The embattled BBC has a new foe – in the form of a Labour Culture Minister, emblematic of this Government in its stressed default mode.
It faces urgent questions about how a public service broadcaster should respond to criticism of alleged imbalance on subjects which strongly divide opinion – and which in the case of Israel/Gaza coverage, are core to its reputation as a truth-teller.
For a media entity that has perceived its main foes as politicians on the right, there’s a particular discomfort on this topic when Labour is in the driving seat.
The BBC’s management has held a placid view that a centrist Labour government would broadly allow it to continue business-as-usual, with some exploratory and inconclusive talks about life after the license fee.
Things have not turned out this way. A set of storms has eviscerated its reputation, including the Huw Edwards case, along with many other abuses of power for sexual gratification among presenters over the years.
The coverage of Israel and the war in Gaza is even more damaging in its scope and resonance at home and abroad. The BBC facilitated the commissioning of a documentary on the conflict called Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, with a 13-year-old child as narrator via a third-party documentary company. The one thing that any cautious observer of coverage in a war zone would note is that, with a sense of massive grievance and selective facts in a story as complex and contemporary as Israel-Gaza, the idea of sourcing a young person’s first-person view is absurdly high risk.
It turned out that the fluent child narrator Abdullah is the son of an official in the Hamas government. To add to the mess, Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury chant “Death to the IDF” was broadcast without excision, and has doubled down on the problem – forcing the director-general to convene anxious Jewish BBC employees.
On the other side of the balance sheet, many reporters and advocates of the Palestinian cause fear that an already panicked broadcaster will move further away from seeking to report in depth from the horrors afflicting civilians in Gaza, where information is hard to come by and constrained by Israeli authorities.
Into this quagmire steps Lisa Nandy, a Culture Secretary with the “heads must roll” message. But are they the right heads – and given the BBC’s status, which is not a state-run broadcaster but an arms-length licence-fee funded one, should Nandy be issuing statements like “I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired?”
The problem here is twofold. For a government that is keen on employment rights and stuffed full of lawyers, it is odd. To demand the “firing” of someone is to wholly end their employment, which requires a high bar of proof of individual dereliction, without ending in a massive legal tussle about org charts and intersections of jobs and blame.
Lorna Clarke, an experienced executive overseeing live and major events output has “stepped back from day-to-day duties” after classifying the act as “high risk” and then not pulling the broadcast in real time.
Nandy may well feel strongly on this matter, but she is also fighting for her own job, with a perception that her stint in culture and media is not a natural fit. She thinks the BBC and its boss Tim Davie have a “problem of leadership,” which looks a lot like an attempt to push Davie from office.
It is also hard to protect the BBC’s independence in, say, Putin’s Russia, where its reporting is excellent if the Culture Secretary decides to front up BBC HR decisions.
square IAN BURRELL The BBC needs to focus on reporting the news - not being it
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At the same time, the BBC clearly needs a wider review on Israel/Gaza coverage and a fresher look overall at who sets, conducts and oversees its news and analysis. My own recipe for change, as someone loyal to and often frustrated by the BBC’s shoulder-shrugging managers and incurious habit of handing out editor posts to an established, insider bunch of favoured people (often reliant on contracts which essentially guarantee a wash-around of the same names to different outlets, rather than opening up its doors) is that it feels too much like a talent “cartel”.
One remedy is a place where more talent and a variety of journalists and commissioners can flow in and out of the corporation. All organisations turn inwards, in part due to hard cost pressures and frankly, because it is easier for managers to keep the peace or not make more innovative decisions.
Reviews are plentiful at the BBC when stuff goes awry. Truly energetic challenge to the status quo is much harder to come by and not really welcomed. So if Nandy really wants to promote a rethink that is durable, rather than knee-jerk, she might ask chairman Samir Shah to take a more penetrating look at how to create pluralist organisational remedies.
As her predecessors also knew, it is far easier in an exigency to call for an executive head to roll. It rarely solves the deeper problems or poses the harder questions. And it most often ends up being a head whose boss is still in place.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico, host of the Politics of Sam and Anne podcast and a frequent BBC presenter
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