466. Crisis Engulfs the BBC: Is this a Coordinated Attack?

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2:05Welcome to a live episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we were together live in Bournemouth last night. So we've all been charging up to London. I just got out of the car. But just before we went on stage, you pointed out that we'd seen the resignation of Tim Davy. So just to bring people up to date, the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davy, and Deborah Ternus, Head of News, have both resigned. And they've both resigned at the end of a week of stories, which originally came out of the Daily Telegraph, leaking a memo by a man called Michael Prescott.

2:40Maybe I'm giving too much detail here, but We can get into this a little bit more. Prescott essentially focused on two allegations against the BBC. One of them is that Panorama, in a program at the end of last year, had spliced together two bits of Donald Trump's speech before the January 6th riots in a very unfair way to make it look as though he'd said in a single sentence, we're going to march on the Capitol and we're going to fight, fight, fight. And in fact, those words appeared about an hour apart in the speech. And the second was a series of allegations about BBC Arabic in Prescott's views, providing a very different and more pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli slant than BBC English.

3:28This got going during the week. And those of you who don't closely read the Daily Telegraph or the Mail. You may not have seen all of this, but you saw Kemmy Baden-Ott getting on this, Boris Johnson getting on this, and increasing calls for the Director General of the BBC to resign. And then finally, yesterday, he did resign, which has raised a huge number of questions. The reason we're doing the emergency podcast is that the BBC is probably the most famous public service broadcaster in the world. It's certainly in in international polls, the most trusted broadcaster in the world. And we are at a time when news and fact in news couldn't be more contested.

4:09And the director general has gone on which over to you. Yeah, that's right. And you were in your dressing room at Bournemouth. I came in, knocked on your door and said, I can't quite believe this. Tim Davey and Deborah Dinesse have both resigned. And you said sort of something on the lines of WTF. Now, on the one hand, And I think that maybe some people think this is a kind of classic Westminster bubble inside the beltway. Media love talking about media story. But actually, I think there's a lot of angles to it that relate to the stuff that we talk about all the time. Donald Trump has become a big part of the story.

4:45As you say, it was and it was, let's be honest, it was a really stupid piece of editing which didn't need to be done. Very few viewers would not have known by then that Donald Trump did effectively incite a riot at the Capitol. And bear in mind, this documentary went out shortly before the election that led to Trump getting his second term. So the idea this was going to have a big impact in America is for the birds. I think what's happened here, and look, I've been saying for a long time that I think the BBC has lost its confidence. I think it panders to those who seek to destroy it and I'm afraid I think that's what this is about I think that this is going to lead to questions about the governance of the BBC and let's just focus on one of the key characters here Robbie Gibb Robbie Gibb and I wonder whether you had anything to do with Robbie Gibb when he was Director of Communications to Theresa May he's on the board and he's he's appointed as one of what's called the national appointees he's there for England and these appointments so the appointment of the chairman samiz shah and these national appointments they're made by government and then the other appointments to the board are made by and from within the bbc and robbie gibb being there is honestly like so teresa may was prime minister he was her director of communications he's got a long track record of being a very very active political figure in all sorts of areas including Gaza and Israel through his senior role at the Jewish Chronicle.

6:16And he's there. He's appointed under Boris Johnson. It is as though when Gordon Brown was prime minister, I was appointed. Now, can you imagine, can you imagine what the outcry would have been on these papers you've mentioned? The Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun, the Express, they would have gone completely berserk. If Alistair Campbell had been put on the board of the BBC. And that may be why, sadly, um we we may not see you as the new director general i think i'd frankly do a better job than some of the names that are in the frame but you're absolutely right it is not it is not going to happen but i think that and look i've as you know i've had my criticisms of the bbc i i had a fight with the bbc over 20 years ago which led not just the director general going but also the the chairman and look this in a sense there are there are there are various ways of looking at this story.

7:06One of them, to which I subscribe in part, is that there has been a right-wing, very organized, very well-funded attempt to undermine the BBC. Because if you are a Trump, if you are a Farage, you don't want a media organization that properly holds people to account. You want a fanzine. And the other narrative is that the BBC is sort of, you know, hopelessly woken left wing. I just don't buy that. The other one where I have more sympathy is that the BBC is very, very bad at dealing with complaints and dealing with crises of its own. And we've seen that in space this week. So many, many different angles.

7:47First thing is that it's definitely true that a lot of people who were in the Conservative Party with me and many of the Conservative Party members in my constituency instinctively feel that the BBC is on the left. Just as you feel that the print media is broadly speaking on the right, they feel the BBC is broadly on the left. And it's probably basically true that many of the BBC journalists I knew traditionally were slightly more on the liberal side than on the conservative side, but whatever. Fundamentally, though, the BBC's problem is that it's a punchback. It's a punch bag with the right basically thinking that the truth is right wing and the left believing the truth is left wing.

8:33And the BBC trying to present a story in the middle. In a polarised world. Yeah, in a polarised world and being hammered from both sides. It is the most impossible job. Now, second thing, I was thinking a little bit about past director generals for the BBC and actually how difficult the job's always been. I think it's got much more difficult. We can talk about why if you were actually to take that job in a few weeks' time, it would be a pretty unpleasant job. And we can talk a little bit about how you could do that job. But if you look back at direct journals of the BBC, you, yes, you just pointed out you were absolutely central to Greg Dyke going.

9:09People remember George Entwistle, who came in in 2012 and had to resign over Newsnight coverage suggesting that Lord McAlpin had been involved in the sex abuse of children in Wales. So that's another news story going along that led to his resignation. I was thinking about now going back a bit more time in your earlier career, Alistair Milne, who was basically booted out because Mrs. Thatcher brought in Marmaduke Hussey. And I guess presumably was booted out because they thought the BBC was too left wing in the mid 1980s and kicked him out. So there's a big history there of a public service broadcaster really struggling.

9:47And of course, somewhere in the background are kind of old fashioned people like me who keep saying, you know, Reithian values. Now, who knows whether this guy, Lord Reith, the first director general was quite all that we now make him out to be. but who are also horrified that the BBC has got rid of Stephen Sackler on Hard Talk, which was a fantastic program, has cut a lot of the funding for Newsnight, so it's now a shadow of its former self, has taken a lot of its coverage out of the party conferences. All of which, and then finally, and then I'll hand back to you, I think we're going to go on and agree absolutely violently how important the BBC is and an impartial public broadcaster is.

10:27It is shocking what they did. I watched that panorama moment. It is unforgivable. They've shot it exactly as though Trump said those two sentences one after the let's walk down to the Capitol and fight, fight, fight. And actually, his fight, fight, fight is not a reference to marching on the Capitol. And any decent editor should have, particularly at the BBC, should have said, what the hell are you doing? How did you splice this together? And one of the things that I never see in the BBC, and maybe this is something we can get onto, is where are the resignations and the accountability at that level of the person who actually made it?

11:01Because presumably, Tim Davey is dealing with everything from Strictly to Radio 3 and goodness knows what else, right? What's gone wrong with the editorial team at Panorama that they could have done that? I mean, I don't know the answer because I don't know who made the decisions. I don't know what the commissioning process was. A lot of programmes that are made these days are made by independents. That actually was part of Thatcher's reform was to say the BBC needs to have more people outside who are brought in to make programs and so on. So I don't know the answer. It was a terrible mistake, no doubt about that.

11:31But it is a stick that is being turned into a kind of, you know, machine gun with which to beat the BBC. And let's just focus a little bit on this left wing, right wing thing. And you mentioned Margaret Thatcher there and Marmaduke Hussey. Margaret Thatcher had this thing that she reputially always used to say when they were talking about public appointments. You know, is he one of us? Okay. And that became the title of one of the best books about Thatcher. Is he one of us? And I think what's gone on here is quite a lot of one of us-ery. The fact that Boris Johnson, who to all intents and purposes, apart from the occasional COVID appearance at the COVID inquiry, has not been involved that much in public debate of late.

12:16Why did he suddenly pile into this? Because actually, Robbie Gibb is, quotes, one of us. I would argue that Michael Prescott is, quotes, in their eyes, one of us. He's a friend of Robbie Gibb's. He made his name as a journalist on the Sunday Times. We know what the Murdoch Press think of the BBC. He then went into corporate PR. And when we talk about this leaked report, you know, people say, oh, a report got leaked. Always worth asking, who does the leak help? In this instance, the leak helps anybody who wants to say that the BBC is terrible. And it gets leaked to a newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.

12:52I mean, we have to call it a newspaper because it's registered at the Post Office, but it's not quite what it was. A newspaper, by the way, that was previously owned by Conrad Black, who went to jail, then by the Barclay brothers, who ended in pretty difficult circumstances. It's now there's a process of sale going on that seems to be going in all sorts of weird directions. But this week, you've seen all these forces of the right, Johnson, Trump, Reform, the Mail, the Telegraph, etc., coming together. And let's just put that in context. I have had fights with the BBC. Okay, I have criticised often the BBC, but you cannot remotely compare the vast output of journalism they do with the absolute mendaciousness and indeed criminality of some of the newspapers that are now shouting loudest for them to be brought down.

13:47Can I get slightly uncomfortable ground here for a second, and then we'll kind of move back. Just take you back to those days in 2003-04, and what you felt leading up to the resignation of the then director general greg dyke and the chairman presumably you felt and the government felt and your allies felt that the bbc had mishandled it and presumably some of it i mean you're obviously seeing it more from your angle but some of the things you felt about the bbc would have some echoes with what the right complaint about the bbc which is bbc did something wrong they didn't apologize in the right way that's exactly right i mean and i i didn't enjoy getting into this terrible sort of battle to the death with the BBC.

14:31Because I actually have always been a defender of the BBC. I criticise it like we all do. I regularly shout at some of its programmes. As I said at Bournemouth last night, I think the real scandal at the BBC today is their never-ending platform of reform with their five MPs ahead of the Greens, the Lib Dems, and most of the time Labour and the Tories as well. So I criticise it. but I defend it partly to go back to what you said earlier about trust. I was just looking at a trust report in America. It's the second most trusted news source in the United States after the weather channel. No. Oh, well, I wouldn't have got that.

15:10So, and it's got big and growing reach in the United States, which is why Trump and the White House and his press secretary last night saying GB News is now the only channel you should watch. This is ridiculous. the White House press secretary talking about this minor channel in the UK. Now, back to Hutton. Andrew Gilligan was a journalist who said something on the Today programme which was completely untrue. He essentially said that we, and then later went on to say I, had quotes, they used this phrase sexed up, but essentially said that I had put intelligence into this dossier knowing it to be untrue against the wishes of the intelligence agencies.

15:51I sitting there as doing the job I was doing at the time, find it quite hard to think of a more serious accusation. And I knew it was untrue. Tony Blair knew it was untrue. The intelligence agencies knew it was untrue. What happened though, and this is where there is a parallel with this, is that the BBC goes into a kind of defensive crouch. But I think what's different with this is that when this story started to appear uh as you say led by the telegraph this leaked report lands in the telegraph and the other papers follow up and katie razzle to be fair to the bbc culture correspondent she has made the point on the bbc website today that you know for the life of us you cannot understand why the bbc didn't grip it from the word go if you'd have gripped it that had come out and said yeah you're absolutely right we don't know how this has happened it's a terrible mistake and we're going to make sure that this you know doesn't happen again and somebody has to pay the price yeah this seems key doesn't it and just just to lean to this alan rusper in a good article in prospect quotes a man called david brader david brader a great washington journalist saying yeah journalism is a partial hasty incomplete inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we've heard about in the past 24 hours yeah distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it about now.

17:16So he's basically saying, as any news person, we're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. And the BBC is inevitably going to get a lot of stuff wrong. The key point is to get out there and apologise. So I suppose where the parallel might be is you presumably could have felt with Andrew Gilligan, listen, okay, he screwed up, he got it wrong. But provided the BBC comes out quickly and says, okay, we acknowledge, you're not going to be totally surprised that, you know, we get things wrong a lot. I mean, And as that guy's just pointed out, you're putting stuff together very quickly. You're trying to get news out very quickly.

17:48And in the case of Panorama, look, I think it's very difficult to understand how the editor let that pass. But nevertheless, presumably Tim Daly hadn't seen that Panorama thing. And goodness knows. So it's the apology point. Well, can I give a possible explanation? I don't know. When I was thinking about this this morning, this goes to how technology is changing. I'm guessing. but let's say you've got a young researcher producer who is told right we need a couple of clips of trump's speech because actually if you look at the whole documentaries i know you have yeah it's it's pretty fair in lots of different ways it's predicting what might happen it's got a lot of interviews with people explaining why they like donald trump it's not a biased against trump for a whole hour it just isn't like that but i can imagine somebody of the sort of tiktok generation maybe hasn't gone through all the sort of training that a lot of journalists because journalism has changed so fast as well so they've thought well actually there might be some of the things well it sort of gets the sense of what he said now i i it's unacceptable especially on the bbc but i can see how that might have might have happened but what i was asking for with the BBC and Gilligan was for them to accept that what he said was so contentious, they had to be 100 % sure.

19:11Instead of what, as soon as we made the complaint, they went into, we're just going to defend this, whatever the truth. So what then came with an independent inquiry with a top judge in charge of it, they got to what we always knew the facts were going to be. And the most striking thing for me was that what emerged was that there wasn't really any effort to find out whether what he said was true. They just felt they had to defend themselves against the government. Okay. All right. Listen, we're speculating a little bit here, but I've been talking a little bit to some BBC people this morning, and you would have been talking to even more.

19:46And that is something that people worry about. So without naming names, maybe safer to go back to this Russ Britcher article in Prospect that I thought was so good. He's talking about the way in which the management's set up. And one thing is there's not enough journalists at the top. If you look at the board, I think three out of 13 of them are journalists. Tim Davey didn't come basically through the news journalism route. He came through more the marketing. And when you look at the people making, looking at these editorial decisions, As you say, you have people like Robbie Gibb floating around.

20:23Michael Prescott was formerly employed to look at this stuff. And he says, who would you rather trust? People who were former journalists and then spent 15 years working in PR companies or public affairs or someone like Lise Doucette, for example, who's the kind of long term. So there is a sort of sense in which the BBC often feels very kind of defensive. And part of that defensiveness, as you pointed out, even 20 years ago, and this is something I recognize in civil service departments too, is that they defend and they don't really look into it. I actually found this sometimes when I was getting into fights with my own departments, that the immediate stance of the permanent sector is total defense and actually not that much energy.

21:09intratrity trying to work out what had gone wrong it's weird as well when you think about other institutions you look at the way that the police now when anything goes wrong and they immediately refer themselves to the body that has to investigate things that the police go wrong now whether they are you know and that can get very very tense and very very difficult it was really you know this week rory which you just tell listeners what the the leading interview that's out today is with bradock sikorsky and it's mainly about ukraine and putin and what have you but there's a very interesting section i'd forgotten about this but fiona listened to it this morning and he i don't know if you remember it's when you asked him about the what happened to the media when the law and justice party were in charge this sort of right-wing populist party that was the the government and he said it was as if the bbc had been taken over by breitbart and this is before any of this stuff was going on and he went on to say we can all have our complaints about the bbc but at least you know they try they check facts they're not just a political organization.

22:07And why you now have, I mean, is it not absurd that the President of the United States, with all that he has to do and all on his plate, he this morning composes and writes a tweet as follows. The top, in caps, people in the BBC, including Tim Davey in caps, whose name I suspect he didn't know until yesterday, the bastard caps, are all quitting slash fired in caps because they were caught doctoring, in quotes, my very good, brackets perfect in caps, speech of January the 6th. Thank you to the Telegraph for exposing these corrupt journalists, in quotes. These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election.

22:45On top of everything else, they're from a foreign country, one that many consider our number one ally. What a terrible thing for democracy. And then she says, Caroline Leavitt, BBC News is dying because they're anti-Trump fake news. Everyone should watch GB News. this is what i mean about this is a concerted organized right-wing thing that is basically about saying we don't want media that holds us the powerful to account we want media like fox news bright bright bar info wars and all that stuff and that's why we should be very very very careful watching all these reformed people celebrating today and jumping on tim davy's grave

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27:07Fees and terms and conditions apply. I talked to my friend Matthew Paris this morning, who you're not a great fan of, but I think one of the things that he said, which I think you would agree with, is there's a very disturbing sense of kind of triumphalism on the right at the moment, and the sense that the center-left is in a defensive crouch. Totally, they're on the march. And the sort of sense that Charles Moore is kind of, Charles Moore is the previous Telegraph editor, great critic of the BBC, very much. And of course, there's a coming together of people talking about Trump, people talking about Israel, people talking about transgender, has all been wrapped into a sort of general critique of the BBC.

27:49Then, okay, let's say we violently agree that we desperately need a really good public broadcaster. We were looking yesterday at Bournemouth together at this reporting that John Burns Murdoch has just done in the FT, looking at a recent paper from Harvard and MIT, showing how the first generation of social media, Facebook and Twitter, polarized, but the second generation, TikTok, is driving to much more negative and aggressive responses. And that's to do with the change in the algorithm, a change from a simple algorithm that's just based on likes and searches to an algorithm that's based on attention.

28:27And we can now feel the sort of existential nature of this fight between the old school of reliable news anchors, Walter Cronkite, various people called Dimbleby telling you what to think about the world every evening, and the new world of this massively decentralized, algorithm-driven polarization, fake news. And in the middle of all this, you've got the BBC, most trusted media organization in the world. One organization that you hope you can kind of reach for. And we desperately need it. I mean, I use the New York Times like that. And of course, the New York Times not perfect either. But I think all of us need in our life, wait a second, is there something I can go to where I can get a more reliable news.