of legal action and make quite sure that the programme was, as far as possible, proof against it. It was one of John Birt’s better innovations to insist that BBC lawyers should be given long enough to consider each programme properly. But legal advice is just that, advice. It is the way that BBC bosses – right up to the editor-in-chief, the D-G – treat the journalism of their programme-makers that matters most. Journalists need to feel that while sloppy reporting will not be defended, good, sound work will; and under John Birt that did not always happen.
Some of the crises of confidence between Panorama people and Birt and his lieutenants can perhaps be explained simply as matters of editorial judgment. Birt says that his postponement of the Supergun programme fell into that category. A Panorama exclusive on the brink of the Gulf war had new details of the enormous gun being constructed in Iraq, apparently with the help of British manufacturers and the knowledge of the British Government. Birt kept postponing the programme until ITV got hold of the story and did it first. Admitting that no one else at the BBC agreed with him, Birt argued later that with British soldiers about to risk their lives in combat with Iraq “that was not the right moment to put out a programme of that kind”. Others felt Birt’s decision had more to do with not being the first to anger the Government with a programme suggesting they had knowingly allowed British companies to help arm the enemy.
In 1989 Birt had given strong backing to a programme about Dame Shirley Porter, the leader of Westminster City Council, which said that she had manipulated the council’s housing policies for party political purposes. In 1994 Panorama returned to the subject with new evidence. Transmission was planned for just before the local elections, when public interest would be high, but Birt insisted that the programme be postponed for additional legal advice. Not until the elections were over was the programme cleared for broadcast. All this was going on precisely at the time when the BBC’s future was in the balance – just two months before a long-awaited White Paper renewed the Charter and made the licence fee inflation-proof for years ahead. John Birt, now Lord Birt, denies that his admirable efforts to secure the BBC’s future had any relevance to his decision to postpone this particular Panorama programme. “That’s not how I behave,” he says. “No decision was ever made because of institutional reasons.” But there were other Panorama programmes that were delayed until their impact had been diminished. In John Birt’s BBC the sense that good current affairs programmes might sometimes be muffled, if not muzzled, spread. Journalism must be timely, as well as sound.
Today the danger to BBC journalism seems rather the reverse. Greg Dyke is essentially enthusiastic rather than cautious, someone who shouts “Go, go”, rather than “Hang on a minute...”, as John Birt would have done. Panorama people have no doubt they will get backing for their programmes, even when they take risks. After all, it was under Dyke that Panorama was allowed to ask: “Who bombed Omagh?”, and provide the answer. Dyke has been a tonic, reviving the spirit of enterprising journalism that had often drooped under Birt. But a determination simply to defend anything and everything BBC reporters do is not the best way to back them up.
As for what followed, did it really make sense for Greg Dyke and BBC News not to give an inch on the specific charge Gilligan had made? Do the governors really feel happy now about being bounced into backing that position when, as it soon turned out, they had not been given all the available facts? Whatever Lord Hutton may say, those are questions that the BBC must answer.
So what do broadcast journalists need and, rather more importantly, what is the best way for viewers and listeners to get news that’s accurate, fair and timely; news that’s neither neutered by nervousness, nor tossed a little too eagerly into the ether? Simple: an editor-in-chief who is courageous in search of the truth, sensible in judgment about it, and brave but not precipitate in deciding when to tell it. And all his journalists, his editors, producers and reporters, have to adopt that way of working too. Easy, isn’t it?
Richard Lindley reported for Panorama from 1973 to 1988. His book, Panorama –
Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia, has just been published in paperback by Politico’s
at £9.99.