Weekend Essay – save the BBC from itself

The BBC, the world’s oldest public broadcaster, is going through another of its characteristic, though not infrequent, spasms about its funding, personnel, politics and future. Substantial cuts in budgets and personnel have been ordered, and the heads have started rolling. It faces, not for the first time, a robustly hostile government. This time the regime’s thinker in chief Dominic Cummings is on the record, albeit as far back as 2004, that he would like a British version of Fox News to supplant the BBC.

It hardly needed the last week’s bizarre plethora of announcements from the Corporation’s headquarters, the rather ominously named New Broadcasting House, for the commentariat to lock horns about whether the BBC could or should be saved, and if so, how?

More to the point judging from the latest antics in the pantomime, I would hazard, is the question now – how can the BBC be saved from itself?

I have to confess as a BBC hand for just under 20 years from 1968 to 1987, and a regular contributor for more than 50, (in fact more than half its own existence) I have found it to be one of the most institutionalized of institutions – rivalling the Vatican and the Brigade of Guards.

This brings myopia and solipsism, which lie at the heart of the present bout of crisis. We began the septimana horribilis with the Director General Lord Hall announcing in January that he will retire this summer. This was followed by announcements from Fran Unsworth, the Head of News, and Khalid Ahmed, the strategy director in the same division, that 450 jobs were to go in BBC News.

Programmes were to be trimmed to save around £80 million from the News budget. The lead TV and Radio current affairs programmes, Newsnight and Today are to be cut, though not drastically. But there are to be fewer filmed reports on Newsnight, and reporters for Today are now to join a “hub” which will produce reports to be relayed and repeated across the board of BBC output.

The directorate of Unsworth and Ahmed are suggesting that BBC current affairs reports can be homogenized across the board – turned into the equivalent of condensed milk – but it is the distinct idiom and quality of a report, say, of the Today programme that gives the show its special identity and bite.

Once again, the Chiefs at tribe BBC were following the custom of firing the Indians, and asking those remaining to work even harder. One Chief, however, had had enough. Sarah Sands, the high profile editor of Today resigned, and with characteristic grace she said she had enjoyed her three years at the helm, but was tired and wanted to do other things. The back story is somewhat different, however, and is even more honourable.

She was told she was to lose some of her powers as editor of the programme, and would have to rely on reports from journalists working on and through the “hub”. In her last days as editor of the Standard, she had faced much the same dilemma. She was asked to cut the reporters on the paper and rely on those now assigned to a pool to generate reports for the Independent, the online papers of the group, the “I” and the news input of the London Live TV station. She saw a conflict, according to a confidant, between giving up the reporting ethos, standards and style of her paper, while remaining on a big salary. She was not going to give in this time either.

Not that her reign at Today has been without controversy. The government is now boycotting ministers appearing on the show, starting with the prime minister himself, on account of what they believe to be unfairly hostile interviewing.

Tony Hall, the director general, compounded the controversy by saying that political interviews should be longer, more discursive and exploratory, and less aggressive and confrontational. These comments were made in a speech at the Edelman Trust Barometer. At first sight they read more like the remarks of a bureaucrat and functionary than a fearless Editor in Chief of the oldest broadcaster of public service news and journalism. As Editor in Chief, a key part of the terms of his employment, I wonder how much he chose to speak to the presenters and interviewers privately beforehand.

The BBC under Hall has lost its way and its nerve. The commentators and leader writers rumble about “an existential crisis” engulfing the BBC. The crisis is not existential, a matter of its existence, but teleological.

In the early days from foundation in 1922, it had quite a rackety history – largely from its peculiar position being a public entity, yet independent of government. In the General Strike of 1926 it was nearly forced to be a state broadcaster. Its reputation was sealed by its role and reporting in the war from 1939 to 1945. Ironically, the BBC’s breadth of information programming contributed to the overwhelming Labour victory in the General Election – “the Khaki Election” – of 1945.

But it was a near-run thing. Churchill suggested nationalizing the BBC in 1940, only to be dissuaded by Brendan Bracken. There were less seismic bust-ups in 1956 over Suez and during the Falklands crisis in 1982. In the 1980s the governors, led by Joel Barnett and William Rees-Mogg, decided things needed to change and sacked the chief executive and director general, Alasdair Milne, to be replaced by John Burt.

The arguments then were remarkably similar to those today. With his friend Peter Jay, Burt was the author of a study of broadcast news called “The Bias Against Understanding.” Journalists needed to be guided to fully appreciate the intellectual depths and nuances of a story before they embarked on making reports for a current affairs programme. The implication was that BBC reporters, among whom I ranked at the time, were simply too thick to be let loose on a story on their own. Editors of programmes like Panorama would tell the reporting operative what the story was, and they were sent forth to get them.

I have to record that one distinguished radio news editor, Stan Taylor, was so enraged by the patronizing verbosity of the Burt-Jay report that he hurled the large brick of typescript from an upper window of Broadcasting House across the open car park below.

The latest ex cathedra statements by Lord Hall, Fran Unsworth and Kamal Ahmed seem to be treading the same path as Burt and Jay. Reporting from the “hub”, implied Unsworth, would now be “story-led”. In other words we at the centre, looking at our screens in the well of loneliness, and deprived of natural daylight in the basement of New Broadcasting House (honestly, George Orwell would love it) will decide the news, and then you the hacks must go forth to harvest the factoids and soundbites to back it all up.

Inadvertently, they have stumbled on the heart of the problem. Forget all the abstractions and theories of communication in the world, space and cyber space. It all comes down to news, journalism, and reporting. These give the BBC its quality and ethos, and reasons for being. The rest is entertainment and showbiz, which can be funded and run in any number of ways.

The BBC started as a monopoly. It no longer is one, but it often behaves like one. In some areas the offer of public service forensic journalism is superb. In other respects its public service conduct has been inadequate.

In particular it has failed in its promise to offer a substantial and well supported network of local radio stations. Much of what it does offer has discouraged rivals, especially in local newspapers and freesheets. Equally the BBC’s dominance with its website acts as a spoiler. It has a huge following, largely because it is free. At least it purports to be free – but you and I pay for it through the license levy. The quality is pretty average – and nothing like the offer from the sites operating through paywalls such as The Times and Financial Times, and the superb Washington Post, New York Times and the long reads in the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. The Guardian, bravely, resources its site largely through crowd funding subscription, although it is also supported by a large “trust fund”.

For the great temple of broadcast news, the BBC is rather more reliant on print journalism than might at first appear. The main factual programmes on BBC television channels 1, 2, and 4 and Radio 4 are punctuated by reviews of the newspapers, which are then used to kick start their own follow up reports. Current affairs panels are packed with newspaper correspondents and editors, and gumshoe hacks – who have more time to spend on real digging, and schmoozing than their broadcast colleagues.

Contrary to the judgments of Lord Hall and Boris Johnson, I believe that journalists need to call those in power to account. Andrew Neil does it brilliantly when he is at the top of his game. Jeremy Paxman, Robin Day and John Freeman set the gold standard in research and preparation for the television political interview.

But it starts going wrong when journalistic forensic examination becomes show business – infotainment. The endless projection of the personality – the tiresome Today presenter who has to make sure you know he thinks he is the cleverest person in the room – becomes tedious and less than enlightening.

The rows about pay for presenters, including salaries for grey suited newsreaders nearly four times the prime minister’s salary, suggests a profound distortion of journalistic values.

The over reward of presenters has led to the undervalue in the estimation of their employers at the BBC of the reporters. The reporters have a tough time, often taking huge risks – a correspondent like Orla Guerin has exceeded her feline quota of nine lives a dozen times over. Many are brilliantly original, engaging, empathic and brave. Take the uniquely engaging reporting of Quentin Somerville from Syria, Sarah Smith on social as much as political matters in Scotland, and John Sudworth on the plight of the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

By contrast, much of the narrative writing of news programmes tends to the dull, lax and clichéd. The main news programmes’ reporting of climate change and environmental matters has on occasion – many occasions – been repetitive and superficial. The images of fires in the Amazon and Australia were spectacular – to which the verbal reporting added almost nothing.

Climate change and Brexit are two powerful ingredients in the government beef against the BBC. They have been added to the long running battle over unfair questioning, and bias in the shouting matches of the Today interviews and the bear pit of Question Time. Politicians have bitched, rightly or wrongly, about snarky interviewers since Robin Day called John Nott a “a here today and gone tomorrow minister,” the latter then storming out of the studio.

Until his retirement last year, John Humphrys was the acknowledged Grand Inquisitor of the Today programme. Younger colleagues flattered by (often not very good) imitation of his in-your-face point-scoring interrogation style. Others, such as Evan Davis on PM, have taken a different, and often more effective, approach. They draw their subjects into a dialogue to get behind their thinking, which often leads into crucial back stories.

The problem with the Humphrys technique is the loaded, or leading, question. Unpicking the editorial false premise in his questions could be a huge, time wasting, challenge. If he said ‘some scientists say the earth is flat…’ he was daring you to waste time on contradicting him. It is the equivalent of the barrister’s question ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’. He could be a nightmare live interrogator, especially when his verbal appendage of ‘and all that sort of thing’ gave you, the interviewee, the giveaway clue that he hadn’t really thought the question through.

One of the liveliest recent editions of Today was guest edited by the former Telegraph editor and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore. It included an extremely heated discussion involving Moore, Matt Ridley and Nick Robinson about climate change.

Earlier in the programme Moore was interviewed on his misgivings about the BBC and its future. He was angry about the Brexit coverage, he said. Then with characteristic verbal elegance he made two points which struck the heart of the matter. He said that the BBC license levy was a poll tax, indiscriminate and unfair, which all had to pay – rich and poor and those who didn’t go near the BBC’s output in any shape or form.

The BBC’s pseudo monopoly made it behave like the established church of broadcasting and news, equivalent to the Church of England. This accounted for the BBC’s preachiness matched by the evident self-regard of its presenters.

Moore suggests that it is time to “disestablish” the BBC and make it compete as any other broadcaster. To say that it will be overwhelmed by much richer competitors Netflix, Amazon and Apple, is no argument. It must up its game and fight for its place in the broadcasting market.

The BBC needs to come up with an alternative mechanism for funding, before it is forced to, and well before its present Charter runs out in 2026. Insiders and outsiders I have spoken to this past week are united in their dismay at the lack of vision and strategy of the current New Broadcasting House regime. “They seem to have lost sense of the core value, and very essence of the BBC,” a former leading correspondent informed me.

A British version of Fox News will not be the new mainstream news broadcaster, however fervently Dominic Cummings may dream of it. But there are plenty of alternatives around, particularly in radio, which the BBC is in danger of killing with kindness. LBC has upped its game hugely with presenters like Nick Ferrari and Eddie Mair. The Times is about to launch Times Radio, and it has promised serious Murdoch money to back it. Tyler Brulé’s Monocle 24 puts out extended news discussions by veteran newspaper and broadcast journalists that the BBC seems unable to match in depth and range.

The BBC should sell its wares, including its website, on subscription. The license fee is a universal tax – Moore is right – and it is unfair and unbalanced, and should be scrapped. The government should subsidise specific services for clear and specific goals, such as the language services through the World Service and possibly public service broadcasts for the sick and elderly. It will have to compete on more equal terms for our cash, interest and support.

It is not poor, with a gross annual income touching annually £5 billion. It has around 22,000 staff and employees – just about the same number as the Royal Navy, minus the Royal Marines.

Go through the portal of the art deco temple of the old Broadcasting House, and marvel at the arresting sculpture of the boy Ariel by Eric Gill and you come across the inscription of Lord Reith’s exhortation that “nation shall speak unto nation.”

The problem for the BBC right now is that appears to be losing the knack of how to speak to this nation. That means all of us, the nation that pays its fees.