Living off their Writs

Nick Cohen
February 2009

Only alert readers will have noticed the revival of the old fight for freedom of speech in Britain. The threat of a writ so alarms the mainstream media that it barely discusses the increasingly angry arguments around what the United Nations rightly described as the "scandal" of England's suppression of plain prose and investigative journalism.

The case for reform is not being made by what we used to call Fleet Street or the broadcasters but by Index on Censorship and Private Eye, small journals that are more willing than most to make a stand. A heartening coalition of MPs from all parties is offering critical support, but the strongest push is coming not from editors and politicians but from writers in Britain and abroad, who are infuriated by the ability of rich men to use our authoritarian libel laws to suppress unfavourable reports.

First among them is the New York journalist Rachel Ehrenfeld, who is reshaping Anglo-US legal relations after Mr Justice Eady ordered the banning of her book on the funding of radical Islam. She did not publish or publicise it in Britain, and only a few copies reached Britain via Amazon. The obliging Eady nevertheless acceded to the demands of the Saudi banker Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz to fine Ehrenfeld and order the destruction of her book.

Boy, did he pick the wrong woman to censor. Ehrenfeld has organised US publishers and civil liberties groups to persuade Congress to declare that English libel judgements should have no validity in the US.

That the Ehrenfeld case was all about Islamism should surprise no one. Carter- Ruck, an aggressive firm of libel lawyers, has spotted a growing market among the religious. A newsletter to clients boasted that, "during the course of the last 12 months, Carter-Ruck has secured numerous apologies, together with damages totalling in excess of £700,000, for a number of Muslim clients falsely accused of suspected involvement with terrorism".

I have no objection to the exposure of false accusations - although I place more trust in the verdicts of the court of public opinion than of Mr Justice Eady - but the notion that a libel law exploited by criminals and charlatans from Robert Maxwell to Jeffrey Archer only defends the falsely accused is ludicrous.

For years, my colleagues have been telling me about the rapid rebuttal service Carter-Ruck offered Mohamed Ali Harrath, founder and manager of the Islam Channel. Journalists were interested because it is the Muslim equivalent of an American tele-evangelist station, and just as popular. Since it began broadcasting on Sky satellite and the internet in 2004, it has won a devoted audience. The British government estimates that it reaches about 60 per cent of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, as well as audiences in Europe and North Africa. Journalists had heard rumours about the station for years. After they put them to the station, however, the phone would ring and a solicitor would be on the line telling reporters to back off or face a libel action. Most did until the editor of The Times decided that enough was enough. He assigned reporters to the story, and they soon found the reason for the nervousness of Harrath and the aggression of his lawyers.

Interpol has an international alert out on him. The dictatorship in his native Tunisia claims he is a leading member of an Islamic terrorist organisation, and the US government repeats the allegation. The accusations did not stop the Metropolitan Police pumping public money into Harrath's Global Peace and Unity forums and consulting him on how to "combat extremism" - of all things.

None of the above means that he is a terrorist - he denies the charge and he has never been convicted - or that the Islam Channel is a terrorist network. By contrast, much of what passes as entertainment on the Islam Channel is as tedious as a tax return. Meanwhile, its political programmes are not the full-blooded totalitarianism of al-Qaeda and its associates. Rather, the Islam Channel represents the views of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati-e-Islami, its south Asian sister organisation. Both parties are totalitarian in that they want a theocratic empire, but both have been very successful in persuading not only the police but Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians and pseudo-left journalists and intellectuals that, in Harrath's words, "there is nothing wrong or criminal in trying to establish an Islamic state".

A viewing of the channel's documentaries shows the folly of the liberal establishment's acquiescence to what we old lefties would call "entryist" tactics. A Promise of Heaven, the Islam Channel's history of Jerusalem, is the most notorious. You do not have to be any kind of supporter of Israel to find its apparently authoritative narrator's commentary mind-bogglingly sinister. Israel was never Jewish but "colonised by Arab Canaanites", he assures us. The Old Testament would appear to contradict the assertion, but the narrator continues, "Abraham was no Jew, no Christian. He was a Muslim." What Jews there were in Israel merely "passed by this land as warriors, not as tribes of settlers who lived on this land". Viewers must discount the archaeological evidence of Jewish names on gravestones. They are forgeries, the result of a hellish plot by Zionists and their western allies to deny the Muslim claim to Jerusalem.

The media regulator Ofcom found the Islam Channel guilty of a failure to show "due impartiality". Detectives found a copy of A Promise of Heaven in the home of Saajid Badat, a radical from Gloucester who pleaded guilty in 2005 to plotting to destroy an aircraft with a shoe bomb. But I emphasise that terrorism is not the most worrying aspect of the Islam Channel's popularity. Its undoubted success shows that a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the dismissal of Enlightenment values are British Muslims seeking assimilation and a better life, particularly Muslim women.

As a supposedly free citizen of a supposedly free country, I long for the day when I will be able to denounce such reactionary politics without first having to have my writings approved by a lawyer.

Standpoint Online

Freedom of Speech in London

In the name of combating 'Islamophobia', Ken Livingstone has launched an attack on press freedom that reveals his fear of the public.

Brendan O’Neill
15 November 2007

What kind of leader launches an open assault on the press, accusing it of jeopardising public safety and demanding that it put its ‘house in order’? What sort of ruler proposes ‘guidelines’ to the press on what stories it should cover, and even worse, what kind of language it should use to cover them, what kind of people it should employ, and what kind of values it should uphold and communicate to the mass of the population? Kim Jong-il, perhaps? Saddam Hussein, before he was chased into his hole in the ground and later executed? How about Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London?

This week, ‘Red Ken’, as some people insist on calling him, launched a report on British media coverage of ‘Muslim issues’. Titled The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, Non-Muslims and the UK Media, the report was commissioned by Livingstone’s Greater London Authority. It explores the alleged rise of Islamophobia in the media. And in the name of tackling the apparent spread of prejudice through the papers (especially tabloid ones), Livingstone and his supporters have crossed a line normally only transgressed by despots: they’re using their political clout to try to shape the media in their own image. Strip away all the PC lingo about ‘protecting Muslims’, and the London mayor’s latest initiative comes across as an intolerable attack on press freedom.

The report argues that Islamophobia is rampant in the British press, and that new attitudes amongst journalists and codes of ethics will be required to deal with it. In his foreword, Livingstone argues that there is an increasingly ‘negative portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the media’, which is helping to ‘[sow] divisions among London’s diverse communities’ (pxi). Elsewhere, the report argues that such coverage means ‘Muslims understandably feel vulnerable to hate crimes and unlawful discrimination’; indeed, the ‘drip-drip-drip’ repetition of ‘abusive and emotive language’ about Muslims could lead to ‘more hate crimes and acts of discrimination than otherwise’ (p128). In short, the media’s irresponsible coverage of Muslim issues is a threat to social cohesion and a potential harbinger of violence.

In fact, the report uses questionable, one might even say dodgy methodology to show that the media are continually ‘abusing’ Muslims. For chapter 2 – ‘A normal week? Threats and crises in Britain and the world’ – the report’s authors select a ‘random’ week in 2006 and assess the newspapers’ coverage of Muslim affairs during that week. They chose Monday 8 May to Sunday 14 May 2006. During this week there were apparently 352 articles on Muslim-related issues in all the mainstream daily newspapers. The report’s authors found that of these 352 articles, 91 per cent were ‘negative’ in their portrayal of Muslims and Islam, and only four per cent were judged to be positive. Five per cent were judged neutral. This is evidence, the report claims, of the ‘demonisation’ of Muslims by a ‘torrent’ of negative stories (p18).

It pays – a lot – to look more closely at how this research was carried out. First, the random week selected by the researchers happened to be the week in which the government published its report on the 7/7 bombings. That report came out on Friday 12 May. Not surprisingly, there was a huge amount of press coverage, and not surprisingly most of it was ‘negative’, in the sense that it was about four British-born Muslims who blew up themselves and 52 others in London a year earlier; even individuals of an old Stalinist bent, such as those who stack’s Livingstone’s GLA, would find it hard to put a ‘positive’ spin on such a story. Of the study’s 352 newspaper stories related to Muslims, 69 – or 19.6 per cent – were about the 7/7 bombings (p26).

What’s more, the researchers made a broad sweep indeed when selecting articles ‘about Muslims’. They counted all articles that included the words ‘Islam’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’, ‘Sunni’, ‘Shia’, or the words ‘radical’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘extremist’ if the ‘context was such that it was reasonable to assume that an association with Islam or Muslims would be made’. In other words, even an article about an ‘extremist’ online al-Qaeda sympathiser, say, could be selected as a negative story about Muslims, even if it did not say anything about his religious identity (p17). The researchers also included articles where the names of people were obviously Muslim, ‘even if their religious identity was not explicitly stated’. This leads to a bizarre situation where articles about the sentencing of the former boxer Prince Naseem for dangerous driving are included as part of the torrent of negative stories about Muslims. Naseem was sentenced to 15 months in prison in the week selected by the researchers (on 12 May 2006), and because his name (Naseem Hamed) is obviously Muslim, and because the stories (on dangerous driving) are obviously negative, they are added to the pile of evidence that the media are abusing Muslims. Of the 352 articles selected by the researchers, 15, or 4.3 per cent, were ‘negative’ stories about Prince Naseem (p26).

Even worse, in selecting articles that include the words ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, the researchers included all of that random week’s coverage of the bloody mess that is postwar Iraq. May 2006 was the bloodiest month of the year so far in Iraq: according to the Iraq Body Count website, between 2,000 and 2,100 people were killed in Iraq during that month. Not surprisingly, articles about Iraq come second only to articles about 7/7 in the researchers’ list of ‘negative stories on Muslims’. Of their 352 selected articles, 49 – or 13.9 per cent – were news articles about the violence and instability in Iraq. Here, even reporting about a bloody foreign war, which might not necessarily mention ‘Muslims’ but by necessity mentions the words ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, is cited as an example of irresponsible and abusive media content on Muslims.

What are the researchers saying? That coverage of things like Iraq and 7/7 needs to be more positive? That journalists who write on war and rare acts of terrorism should mind their language lest they offend Muslims? Or more to the point, lest they offend those who fancy themselves, through the power of self-selection rather than anything so grubby as an electoral process, to be the representatives of Muslims. The contributors to Livingstone’s report include Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Aziz of the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism, and Tariq Hameed, who writes reports for the Muslim Council of Britain on how journalists should cover Muslim affairs. Are these individuals so narcissistic that they read about the debacle in Iraq and think only of their personal feelings?

In labelling as ‘negative’ and ‘abusive’ even stories about war and terrorism, the report’s authors show their deeply censorious streak. They are effectively updating, in PC terminology, the old BBC man Martyn Lewis’s demand in the 1990s for more ‘happy news’. Where Lewis said news reporters should seek out ‘good news stories’ as well as bad news stories, effectively spreading the ‘And Finally’ bit of News at Ten across the whole news agenda, Ken’s researchers label everything from coverage of Prince Naseem to the war in Iraq as overly negative, and demand more positive stories on Muslim affairs. This is a demand for the press to overhaul its agenda, for journalists to shift their focus, change their language, and, as the report says, ‘contribute to informed discussion and debate amongst Muslims and non-Muslims about ways of working together to maintain and develop Britain as a multicultural, multifaith democracy’ (pxiv). In short, the press should do the kind of thing that Livingstone wants it to. It speaks volumes about Livingstone’s arrogance and contempt for public debate that he would like to, if only he had the power, turn the press into an offshoot of his political fiefdom.

So, the demonisation of Muslims in the media does not normally consist of articles attacking or slurring Muslims – rather it consists of news reports on Iraq, 7/7, Prince Naseem, as well as Iran, Palestine and numerous other newsworthy issues. Thus, the authors of the report are forced to trawl the dodgier regions of the tabloid media for what they consider to be truly disturbing examples of anti-Muslim prejudice. In chapter 3 – ‘Britishness is being destroyed: worries in a changing world’ – they flag up examples of the media abuse of Muslims. The main example – make sure you are sitting comfortably – appeared on the front page of the Daily Express in October 2005. It was headlined: ‘HOGWASH: Now the PC brigade bans piggy banks in case they upset Muslims.’ The report spends five pages discussing and dissecting this silly but fairly typical ‘PC gone mad’ story that the vast majority of us will have shrugged off at the time and certainly forgotten about since. In total, chapter 3 breaks down what the authors admit are ‘four small episodes’, ‘each relatively trivial in itself’ – that is, all of them are tabloid-style ‘PC gone mad’ stories – yet cites them as evidence that there is an ‘attack on Muslims’ in the media (p31).

The authors then get really desperate. Unable to find many clear expressions of serious anti-Muslim prejudice in the mainstream, they move on to the online discussion boards of the tabloid newspapers. On the Daily Express website they find that web-users have written things like ‘I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about Muslims this and Muslims that’; ‘The Islamic tail is wagging the British bulldog’; and ‘Instead of assimilating into our culture, Muslims whine and complain… They should return to the homeland of their beloved prophet Mohammed.’ (p11) Clearly some of these statements were written by individuals with noxious views. But material posted on the free-for-all discussion boards of the Daily Express website hardly represents a mainstream torrent of abuse. If I took seriously everything that was ever said about me on online discussion boards, I’d never leave the house. That the researchers had to trawl the gutters of the World Wide Web in order to find abuse of Muslims (and even here, the abuse cited is fairly mild) shows that ‘Islamophobia’ is not a mainstream or powerful prejudice. Yet the researchers seem desperate to demonstrate that it is. That is because this report looks to me less like an attempt to tackle real prejudice than to propose some quite authoritarian ideas under the guise of ‘tackling Islamophobia’.

This report demonstrates what the phenomenon of Islamophobia is actually about today. There has been no public groundswell in anti-Muslim prejudice, or in anti-Muslim violence; rather, the spectre of ‘Islamophobia’ exists in the minds of the elite, who look upon Britain’s white working-class communities as an unpredictable blob liable to carry out acts of violence against Muslims if they read an article about piggy banks being banned or Prince Naseem being jailed. The Islamophobia agenda, as pushed by central government, the GLA, the police, various self-selected Muslim community groups and, as it happens, large sections of the media itself, is underpinned by a poisonous view of the masses as irrational and given to violent outbursts, and Muslims as pathetic victims who need heroic Ken and his handpicked Muslim community warriors to protect them. That is why this report focuses mostly on the tabloids, because, as it says, these papers are read by ‘millions’ of people. Those horrible, hard-to-predict millions; we can’t have them reading inflammatory material, can we? (pxvii)

The report says that media coverage may lead to increased violence, yet all the evidence suggests that there has not been a rise in anti-Muslim attacks. At the end of last year, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that in 2005-2006 – in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, when politicians, the police and others predicted there would be an anti-Muslim pogrom – there were only 43 cases of religiously aggravated crime, 18 of them against Muslims (or ‘perceived’ Muslims). This represented a decline from 23 anti-Muslim crimes in 2004-2005 (1). It is the irrational fear of public opinion that is widespread in the GLA and elsewhere that leads some to see a connection between fairly ordinary media coverage of important events and a possible rise in violence. The truth is that Livingstone’s desire to police the language that journalists use, just as central government has tried to curb the language all of us use in relation to ‘religious hatred’, does nothing to rejuvenate or improve communuty relations or public life; instead it allows ideas to fester, unchallenged.

Common Ground, with its strange methodology, cliquish community group input and fear of tabloids and tabloid readers, ends by calling for an overhaul of the media. It calls for ‘codes of professional conduct and style guides about use of terminology’; for the employment of ‘more journalists of Muslim heritage who can more accurately reflect the views and experiences of Muslim communities’; and for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights and the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government to focus on ‘combating anti-Muslim prejudice in the media’ and in ‘the general climate of public opinion’ (p133). These are explicit demands for increased government intervention into the press, and anyone who believes in the freedom of the press should rigorously oppose them and hope that the government ignores them.

Of course there are vast problems with the British press, its tendency to scaremonger about the threat of terrorism amongst them. Yet as Karl Marx, history’s most passionate and consistent defender of freedom of the press, argued, a ‘bad’ free press is better than a ‘good’ controlled press. Marx said: ‘The free press remains good even when its products are bad, because these products are deviations from the nature of a free press, [while] the censored press remains bad, even when its products are good, because these products are only good insofar as they represent the free press within the censored press’ (2). Marx ridiculed nineteenth-century European rulers who argued that the press should be restricted because it threatened the ‘public good’ and who called on newspapers to hire only ‘respectable’ individuals whose ‘position and character guarantee the seriousness of their activities and the loyalty of their thinking’ (3). Livingstone, if he had the power, would do precisely these two things. He argues that the media is ‘sowing divisions’ and ‘harming social cohesion’ – that is, threatening public safety – and his report goes so far as to suggest who the media should employ: more Muslims, who apparently have the expertise and the loyalty to uphold the multicultural vision.

There is something archaically tyrannical in Livingstone’s vision for the press: on the basis of questionable findings, he and his supporters express their desire to cajole the media into promoting the Livingstone vision for society, which is the ‘building and maintenance of Britain as a multicultural society’ (pxiii). If Livingstone got his way, it would represent an explicit politicisation of the media, though it would be done under the guise of representing the interests of Muslim communities and the British people more broadly. Yet as Marx said, in a controlled or censored media, the government ‘hears only its own voice, knows that it hears only its own voice, and is yet fixed on the delusion to hear the voice of the people...’ (4) The press should remain free from all forms of delusional interference by the authorities. Our current bad media – fairly free, messy, a bit mad, but which represents at least an aspiration to independence and objectivity – is a million times better than Livingstone’s vision of a calm, slavish and unquestioning ‘good media’ could ever be.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here.

(1) See Hands up if you’re suffering from Islamofatigue, by Brendan O’Neill

(2) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

(3) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

(4) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

What is Television For?

The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture
Jeremy Paxman
24th August 2007, Edinburgh


Oh dear. What a terrible trade we work in. Blue Peter is bent. Five is a faker. Richard and Judy’s competitions give a glorious new meaning to their slogan ‘You say, we pay.’ (They did, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.) Big Brother gets castigated for being an exploitative freak show. (Sorry, what’s the story there, then?) The ITV press office misrepresents a documentary. Channel Four’s Born Survivor Bear Grylls turns out to need Room Service. Even Children in Need, and Comic Relief, turn out to be guilty of something worse than insufferable smugness. The Prime Minister is mad at us. Even the Queen is cross. And that great Alpha Male, Gordon Ramsay can’t even catch his own fucking fish.

Now, some of these so-called scandals are just nonsense: the shock of discovering that Griff Rhys Jones isn’t standing on a mountaintop for the title sequence of his latest series is one example: I can exclusively reveal that Newsnight’s old backdrop of a London skyline was a painting and that the famous Panorama slogan about being ‘a window on the world’ didn’t mean it was a pane of glass with a metal handle. Other of the attacks will blow over. Some are wilful misunderstanding. And some are just part of the weather. We do not, for example, need to worry too much about being condemned by newspapers which reprint the foreign holiday snaps of a short-sighted nightclub bouncer to tell us there’s a Great White Shark lurking in the sea off Cornwall, and then providing useful tips on how to avoid being eaten (such as ‘don’t clap your hands and bark like a seal’.)

But this needs saying, and it needs saying quite clearly. There is a problem. Potentially, it is a very big problem. It has the capacity to change utterly what we do, and in the process to betray the people we ought to be serving. Once people start believing we’re playing fast and loose with them routinely, we’ve had it. And the problem is not going to be addressed until senior people in this industry have the courage to come out and state quite clearly state what television is for. What I say tonight is my own ideas, not the views of the BBC. I don’t think it will do for senior figures in this industry to stay hunkered down, occasionally lashing out at young people in the business or setting up inquiries of one sort or another. What’s needed is a manifesto, a statement of belief.

Let me say right now that some of the things of which we stand accused are contemptible. I can see no circumstances at all under which you can justify defrauding the public on a premium rate phone line. In fact, I can’t quite see why there aren’t grounds for prosecution. And, frankly, I find it pretty hard to believe some of the television bosses when they say they had no idea what was going on. I know people who worked on ITV Play who told me the best part of a year before the scandal how bothered they were by what was happening. Whoever was responsible should be sacked.

But in a way, that’s the easy part. My worry is really about the bigger picture. And I have to say that it seems to me things haven’t been much helped by they way they’ve been handled. We’ve had the preposterous spectacle of some of the most senior figures in broadcasting running around like maiden aunts who’ve walked in on some teenage party, affecting shock and disbelief at what they’ve heard. It simply won’t wash for senior figures in the industry to blame our troubles on an influx of untrained young people: the ITV Alzheimer’s documentary and the trailer for the series about the Queen were made by a couple of the most venerable figures in the business. The question we have to ask ourselves is, is there something rotten in the state of television, some systemic sickness, that renders it inherently dishonest? But the question behind that one is simply, What Is Television For?

To take the first question first: is television inherently dishonest? Of course it’s not. The question is like asking do cars kill people? It rather depends who’s driving. Right now the impression is being given that the only thing real on television is the cellulite on How to Look Good Naked. We should start with some acknowledgements, the first of which is that all television is artifice to some degree. Let’s not pretend it isn’t. Even the news: when we see a reporter in waders broadcasting live from a flooded street, do we honestly think the whole town is underwater, and with it the OB truck? Every time you stick a noddy into an interview, that’s artifice. Even the live television interview itself is artifice.

The key thing is that the audience have to be able to have confidence in us to show them something which, while being manufactured, is a fair representation of the true state of affairs. That does not demand that things aren’t edited – or even that interviewees are not challenged or helped to express their views clearly. It demands that we can be trusted to handle the resulting material honestly. Lose that, allow the impression to get out that we can’t be trusted, and we’re throwing away the one commodity which makes our work worthwhile.

Now, apart from a brief and undistinguished stint on Radio Brighton and a less than stellar period as a newsroom sub, I have spent all my working life in television. I went into it because it was exciting, because it was as creative as I could manage once I realised I didn’t have the talent to write novels, because I conned myself that I wasn’t really starting work. And, in particular, because I got turned down for every other job I applied for. I have never regretted it, for a number of reasons. Because I work with clever, talented and funny people. Because it never really seems like work. And, most of all, because I think this medium matters. My point is this: if we allow the belief to take hold that the medium as a whole is guilty as charged, for it to be reduced to the abject, commercial amorality of much of the worldwide media, British television won’t be worth working in. We should all get out and do something more worthwhile, like selling timeshares or dumping toxic waste on poor countries in Africa. If we’re going to stay here, we have to rediscover the purpose of this medium.

I once asked Tim Gardam, when he was editor of Newsnight – before he went on to run Channel Four – what people like us did before television was invented. “Oh that’s easy,” he said, “we went into the church.” There’s something in this. In the old days the Church offered young people who weren’t going to inherit the family estate or go into the army the chance of a comfortable, if not particularly well-paid, occupation which didn’t oblige them to get their hands dirty and gave them an ‘access all areas’ pass through the land. Much the same awaits television producers and researchers now. We could go on: the skulduggery inside contemporary media organisations is every bit as pervasive as anything in Trollope. And there’s the uncomfortable sense that for some people events have no meaning unless they are somehow sanctified by the presence of television: how else are we to explain those people queueing for a DNA test to establish whether their sister may be their mother-in-law on confessionals like the Jeremy Kyle Show?

But the broader comparison is the way that the media have come to occupy a very similar role to that once performed by nineteenth century clergy. Edmund Burke is supposed to have coined the expression ‘the Fourth Estate’ when he talked of the three Estates in parliament; the aristocracy, the Church and the commoners, and then pointed out that the reporters in the Gallery had more power than all of them. This was an absurd exaggeration then but it is much less of one now. In twenty-first century political life the aristocracy counts for nothing, and the church not for much. In effect there are two estates that count, the popularly elected and the self-appointed.

When I was asked to give this lecture – and I realised I couldn’t wriggle out of it, as I’d wriggled out of it before, I thought I knew what I wanted to talk about. It was about the relationship between those two estates, the media and political life. Broadcasting has utterly changed the way that politics is conducted in Britain. And then, a few weeks later, Tony Blair nicked my subject, in a speech at the Reuters Institute in Oxford in which he talked about us being a pack of feral beasts. His analysis is the most sustained, high-profile critique of what we’re about, and I’m going to deal with what he had to say – and what’s become of television news - later. Blair’s focus was on news, but what he identified as the cause of the trouble applies right across television. In a nutshell, he defined the source of the problem as hugely increased competition, which makes impact by far the most important consideration in broadcasting, because impact gives competitive edge. But no sooner had he made his speech than the series of scandals I mentioned earlier began going off, like a series of Bonfire Night fireworks.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that what links all the scandals – what is the defining problem of contemporary television – is trust: can you believe what you see on television, does television treat people fairly, is it healthy for society? There’s a real danger now either that we lose trust. Or that in attempting to regain it we retreat into such a mind-numbing literalism that we neutralise the imaginative capacity of the medium. I heard the other day of a production company which is sending its producers and researchers on a re-education course in which they’re instructed that if an interviewee does not say on camera what they have said in research, they may not be reminded or encouraged to repeat what they said previously. It would, they were told, be construed as coaching witnesses. This is ludicrous. And I am not entirely convinced by the spectacle of senior figures in this industry walking around like some order of medieval self-flagellating monks offering pre-emptive cringes to all and sundry. What we need instead is a clear, unambiguous statement of ambition.

Before we can do that we need to recognise is how the world in which we operate has changed.
Firstly, I would modify what Tony Blair said about competition. As everyone knows, in the last quarter century we’ve gone from three television channels to hundreds. Goody, goody, lots of jobs. Lots more sponsors for tables at those self-regarding awards ceremonies. I’m afraid, though, that it comes at a price. The truth is this: the more television there is, the less any of it matters. Once upon a time people used to console each other after some gargantuan on-air shambles with the words ‘ah well, it’s only television’. It was supposed to give some sense of consolation – at least no-one was dead. But it wasn’t really meant. Nowadays you could say it and mean it. This is the key characteristic of the current climate: there is a vast amount of stuff out there. Ubiquity is the mother of indifference.

And as we all also know, in the digital age, that problem is going to get worse. We have already entered a world in which, though sites like Youtube, anyone can publish anything. It’s removed the magic from production. The more familiar people become with the medium – like the boy in the jam factory who didn’t eat the stuff because he knew what went into it – the more sceptical they’re likely to be. As far as the big broadcasters are concerned, the sad truth is that, apart from soap-operas, there is now hardly a programme with which a broad audience has a regular date. Dr Who is a glorious exception, as is the cleverly produced new series of the X factor. But the reason beleaguered bosses at the BBC, for example, keep trotting out the example of Planet Earth as a reason for the organisation’s existence is precisely that it is so rare.

Secondly, once the audience is able to watch television at a time, and in a style of its own choosing, the authority of the broadcaster is immediately undermined. Things like the iPlayer, just as much as the file-sharing websites mean it is no longer some scheduler telling people when something is available, it is the viewer deciding what they want to watch when they want to watch it. It is a subtle but significant change in the balance of power.

Thirdly, the decline of almost all audiences means that no one programme, or organisation any longer has the natural authority of dominance. (And a company’s ability to produce a soap-opera which does well in the ratings does not enhance the authority of its current affairs programmes.)

Fourthly, television is now encountering something which politicians have had to live with for years. The weather has changed. We no longer live in a time when trust was axiomatic. The crisis of confidence in television reflects the crisis of trust in politics: the old ‘we know best’ culture – in which producers affected a patrician concern to enlighten the poor dumb creatures who were their viewers won’t wash any longer.

But the most important change, it seems to me, is the philosophy which underpins what we do.
Take one case. The biggest brouhaha of the summer was the fuss over the misleading editing of the trailer for RDF’s documentary for the BBC about the Queen. Let’s be realistic. Ten years or so ago the BBC wouldn’t have dreamed of farming out a documentary about a year in the life of the Queen to an independent best-known for such seminal works as Wife Swop. There’d have been a producer like Eddie Mirzoeff, a cameraman like Philip Bonham-Carter, and an immensely ponderous production process. The thing would have lumbered on through endless meetings with royal liaison people, aspired to a secret screening with a lady in waiting or two, and been generally badly up itself. But it was a clear, controllable operation. Instead of which, what happens? An independent negotiates access to Buckingham Palace and then sells the project to the BBC. The BBC insists upon another company exec producing the series, the thing is filmed by a young one-man band, RDF contract a more experienced producer to put together his mountain of rushes, the BBC changes it mind about how many programmes it wants, and then the production company re-edits a bit of tape for showing at a festival, to drum up foreign sales to make a turn on the whole project. You begin to see how things could have gone wrong.

I am, emphatically, not saying there was some Golden Age, because that’s pointless. After all, there are some people here old enough to remember the television of that time. Like the White Heather Club. But there was something qualitatively different about much of the medium. The useful thing about the example of the Queen is the way it demonstrates the changing imperatives, the variety of operators, the confused lines of accountability, the fact that money intrudes at every stage.

Now this is new. For most of the media, most of the time, the motivation has always been pretty simple: you grab as much of the potential audience as possible, in order that you can screw the maximum amount of money out of them. Television was different because those who made it had a different sense of intention. In those more innocent days – and it applied to both the BBC and the commercial sector, producers made programmes because they were passionately engaged with the world and wanted to communicate what they’d found out. Too much of the time now they simply pick things from the world which look as if they might make good television, regardless of whether they do anything other than meet the demands of a format. To put it simply, people at the top are less concerned with content and a lot more concerned with bottom lines. There are too many people in this industry whose answer to the question what is television for? is to say ‘to make money.’

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the restructuring of the industry which the Tories began and Labour has continued. The BBC was big and lumbering and arrogant, and plenty of the independents are lean, and quick and creative. But the dynamic shifted. Those reforms also removed from ITV obligations to produce all sorts of programming which was once deemed to be a public good. Instead of great regional companies with distinguished records – Granada Television being a case in point – we have one amorphous mass. Tonight with Trevor Macdonald is most definitely not World in Action. Then came the retreat from children’s programming. One by one the public service requirements are being abandoned. Given the chance, who seriously doubts that ITV would abandon much of its regional broadcasting? I’m not really blaming ITV: once you treat television as if it’s no different to running a fast-food empire, of course commercial judgements rule. But who has confidence that news and current affairs will survive even on Channel 4 in the digital age without a regulator’s enforcement? And the only way to stiffen the regulator’s backbone is to ask them to define what, precisely, is television for.

The difficulty is that I see precious little evidence that anyone is grappling with this question. In fact, I don’t see much evidence anyone knows which way is up. Or to put it another way, it’s not that the television industry doesn’t have a compass. It’s that too often it doesn’t even seem sure any longer that North exists. There has been a catastrophic, collective loss of nerve. To go back to the comparison with the Church, too often the medium seems like the Vatican in one of those periods of medieval complacency. The cardinals of our trade are more interested in selling indulgences and keeping the estate intact than they are in articulating qualitative judgements about what’s good, what’s bad, which programmes matter, and which don’t.

Instead we have television executives behaving like politicians. One of New Labour’s tricks was to commission polling evidence and focus groups to find out what people wanted. And then to offer it to them. Television has gone much the same way. Too often it seems that the people at the top of this industry no longer ask themselves what they ought to be using this uniquely powerful medium for. Instead of seeking to enlighten the audience, they set out to second-guess them. It won’t be long before we discover what politicians have discovered: if you spend your time telling people what you think they want to hear, pretty soon you lose their respect.

Television and politics are facing the same challenge: how do you connect? Which brings me to the question of news. News is the most important element in the overall ecology of television. It is the canary in the miner’s cage. If and when – and I sincerely hope it’s never – people begin to trust television news as much as they trust many of the newspapers, then we’re in trouble.
But I thought the way we responded to Tony Blair’s speech was pretty pathetic. Again, let’s be frank. These two trades, politics and media have a great deal in common. Both deal in words and images, both involve a contract with the public based upon fairly explicit promises. And both are trades best practised by people who aren’t over-encumbered with a sense of their own frailty. We are also, of course, both down there with estate agents and car dealers when it comes to public affection and trust. Look at the charts: producers do rank just above paedophiles. Just.

By and large, the response to Blair’s attack just pressed the F12 key. Yah booh. You’re a politician. We’re media yahoos. Get over it. Of course, the attack all seemed a bit rich, coming from a government which took the media more seriously – and tried to control it more effectively – than any previous administration. I remember once being in Number Eleven Downing Street waiting to do an interview with Gordon Brown, and a side door from Number 12 opening. In previous governments, Number Twelve was where the Chief Whip had his office. Now, as it swung back I was astonished to see the place had been taken over by what seemed to be a fibre-optic version of a Victorian counting house - a squad of young people sitting at rows of desks, on the phone bending the ears of journalists. At the top – can he really have been sitting at a higher desk? - that’s certainly how I think I remember it – sat the brooding figure of Alastair Campbell. The scene showed how thoroughly priorities had changed: where once government used the room to control and discipline its MP’s in parliament it now used it to try something similar with the media. If you read Alastair Campbell’s diaries – which will turn out to be such a gold mine for future…. psychiatrists – you get the first hand version. This was an administration so obsessed with its own PR that the man hired to handle it is even drafting the resignation letters of people who quit the government as a matter of principle. My own theory about why the diaries are only 789 pages long is that he ran out of expletives to use to describe the media. But the fact he came loathe the trade he had once practised shouldn’t blind us to the fact the may have a point or two.

In his speech, which managed to avoid the words wanker, prat, shit and the like – obviously not drafted by Alastair - Blair admitted that a vast amount of the work of his government – perhaps too much - had been devoted to handling the media. He justified it by claiming this was because we in the media pay little attention to what goes in places like parliament because we’re obsessed by impact. In a choice between impact and accuracy, he said, impact wins. Scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. He went on to accuse us of using extravagant language: every problem’s a crisis, policies don’t run into difficulty, they end up in tatters. We see everything in black and white, and have given up separating fact from comment. “We are” – and this a direct quote “all being dragged down by the way that the media and public life interact.”

Now we could despatch some of these ideas quite quickly. We do not need to take seriously complaints about the marginalising of parliament from a Prime Minister who could hardly be bothered to turn up there much of the time. Nor need we concern ourselves with complaints about trivialisation of cabinet government from a man whose cabinet meetings could last less time than an edition of Ready Steady Cook. We do not need lectures about cynicism from an administration which employed people who believed that September 11th was a good day to bury bad news. Most of all, we do not need homilies about destroying people’s reputations from an administration on whose watch Dr David Kelly was driven to suicide. But I found the media’s response – and particularly the response of the television industry - to the Blair challenge pretty depressing. Hardly anyone engaged with the substance of the criticisms – of our triviality, our short-sightedness, our preoccupation with conflict. The immediate and almost universal reaction was not to examine the charge sheet, but to utter a blanket plea of ‘not guilty’, usually followed by well, you misled us about WMD, as if that somehow entitles us to say whatever we like. Well, it won’t do.

There was plenty wrong with Tony Blair’s speech. To talk about the media being ‘feral beasts’ was weird, because, as we all know, feral either means untamed, or it means to run wild, as if they were once tamed. But surely we ought to be untamed? The alternative is to be some sort of poodle. There’s a story in Simon Armitage’s All Points North, a memoir of his life in Yorkshire, where he was probation officer, of a home visit to see the mother of a young offender on a run-down housing estate. He found the tattered house, with an enormous half-wild Alsatian dog running around the overgrown front garden. The mother answered the door, the Alsatian pushed past her into the house, and the probation officer and mother sat down to a cup of tea. Ten minutes into the conversation, the dog took itself off into the corner of the room and relieved itself. Copiously. The Probation Officer is first appalled, then decides to use the dog as a way into the question of the delinquent son. He plucks up the courage to ask the mother: isn’t there anything she could do to control the dog? To which the woman replied. ‘But I thought it was your dog.’

You can imagine the story, if it were told in Downing Street, becoming some laboured metaphor about the relationship between Probation Officers and offenders being like that between spin doctors and the media. But to me the hero of the story’s quite clear. It’s the Alsatian. What was wrong with Blair’s speech was that instead of attacking the Alsatian he went for the Independent. This was a pathetic target. If the problem’s a feral Alsatian, don’t kick the neighbour’s toy poodle instead. It was also foolish, because if any paper chooses not to be part of the pack, it’s the Indie. But to suggest that just because he picked the wrong example the whole complaint is – as Alastair Campbell (how we miss him!) would put it – ‘bollocks’ or ‘crap’ or something similarly cerebral, won’t do. Something has changed - and changed profoundly - in the way that public life works.

Just look at this progression. Once radio and television reported speeches in parliament. Then we asked Cabinet ministers what they would like to say to the nation. Then we cross-examined them. Now the BBC political editor comes on after they’ve appeared, to pass judgement on whether their performance was convincing. And yes, I do appreciate that people like me are seen by some of Tony Blair’s cheerleaders as part of the ruination of this relationship. I want to say three things about that. One, that I do genuinely believe there ought to be a chasm between journalists and politicians. I intend no criticism of colleagues in the lobby who’ve come to a different conclusion. But that’s what I think. (I do not, incidentally – and I am heartily sick of this quote of being attributed to me – think they’re all lying bastards. I never said it. And they’re not. Although I do think we should always be very sceptical.)

In fact I fear there’s a dreary tendency on all our parts whenever a story breaks to address it by asking for an interview with the minister responsible. I’ll give you an example. When we learned a few weeks ago that ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ meant that thousands of prisoners were going to be released early, it was an opportunity to have a sensible, grown-up discussion about why we lock so many people up in this country, what we do with them while they’re there, and whether releasing them a few weeks early makes any difference. That discussion might have involved people who know about penal policy, maybe a prison governor, and perhaps a thoughtful ex –con. Instead of which what did we end up with on Newsnight (and elsewhere)? The latest prison minister and his conservative shadow. Why do we do that? Because we’re too close to Westminster politics, and because when the production desk is being run ragged, looking for guests, the one thing you can be sure about is a politician’s willingness to spout confidently.

And secondly, on the subject of confrontational interviews, not every interview needs to be like that. In fact most of them aren’t – just the usual journalistic interrogatives: who, when, where, why, how. In the small proportion which are more contentious the way to avoid confrontation is pretty simple. You just answer the question. But I’m not going to devote the rest of this lecture to attempting to justify what I do, because I want to engage with a slightly bigger picture.

I’d like you to imagine a Prime Minister who has more powers than any other in the entire twentieth century: powers to order his citizens to go into battle, to order industries to stop of start production, powers even to seize public property. He does this with little serious public opposition. And in his entire period in office he holds not a single news conference.
It is unimaginable. Yet it is true. The Prime Minister was Winston Churchill. The only occasion on which he held a press conference was on December 23rd 1941. He was visiting Washington. Roosevelt belonged to a different political culture. He persuaded a baffled Churchill to undergo the ordeal. The transcript in the Roosevelt papers reads as follows:

“The President. ‘And so I will introduce the Prime Minister. I wish you’d stand up for one minute and let them see you.’” Churchill then stands on a chair and takes a dozen or so questions from the reptiles, almost all of whom address him as ‘sir’, and not one of whom follows up his original inquiry with any persistence or repetition. Occasionally, perhaps because he genuinely was going deaf, perhaps to give himself time to think, Churchill says he can’t hear the question, and it is repeated, slowly. At the end, the Prime Minister is thanked by the press corps.

That one occasion apart – and that was an event into which he’d been lured by his host – I can find scarcely any evidence that the greatest political leader of the last hundred years ever chose to talk directly to the media. Odd, really, when you think that he’d once been happy to put the word ‘journalist’ in his passport, and showed that steely mercenariness which is the pre-requisite of any successful freelance: he even tried to sell speeches he’d made in parliament to an American media organisation. What an example to us all. But underneath it all, he regarded us with disdain. How very different to our own dear leaders today, who will play tennis or head footballs in their business suits, ride bicycles, kiss babies, say that today is not the day for sound-bites, but the hand of history is on their shoulder, and so on and so on.

In those days, the media knew their place. Even ten years ago in this country, if you were asked about the media, you thought of your own newspaper, or weekly magazine, or favourite television channel. But if you ask the question nowadays you get an entirely different answer: the media are – is - an entity in its own right, a collective being with its own distinct nervous system. It eats, it breathes, it excretes. It has distinct pleasure centres in its brain and it has an awful lot of problems with its eyesight.

Just look at the growth in news. In the year before Blair took office (1995-6), the BBC alone broadcast just over five thousand hours of news and current affairs (5,270). Ten years later, the figure had risen to twelve and a half thousand hours (12,485) In this environment, politics is increasingly played out in the media. Sometimes it seems that politics is only about the media. The media are certainly the amniotic fluid in which public life swims. For ten years we have seen ministers announcing policies on radio and television instead of in parliament, and watched them cross-examined about them on radio and television instead of in parliament. Gordon Brown says he’ll change this way of doing things. Let’s wait and see.

The basic charge sheet against us from Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell is as follows. Firstly, that we behave like a herd. Secondly that we have a trivial and collective judgement. Thirdly, that we prefer sensation to understanding. I’m sorry to say, but I think there’s something in all of these arguments. Takes the question of herd – or pack – like behaviour. This was not a criticism made when the Blair government began, when the herd collectively gave the impression he could do no wrong. He liked that. Before that, of course, we had collectively believed that the Major government was the Downing Street outpost of the Keystone Cops. In time, the worm turned for the Blair regime, too. Then the Blair government decided pack behaviour was a bad thing. Alastair Campbell tells me that he came to believe that, ‘News was only news if it was bad news for the government.’ So, he claims, the Olympic bid was consistently reported as something that was sure to fail. Government White Papers were discounted before they published – not surprising when we’d already been told was going to be in them – and news was the presentation of opinions about them. Reporting became increasingly more opinion and less analysis, as a consequence of which – another Campbell comment – ‘there is now more reporting of politics than there has ever been. And less understanding.’ The media as whole were smug and self-satisfied and believed they could do no wrong. The BBC in particular was incapable of ever admitting it makes mistakes.

Well, none of this comes as much of a surprise when you recall the Hutton Inquiry. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth examining. Are we instinctively oppositional? With the exception of honeymoons like the start of the Blair years, I think we are. Does it matter? Well, it would obviously be better if we always acted thoughtfully. But on the whole, I think the interests of democracy are better served than in a system where the media think it part of their duty to help the government get its way.

The big question here is the one of legitimacy. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wonder about what I do. It comes in the form of a question. ‘And who, precisely, do you presume to speak for?’ Who ever voted for you? It’s something we’d do well to remember. The answer to the question of whether people like me have any special right to interrogate the powerful is no: I have just the same right as anyone else. The only difference between my position and that of any other citizen is not entitlement but opportunity. I’ve got the chance. But the justification is built on an intuitive understanding of what the function of the medium is. That we ask the questions the average reasonably intelligent member of the public would like to see asked. And if you ask a question, you owe it to the audience to get an answer. Even if you have to ask the question more than once. Or more than a dozen times.

The relationship between the media and politics is, Tony Blair tells us, increasingly fractious. I’m not really sure this is something we need to worry too much about: our responsibility is to the citizen. But we ought also to acknowledge one enormous blind spot. There is a tacit understanding between the two sides which does no-one any favours. There are three parties here: the politicians who govern, or want to govern, secondly, the media, and the thirdly, the public. It is a very odd characteristic of this relationship that while the media and politicians feel free to criticise each other, neither has the guts to criticise the public, who are presumed never to be wrong. It is not just that Sun readers are always right. The whole public is always right.

One very small example. Last April, GMTV tackled the case of a Yorkshire man who needed medical treatment to prevent the loss of an eye. The treatment was currently unavailable on the NHS. The man was interviewed down the line, at the end of which one presenter turned to the other and said, ‘It’s just wrong, it’s as simple as that. Sometimes you just have to say that.’ At which his co-presenter tutted ‘He’s an ex-serviceman too. He’s devoted most of his life to public service.’ The exchange ended ‘And even if he wasn’t, he’s paid his taxes. Anyway, coming up after 8 o’clock….’

Now, in an ideal world, everyone should get whatever treatment they need, regardless of the cost. So the presenters were only repeating what you could hear in any Starbucks across the land. What no-one ever says when covering these stories is that rationing is the inevitable consequence of the fact that people won’t pay more in taxes. Let none of us for a moment suggest the British people might be hypocritical or even thoughtless. No danger of that at GMTV. No danger, really, of it anywhere. Would it not be a lot more sophisticated –and honest - to acknowledge sometimes that things may be more complicated than they appear?

Let’s not follow the tabloid newspapers on issues like that. And also, let’s not believe them when they say we’re all dishonest. Overall, I have to say that I think standards of probity on television are pretty high. I believe most of what I see on television, and when, in the heat of the moment, things turn out to be wrong, I’m willing to give those responsible the benefit of the doubt: it’s not easy getting things clear in the early stages of any moving story.

The problem, it seems to me, is less one of honesty than of attention span. The press of events now dictates that almost every story is best if it’s a moving story. In fact, if it’s not a moving story, it’s hardly a story at all. The only radio news story which has made me sit up in bed in the morning this year was the Today programme’s revelation in March this year that Bob Woolmer had been murdered. Except, of course, he hadn’t. The next month I was in Egypt, when I switched on BBC World to have reporting of the Nigerian elections interrupted with the words ‘And we’re just getting some breaking news. It’s from Britain.’ Oh my god, I thought, that’s happened. More bombs? Blair assassinated? The newsreader continued. “Prince William and Kate Middleton have split up.”

Actually, that is by no means the worst example this year. In early June a building collapsed in Westminster. For the best part of an hour, the news channels talked of little else. Aerial live shots were beamed back. Reporters are deployed, required to repeat endlessly the same minimal facts to fill the void. Eyewitnesses are interviewed. They talk about how when the top of a building collapses, bits of debris fall to the ground. And then, slowly it emerges that what has happened is what looks to have happened. Part of a building has collapsed.

Now, although it’s easy to poke fun at it, I would defend that coverage. Obviously, the fear in the back of everyone’s mind is that there’ll be another successful terrorist attack, and the only way to find out is to be present, reporting. But the problem is that all news programmes need to make noise. The need’s got worse, the more crowded the market’s become. We clamour for the viewers’ attention: “Don’t switch over. Watch us! You won’t be disappointed!” (I confess that making this appeal in the dog days of August is peculiarly dispiriting. Sometimes you want to sit there and say, ‘Not much has happened today. I’d go to bed if I were you.’ But, no, the pretence must be maintained that forty-five minutes’ worth of discussable material exists.) So, we all shout. The difficulty is that it is one thing to do this shouting at periodic intervals during the day – at lunchtime, in the early evening, at nine or ten o’clock, or at bedtime. It’s quite another to have to do it every fifteen or thirty minutes.

Self respect – and the culture of the medium - demands that we try to make an impact. You want to write an intro that grabs the viewer. The problem is that a sort of expectation inflation sets in. The warnings are out there. Once it was enough that that great success of the Blair years, Big Brother locked a bunch of people up together and watched what happened. Now they have to be given things to do which are calculated to embarrass, humiliate or provoke them – the audience’s jaded palate needs to be constantly titillated. The danger is that the same thing happens with news: if for no other reason than to save producers and presenters from more of that dead-eyed somnambulism you can already see too often, the story needs to be kept moving. So it needs to be constantly hyped. Making a lot of noise is one thing we’re all pretty good at.

So the pavement-standers in Downing Street or wherever must pretend to omniscience, even though they’ve spent so long on the end of a live-link that they’ve had no chance to discover anything much beyond where the nearest loo may be. In this context, the very slightest development which might give some sense of movement to a story is fallen upon as if it were a press release announcing the Second Coming.

Take, for example, the outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk this spring. The thing was contained and dealt with effectively. There was no panic, except in so far as it was generated by television news coverage. An expensively coiffed presenter is driven up to Suffolk to stand in a field in the vague vicinity. A helicopter is put up so a reporter can speak of the incident as if it was the scene of a major tank battle. For me the nadir was an interview with a woman who owned a chicken coop. The reporter knew what was wanted. ‘We have a dead chicken over there,’ the woman wailed. ‘Whether that chicken was knocked down by a car, we don’t know.’ And that was it. There was a dead chicken in Suffolk. Cause of death unknown. What, precisely was this chicken’s owner interviewed for?

There are plenty of definitions of news. But whether you subscribe to the view that it is something out of the ordinary, or – my own favourite – that it is something someone doesn’t want you to know - the fact that a chicken has died in Suffolk, possibly after colliding with a car, doesn’t cut it. What’s happened is that we have a dynamic in news now that is less about uncovering things than it is about covering them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a war in Lebanon or floods in Doncaster, it doesn’t really exist until there’s a reporter there in flak jacket or wellingtons, going live.

Television has always been driven by technical feasibility as much as editorial judgement. When pictorial news came from newsreels, people in Stornoway learned of the battle of the Somme four weeks after the event. When the Americans were in Vietnam, reporters had to get their film back from the front and then often persuade someone to carry it on a plane to someplace they could get it processed and cut. Now, you go live, live, live, wherever you can. It’s happened because of the pressure to be fresh and urgent, because of the way the market works, and because, well, because it’s possible.

Of course, we ought also to recognise that 24 hour news itself may just be some intermediate technology, like analogue television, or VHS cassettes, or DVD’s. I don’t think I’m attacking the principle of 24 hour news. But I am saying that we all need to redefine what we think of as news. Sometimes I wonder whether there’s enough going on in Britain to sustain these channels at the level of portentous immediacy they require. Of course there’s enough going on to sustain 72 hour a day news coverage. God knows, just look at almost any regional news programme, with its tawdry catalogue of misfortune, recited in deadbeat vocabulary. You’d think that every child in the city was being sexually abused, every journey every day disrupted, resulting in ‘pure misery’, every teenager a drug-crazed psychopath. Does it alarm? Sure. Does it help us understand? You must be joking.

But in the very crowded world in which television lives, it won’t do to whisper, natter, cogitate or muse. You have to shout. The need is for constant sensation. The consequence is that reporting now prizes emotion over much else. In this press of events there often isn’t the time to get out and find things out: you rely upon second-hand information – quotes from powerful vested interests, assessments from organisations which do the work we don’t have time for, even, god help us, press releases from public relations agencies. The consequence is that what follows isn’t analysis. It’s simply comment, because analysis takes time, and comment is free.
In news, as much as anywhere else in the industry, the question is no longer ‘what can we do?’ It’s ‘what can we afford?’ Finding things out takes time and money. Easier to stay in the warm fug of what everyone agrees is news. Which is, of course, why we behave as a herd of not-very-clever animals. It’s less risky than thinking for ourselves.

So no-one seems to question judgements. An obvious example is the decision to broadcast the deranged rantings of the young man who shot dead over thirty people at Virginia Tech. You’ll recall that before the killings he posted a tape he’d made of himself to NBC, who, when they got it, pondered the ethics of broadcasting the thing for all of five seconds before plastering it all over the network, on the ludicrous justification that it was as close as we’ll ever come to understanding the mind of a mass murderer. And then British broadcasters – including, I’m ashamed to say Newsnight - did pretty much the same thing.

Or what about Madeleine McCann, the three year old girl who disappeared in Portugal this spring? This provoked huge coverage, with reporters on twenty-four-hour-a day stakeouts, presenters flown out to stand on the pavement, attempting to parlay ignorance into authority. Everyone was there because everyone else was there. If you dared to ask what this circus was about you got the response “we’re there because the family want us to be there. We’ll stay as long as they want us to be there.” The McCann family are still in Portugal. The reporters went back and visited them a couple of weeks ago. Then they came home again.

At times like this, when the television hurricane hits a story, it too often sucks good sense and consideration out of the brains of those involved. All this does – very effectively – make a lot of noise. But to what end? Of course, you still hear people saying ‘I don’t watch the news – it’s depressing.’ The answer to this is to invite them to imagine a world in which things which made you happy were so unusual they were newsworthy. No, much more nowadays, the problem is that news is determined not by its importance but by its availability. How else can we explain the decision to interrupt reporting of floods in Britain to go live to America breathlessly to cover Paris Hilton’s release from jail? Sorry, who? Why? What relevance is this to any of us?

If you’re not careful, eventually, you get to a point where you just think ‘what is the point of watching this stuff?’ I have been a television journalist for almost all my working life. And I have to confess to a gnawing anxiety. Does exposing people to this ceaseless torrent make them any better off? I have always believed passionately – and continue to believe – in the public’s right to know, that a well-informed democracy is a healthy democracy – but you do begin to wonder when this ceaseless tide of predigested stuff comes at you.

I feel uncomfortable saying this, because I know that some colleagues may take it as an attack upon them. So let me say that I think the young people entering television now are more technically able, more visually creative than at any time in the short history of the medium. I admire them, not least because I have no idea how they do half the things they do. My point about the vaccuousness of much news reporting is not to lay into them, but to plead for them to be given the time and the space to do a better job and for all of to stand back and ask what we’re using this medium for.

We need to recognise a key distinction. Visibility is not the same as understanding. Again, we need to ask: what is all this FOR? My old friend Peter Weil – the only man to invent a daytime television show and receive letters from the audience demanding the return of the test card – thinks that at this stage what I should just come out and say ‘John Birt was right.’ Something like ‘Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, John Birt – the three most misunderstood men in recent times.’ But I can’t quite do it. He’s recalling the infamous article written by Birt and Peter Jay, which talked about a bias against understanding on television. It led to some very worthy and immensely dull television programmes, to an invasion of blokes in funny suits at the BBC, followed by enormous structural changes, most of which have been quietly forgotten. But you could at least say that Birt had a clear idea of what television was about.

I’m not talking about quite the same thing. For one thing, I find it too amusing to try to imagine how the pre-scripting of films and the careful pre-selection of congenial witnesses would survive the current hoo-ha about fakery. My point is that there comes a point where the frenzy has to be put to one side, the rolling story halted, so that we can make sense of things. Television journalism’s justification should be the justification of journalism through the ages: to inquire, to explain and to hold to account. The news may have been dull, but it was respected because it made sense of the day. That involved people assessing, filtering, separating the froth from what mattered. It was, in short, the exercise of clear judgement. And in return, it demanded - and got - the trust of the audience. Right now we could do with less hyperventilating and more deep breathing.

We’re back, then , to the question of what television is for. All the recent scandals and so-called scandals have one element in common: money. When Roy Thompson described his Scottish ITV company as ‘a licence to print money’ he was sneered at, because by-and large the independent companies had to demonstrate that they had some higher purpose. Granada did not produce the most punchy current affairs programme on television, World in Action, to make money. We need to rediscover a sense of purpose. Deep down, I don’t think the objective has changed since that early summary as being to educate, inform and entertain. It’s a boring list, but it will do us as well now as ever. Right now, it seems to me that worry about engineering has driven out worry about content. We need to spend less time talking about how we deliver things, and a lot more time talking about what we deliver.

We know what the dangers are. Left to its itself, the medium will achieve its potential to be no more than a giant electronic circus or freak-show. We know how bad it can get, whether it’s the Russian station which has its newsreaders read the news while performing a striptease, or the Brazilian audience show with its Deformity of the Week feature. In Britain, for the first several decades of its life, television has been something better than that. The presence of the BBC was obviously a big factor. Regulation had something to do with it. But most of all, I think, television has maintained high standards of creative excellence and honesty because the people who worked in it believed they were doing a job which mattered.

If we were merely running a timber-mill, we should be satisfied that we were cutting lengths of wood to the right length and width and depth. But we’re not. We are engaged in a trade which has the potential to do amazing things, to show people things they didn’t know existed, to give them the power to make informed decisions about how they see the world and how they want to be governed. We have the power to open their minds. Why else do advertisers pay such enormous sums for access? We aren’t dealing in lengths of wood: however much we may affect to claim that we are showing unvarnished reality, we are manufacturing something – as I say, all television – even the boring old vox pop - is artifice to some degree. When Tony Blair made his attack on the news, a letter to one of the newspapers – I think it, unlikely as it sounds, the Daily Telegraph – defended us. Blair should back off, because, he suggested, the media were marginally less dishonest, even though he regarded us – and this is the lapidary phrase – ‘with genial contempt’.

I guess that sums up much public feeling about television. They’re no fools. They understand that interviewees are selected and films are edited. They still, I think, by and large trust us. They may not repose as much confidence in us as in their doctor – just as well, really. But they certainly trust us more than they trust many other sources of information. I have always shuddered a bit when I heard television people talking about their profession. It’s not a profession – if it were, there would be a professional body able to enforce standards. No, we’re a trade. But a trade which earned the confidence of the public because it understood that the position of intermediary was a position of trust.

I did think about ending this lecture with a list of possible initiatives. The invention of a Viewers’ Commisioner, with his or her own investigative staff and the power to insist upon the right to insert themselves into television programmes to correct serious mistakes if programmes themselves are unwilling to do so. A professional body with a clear code of practice, membership of which would be a requirement of employment at any respectable company. And lots of subsidiary ideas, like, for example, a code of practice so we can put a stop to the unpleasant spectacle of companies getting rich on the back of the willingness of young people to work for nothing. In the end, though, those things are secondary. They’re engineering, too, in a way. What’s really needed is a much clearer sense of leadership.

There is a clear anxiety that both parliament AND television are sliding into irrelevance, disappearing into the mists of history like the quill pen and the coffee house. The Web, we’re told, makes expensive, professional broadcasting a thing of the past. But the problem with blogs is the same as their strength: they don’t operate by conventional journalistic rules about checking facts, and they’re unencumbered by any thought that there might be more than one side to a story. The blogosphere is a place where everyone can scream and no-one needs to listen. Rather than making an attempt at fairness irrelevant, it seems to me it actually makes it more necessary.

The more profound problem is really about demographics. The audience is getting older and we don’t know what to do about it, so we have the spectacle of a bunch of middle-aged people in the grip of some comb-over compulsion. Youth. Where is it? Why doesn’t it watch us? How do we get hold of it? This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money. Commercial television, because it is the market the advertisers crave. The BBC because it fears that if doesn’t get its nails into this age group, it’s going to succumb to Daily Express syndrome where the paperboy shoves the newspaper through the letterboxes of houses with the curtains drawn.

It’s tempting to shout ‘Stop It! The truth is that television in Britain is commissioned by middle-aged people who rarely watch the box, attempting to reach young people who look at it even less, when it’s actually watched by old people. Twenty to twenty five year olds aren’t sitting goggle-eyed for one very good reason: they’ve got better things to do. The people who do watch it – and pay their licence fees and their other bills – are older people. Why don’t you give them what they want?

The anxiety about irrelevance expresses itself in obsessions with the red button, with interactivity, fatuous opinion polls, podcasts, ‘multiplatform 360 degree programming’, etc, etc, we’ve all heard the jargon, even if we’re not entirely clear what some of it means. In the process, something’s gone wrong. We’ve got too interested in the way we deliver what we do, at the expense of what we deliver. We have become obsessed with how the copper wire is organised, and forgotten about the electricity.

But where is this restatement of what television is for to come from? Well, the obvious place is the BBC, precisely because of its privileged position. I know the BBC Trust hasn’t been in the job very long. But it does seem a big disappointment that it appears so far to consider its job to be more to do with chastising the senior management than with preaching a higher social purpose for the organisation.

Of course, the BBC’s got problems of its own, and they also come down to money. It was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Treasury in the last licence fee settlement, so that it is now committed to spending nearly one and a half billion on things – whether they be the cost of digital switchover, on-demand, building office blocks in Salford – which have nothing much to do with sole purpose of its existence, which is to produce worthwhile programmes.

Even so, quite how these obligations produce a budget crisis in an organisation with an assured income of three and a half billion pounds is still something of a mystery to me. A commercial organisation confronted with the need to make economies would probably say well, our meat pies aren’t selling well, but our soups are, so let’s get out of pies and make more soup. The BBC isn’t a commercial organisation, of course, so instead seems to want to stay in every television and radio channel and to maintain its internet presence, but to do so with fewer resources. The argument, I think, is that since society is more fragmented, it needs a multiplicity of outlets to serve it: why does no-one consider the alternative hypothesis that if social division is a bad thing perhaps a broadcaster’s function could be to build social cohesion? But no, everyone must do more for less.

On Newsnight, for example, over the last three years we’ve been required to make budget cuts of fifteen percent. We have lost producers, researchers and reporters. Nor can we make the films we once made. Now we’re told we likely to have to make more cuts: at least a further twenty percent over five years. It is unsustainable, and I cannot see how the programme can survive in anything like its current form if the cuts are implemented. To get a single, important, film transmitted last week involved surviving a sustained barrage of astonishingly threatening lawyers’ letters from Carter Ruck and ear-bending from one of the country’s most expensive PR firms. You can’t do that if you’re replacing grizzled output editors with people on work experience, no matter how enthusiastic they may be.

I’m sorry if this sounds like special pleading – after all, no show has a God-given right to continue indefinitely. But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever.

I don’t want to be apocalyptic, on the basis of what may turn out to be short-term problems. But I think it foolish to be too confident on that score. I guess there’ll certainly be one more licence fee settlement. But can we really be certain there’ll be a fourth? Or a fifth? The problem is, the anomalies are so enormous. The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil? And how do you justify a tax on television ownership to finance production of material which will never appear on television? And what about material intended for television which is viewed through an iPlayer, for which no licence is required? It is all too easy to imagine a future in which our grandchildren will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service, or was a District Officer in Bechuanaland.

It’s possible that good old British hypocrisy – or creative ambiguity - will get us over the contradictions inherent in the licence fee. I certainly hope so, because the alternatives aren’t appealing. But we have to move beyond the platitude tossed about that it is the best –or the least-worst - television service in the world. So it bloody well ought to be. And I speak as the presenter of programme which was obliged this spring to follow an hour devoted to celebrity dog-walking.

The BBC is going to have to justify its existence not by the way it broadcasts or the buildings out of which it works, but by what it broadcasts. We seem, far too often, to lose sight of this. Articulating a clear sense of purpose and expressing it through much better protection of the defining brands is more persuasive than producing the occasional piece of tea-towel television celebrating the glories of Britain.

There is a fight going on for the survival of quality television right across this industry. The recent skirmishes and scandals have not gone our way. As an industry we need to lay out much more clearly what we’re doing and why. Let’s spend less time measuring audiences and more time enlightening them.

Despite the last few months, I do not believe that this uniquely powerful medium has been taken over by charlatans. But we ought to acknowledge that parts of it are in danger of losing their redeeming virtues. We need to be open. We need to admit when we make mistakes. We need treat our viewers with respect, to be frank with them about how and why programmes were made, to be transparent.

We need, in short, to rediscover a sense of purpose.

British "Justice": If You Have the Money?

I'll come clean: I know exactly how Diana died

Boris Johnson 8th March 2007

What joy, what rapture unforeseen! In a decision of almost complete insanity the Court of Appeal has decided that the inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi must be held with a jury, and the celebrations are under way.

For legions of fat-cat lawyers, it's going to be a binge of expense accounts and refreshers. For the interpreters, the taxi drivers, the hoteliers who will help to look after the dozens of witnesses who will be flown over from Paris, it's going to be more lucrative than anything since Londonderry held the Savile inquiry. For the journalists, there will be yards of simply eye-popping copy.

There will be sex, death, Nazis, the secret service, the clash of civilisations between Islam and the West - and there will be royals, royals, royals!

And there, in the middle of it all, will be Mo Fayed, the brooding Pharaoh of Alexandria. With his Tourette's-style profanities and his rib-tickling denunciations of Nazi Prince Philip, he's going to be the biggest thing to sell newspapers since - well, since Diana.

Trebles all round, boys! Is there a loser? Well yes, my friends, we are all losers - and not just as taxpayers. In granting Fayed both an inquest and a jury, we have made British justice look like a rich man's toy.

However sympathetic we may be to Mr Fayed for the loss of his son, we must surely accept that no ordinary citizen could expect to secure an inquest into a 10-year-old open-and-shut case of drink driving.

As the appeal court judges made pathetically clear, they are bowing to pressure from Fayed and giving credence to his absurd fantasies. It is very rare for a jury to be empanelled for an inquest. It happens in only three per cent of cases. It happens when there is evidence - evidence - that the death occurred in police custody, or at the hands of some other emanation of the state. Is there any such evidence in this case?

Gah. Almost 10 years ago, Diana, Princess of Wales and her then boyfriend died in a tragic car accident. Their chauffeur, Henri Paul, had more than twice the British limit of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was going much too fast. Neither Dodi nor Diana was wearing a seatbelt. C'est tout, as the French authorities rapidly concluded.

Since then, Mohamed Fayed has deployed all his energy and cash to prove that there was a conspiracy, and in some ways he is like so many other sad victims of bereavement. Not only is he unable to come to terms with his loss; he is tormented with the unmentionable thought that he is himself partly at fault. It was his organisation, his Ritz chauffeur, that proved so disastrously inadequate.

Fayed is very human and unexceptional in his refusal to face this, his utter determination to cast the blame elsewhere. What makes him different is his wealth, his ability to promote these mad obsessions through the judicial system.

It is scarcely credible that an inquest was opened in 2003, given that the facts were so clearly established. But we live in an increasingly mushy-minded age, in which the "rights" of victims' families are held to be ever more sacred. It is in furtherance of those rights that inquests are increasingly concerned with apportioning blame - even when no good whatever can come from the exercise - and one way or another it is usually possible to claim that blame lies with the state.

It was by repeating this central claim, demented though it patently is, that Fayed was able to justify his call for an inquest; and it was by harping on the same point that he has now secured a jury - with all the ghastly showboating that involves. His lawyer, Michael Mansfield QC, has already demanded that the proceedings be held in Westminster Central Hall, so as to accommodate the thousands of Diana-worshippers who will want to attend.

The coroner, Lady Justice Butler-Sloss, deserves a medal for at first telling Fayed there was no need for a jury, since she could see no evidence whatever of any state involvement in the death of his son. In this world of bogus sentimentality, she is a model of real compassion and common sense; and it makes one weep to read the ruling of the three judges who overturned her. They say it is important that the wishes of the Fayed family (i.e. Mo) should be taken into account. Why? Would the wishes of any of us be taken into account if we spun a cock-and-bull story about the death of a relative, and alleged that MI6 and Nazi Prince Philip were involved?

Lord Stevens has just spent £3.6 million and 800 pages proving that Fayed's claims are baloney. So why did the appeal court yield? Because in a spineless way they seem to believe that public opinion demands it, and that without a jury, Lady Justice Butler-Sloss would be accused of some kind of establishment cover-up.

What feeble reasoning. Yes, there are millions of mutton-headed readers of tabloid tripe, and, yes, they have been conditioned to believe Fayed's claims, just as millions of them believe in Unidentified Flying Objects or the Bermuda Triangle or that taramasalata is a cure for cellulite. But do you think for a moment that they will be shifted in their prejudices if Fayed's theories are rejected one more time?

It is in the face of this insanity that I have decided at long last to reveal my own evidence, in the hope that Mo will call me as a witness.

I will reveal how the Duke of Edinburgh secretly trained the Loch Ness Monster to swim up the Seine until it reached the Pont d'Alma and then I will explain how Philip then gave a kind of ghillie's whistle and Nessie reared out of the water and so startled Henri Paul that he swerved into the path of Elvis Presley in the white Fiat Uno, at which point Prince Charles - hovering overhead in a Luftwaffe helicopter - switched on the supermagnet installed by MI6 in the concrete pillar of the tunnel and sucked the Merc to its doom. That is the story I will tell. I got it from the horse's mouth - Shergar, that is.

It is at least as plausible as the rubbish we will now hear from Fayed, and it is a sad comment on our national sentimentality, and the way a tycoon can buy his day in court, that we are hearing this stuff at all.

Boris Johnson is MP for Henley

Middle East: BBC Bias?

National Review Online
June 18, 2004, 10:18 a.m.

Living in a Bubble: The BBC’s very own Mideast foreign policy.

By Tom Gross

The BBC: Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London's biggest mosque last Friday, is a respected leader who works for "community cohesion" and "building communities."

Not mentioned on the BBC: Some of the views of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais. In his own words: In the name of Allah, the Jews must be "annihilated." They are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world... the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."

The BBC's Charter and its Producers Guidelines state: "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All programs and services should be open minded, fair and show a respect for truth... [BBC reports should] contain comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world...."

The BBC makes many good programs when it comes to drama, comedy, sport, and science. But its enormous news division — by far the world's biggest — is another story. Using lavish public funding (courtesy of the British taxpayer) and an unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners daily), it is — in blatant breach of its own charter — virtually conducting its own anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy. Anyone who doesn't agree with its policies (Tony Blair, for example) finds himself at the mercy of BBC news coverage.

In January, criticisms made of the BBC in a report by an official commission set up by the U.K. government ("the Hutton enquiry") in regard to its Iraq-war coverage, were so scathing that both the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC and its director-general had little choice but to resign. Since then, the BBC has — for a while at least — been a little more adroit at disguising its prejudices. Instead much of its slant now lies in omission rather than in active distortion.

"B" MOVIE ACTOR
Last week, for example, almost every other news organization in the world (including those in the former Communist states) began their obituaries of Ronald Reagan by saying that many (including Mikhail Gorbachev) credit Reagan with helping to bring about the end of the Cold War. But the BBC online obituary ("World Edition," Sunday, June 6, 2004, titled "Reagan's mixed White House legacy," and running to almost 1,000 words — that's a full four pages if you print it out from the BBC website) didn't even mention the Cold War, let alone Reagan's calls to "tear down" the Berlin Wall.

Instead the BBC reminded us that Reagan was "a B movie actor," and stated that as president his "foreign policy was criticised for being in disarray." Accompanying photos were not of Reagan meeting Gorbachev, but of Oliver North, and of the invasion of Grenada ("a clumsy sham," according to the BBC text).

Even during his funeral last Friday, BBC World Service Radio began its bulletin by first referring to Reagan as a film actor before mentioning that he was president.

When I went to interview for a job at BBC news at the end of the 1980s, the BBC interviewers (comprising several senior news producers) literally scoffed at me when I suggested, in a mild way, that perhaps the BBC might devote a little more coverage to the eastern bloc.

But then the Cold War plays a very small part in the worldview of the BBC. They seldom showed signs of caring much about hundreds of millions of people living under Communist dictatorship then, and they are still very reluctant to acknowledge that it happened, let alone their own failings in reporting it.

I mention this because it helps explain the bubble they live in today with regard to the Middle East and Arab world. A bubble which has led them to seek to undermine, even delegitimize Israel, the region's sole democracy, while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse extremist Islamic clerics, and the worst of the Arab dictators.

The BBC doesn't seem to care that — as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once put it — if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. The BBC's attitude appears to be that: Arabs don't deserve to have their human-rights situation mentioned. As far as their reporting is concerned, women, gays, and others don't deserve rights in Muslim countries.

PREACHING HATE FROM MECCA
Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais (referred to in the introduction to this article, and whose surname has also been transliterated by MEMRI and others as Al-Sudayyis [1]) is not just any imam, and his hate-filled sermons are not just delivered in some peripheral setting. He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque — the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam.

"Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels ... calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers...the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."

Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada.

But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this.

BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.

"The centre was opened as Friday prayers took place, led by one of Islam's most renowned Imams, and celebrations will continue throughout the weekend," said the BBC. "Worshippers had come to hear Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, Imam of the Ka'ba, Islam's holiest mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.... With many unable to enter the new centre, some worshippers took to praying on a street behind the mosque using prayer mats and even newspapers." We are told that the center "will bolster London's reputation as a vibrant and diverse international city" and has a "spirit of modesty."

At the side of the BBC website, a video clip was flagged with the caption: "The BBC's Mark Easton: 'Events like today offer grounds for optimism.'"

It would be hard to imagine the BBC completely omitting diatribes such as al-Sudais's had they been made by a Christian leader — or had a prominent Israeli rabbi said anything similar about Muslims.

IS SOMETHING HAPPENING IN SUDAN?
The BBC efforts not to "offend" Arabs extremists even extend to their reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are (hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans — Muslims, Christians, and Animists). The BBC didn't make any mention whatever of the long history of mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims; nor of the scorched-earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out there by Arabs.

Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that "settlers" in Gaza were "Jewish" and the land they were settling is "Palestinian." I don't think I have ever heard the BBC refer to settlers in Gaza without mentioning their ethnicity or religion — which is, of course, relevant to the story (though many would dispute the historical and legal accuracy of referring to the territory as Palestinian). But the BBC doesn't appear to think ethnicity is relevant when it comes to real killing or ethnic-based cleansing.

That is apart from situations elsewhere, in which non-Arabs are perpetrators. In one of the very same bulletins in which the BBC failed to mention the ethnic make-up of perpetrator and victim in Sudan, it made sure to let us know that "Bosnian Serbs have admitted for the first time their role in the massacre of Bosnian Moslems a decade ago."

In another report last week, a BBC correspondent casually referred to "a fanatical rebel group" in Uganda. This contrasts with the term "Palestinian resistance group" that BBC reporters often use to describe Hamas, a group the BBC clearly doesn't find fanatical at all.

SO HAMAS ARE NOT GUILTY?
But then Hamas (along with Yasser Arafat, one of the most vicious murderers of Jews since Hitler) appear to enjoy a certain degree of sympathy at the BBC, which throughout the past four years of Israeli-Palestinian violence has constantly tried to obscure the true nature of the group by using misleading language.

There are innumerable examples of this; they occur almost daily. "Over the years, Hamas has been blamed for scores of suicide attacks on Israel," says the BBC, thereby trying to suggest to listeners and viewers that Hamas has perhaps been wrongly accused of such attacks (even though Hamas itself has proudly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for them in mass celebratory rallies in Gaza, Jenin, and elsewhere.)

Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire indiscriminately in the heart of the northern Israeli town of Afula, killing two young Israeli civilians and wounding over 50 others. They themselves were then shot dead by Israeli policemen. The headline on the BBC website read: "Four Die in Israel Shooting Rampage," suggesting that four innocent people had died, possibly at the hands of the Israelis.

Again, when suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's retaliatory (and largely non-lethal) attacks on Palestinian military targets. (By contrast, the BBC didn't hesitate to use the word "terrorism" last week, when one of its own correspondents, Frank Gardner, was shot and badly wounded by an al Qaeda gunman in Saudi Arabia.)

Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."

The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."

Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.

A MINUTE'S SILENCE FOR SHEIKH YASSIN
Back in London, BBC staff are careful to promote sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in more subtle ways. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the British parliament, declared in January that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian (and subsequently led a minute's silence in March — in the House of Commons no less — for the deceased Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who issued orders for dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians). Since then, Tonge's invitations to appear on BBC have noticeably increased.

She was sacked by the Liberal Democrat party leader as parliamentary spokesman for children's issues for these remarks, but this hasn't bothered the BBC, who now invite her on both radio and TV to discuss the Middle East.

In one case, in February, BBC Radio 4's Flagship morning news program Today actually sent her off to "Palestine" (at the BBC's expense), after which they broadcast her "diary," in which she further defamed Israel and reiterated her sympathy for suicide bombing. She has also repeated her support for suicide bombers on air on the BBC on other occasions.

Similarly, there is the case of Oxford University literature lecturer Tom Paulin — who among other things has compared Jewish settlers to Nazis, has said they should be "shot dead," compared the Israeli army to Hitler's SS, and said he could "understand how suicide bombers feel." He continues to be invited as a regular guest commentator by the BBC; indeed, he is one of the two or three most frequent contributors to their most widely screened program on the arts.

DON'T MENTION LIMB AMPTUTATION
Those who dare criticize Arab extremism are dealt with somewhat differently by the BBC. For example, Robert Kilroy-Silk — who does not appear on BBC news but hosted a daytime chat show — was immediately taken off air after he wrote in a non-BBC newspaper article in January that Arabs were "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." He swiftly apologized and the newspaper in question acknowledged that he had written "Arab governments" and this was inadvertently changed to "Arabs" as a result of an editing error. But Kilroy-Silk was rapidly sacked by the BBC nevertheless.

However, Kilroy-Silk's remarks — as many Arab moderates who welcomed them, such as the Egyptian human-rights campaigner Ibrahim Nawar, have pointed out — were not wholly inaccurate. Limb amputation and repression of women are enshrined in Saudi law, and suicide bombing of Israelis and Americans strongly encouraged by some in government circles. Paulin's comments, on the other hand, were both blatantly biased and incendiary.

Kilroy-Silk — whose article appeared just a few days before Tonge's suicide-bomb remarks — apologized. He said he "greatly regretted the offence caused" by his remarks. But this wasn't enough to satisfy the BBC. Paulin and Tonge have offered no such apology; but then the BBC gave no indication they would expect one.

When Harvard University later withdrew an invitation for Paulin to lecture, the BBC seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. BBC news online commented: "[Paulin's] knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."

"THE STUFF OF LEGENDS"
The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel Sharon. (The BBC verdict — that Sharon has a case to answer — was never in doubt.) Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare," "charisma and style," "personal courage," and being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and "triumphant." He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." [2]

This was broadcast on July 5, 2002 — just two weeks after President Bush had called for a change in Palestinian leadership following revelations about Arafat's links with suicide-terror attacks. But then the BBC knew that they would get this kind of approach when they asked the notoriously anti-Israeli journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg (formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the London Guardian, now the Guardian's Washington correspondent) to make the program.

A particularly blatant example of bias, perhaps, but not an isolated one. The BBC rarely mention Arafat's dictatorial rule, his endemic corruption, or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — the terror group he set up after launching the current Intifada, a group which, in recent months, has outstripped Hamas in the number of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians. As for Hamas, Sheikh Yassin was recently described by one of BBC radio's Gaza correspondents, Zubeida Malik, as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man."

DID SOMEONE SAY DOUBLE STANDARDS?
The BBC's double standards are clear to almost everyone except, it seems, the BBC itself and its sympathizers in the press. A BBC spokeswoman for example, told the Guardian (May 23, 2002) after the BBC was accused by British Jews of being a prime force in inciting renewed anti-Semitism in the U.K., that "The BBC's reporting about the Middle East is scrupulously fair, accurate and balanced."

The official BBC line has not changed since then, even after the scathing criticism of the Hutton report. Such are the level of arrogance and the spirit of denial that permeate the BBC newsroom. Indeed, recent denials of political bias have been stronger than ever. Of course, the BBC would be in danger of losing its enormous public funding if they were admitted.

For a short while after the Hutton report was published in January, BBC staff were a little more careful in their attacks on Israel. But recently they have returned to old ways, with at least four anti-Israeli TV documentaries airing in recent weeks. That makes a total of 20 major documentaries the BBC has made on Israel since 2001 (all but one attacking Israel.) That is three times more than the number of documentaries the BBC has made on any other single country, with the exception of Britain.

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, the BBC has made no documentaries about human-rights abuses in the Arab world; or about Palestinian schoolbooks; or about the Palestinian Authority's incitement of the Palestinian population; or about the Palestinian Authority's funding of terrorism allegedly with the use of European Union aid funds.

The problem is not that every individual correspondent is biased. Whereas some, such as Orla Guerin, make almost no attempt at balance, others, such as James Reynolds in Jerusalem, do make a genuine effort to be fair. The problem is that the culture that permeates the BBC, a habit of thought that has become engrained throughout the network, allows only one worldview, in which the U.S. and Israel are vilified well beyond any reasoned or justified criticism of anything these states have actually done.

Hiring practices reinforce this. Recently, Ibrahim Helal, editor in chief of the much-criticized al Jazeera TV network was hired by the BBC World Service Trust. The job the BBC wanted him for? To advise on balance in Middle East coverage, and head "media training projects," i.e. to train BBC (and perhaps other journalists) into "understanding the Middle East better."

OCCUPIED WEST BANK OF THE SAHARA?
This culture makes it all but impossible for anyone who thinks differently to gain or hold a job at BBC news. Who at the BBC can name the leader of the Polisario Front, fighting for independence against a 25-year Arab occupation of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain)? Who at the BBC has done a report about all the Arab settlers that the Moroccan government has been bussing into the area to take the land of the indigenous Saharawi people, since Morocco annexed it 25 years ago?

This article has been limited to BBC news programming. But even elsewhere there is anti-Israel (and some would argue anti-Jewish sentiment). Each summer, for example, BBC Radio 3, a station largely devoted to classical music, carries a broadcast of "The Proms." The Proms are a British institution, a jovial annual event at the end of the British summer during which classical favorites and (on the Proms' final night) tunes such as "Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" are sung by the audience with great fanfare and light-hearted flag-waving at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Yet on the evenings of August 13 and August 20, 2002, the BBC Radio 3 producers decided to fill the time during the interval in their live broadcast (there are no commercials on the BBC) with a recitation of poems that compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis and asked Holocaust survivors why they had "not learnt their lesson."

A GLOBAL PROBLEM
The BBC's Middle East problem is not just a British problem but also an international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English, but in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Slovene and Slovak, Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn't typically concern itself with the rights and aspirations of persecuted Kurds in Muslim-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured by President Assad's regime two months ago.)

Throughout the world the BBC enjoys exceptional influence. An article last month in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, for example, quotes a leading Lithuanian campaigner against anti-Semitism as saying that inflammatory and biased international BBC news coverage against Israel was helping to revive anti-Semitism in Lithuania against those few Jews remaining who were not murdered in the Holocaust.

The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.

Footnotes
[1] For more on these and other quotes, see here and Steven Stalinsky's "Kingdom Comes to North America" (after which the Canadian government rescinded al-Sudais' visa request).

[2] For many other examples contrasting BBC coverage of Sharon and Arafat, see the well-compiled reports by London lawyer Trevor Asserson at www.bbcwatch.com.

— Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces for NRO are "All The News That's Fit to Print? The New York Times and Israel" and "Jeningrad. What the British media said."