Public Good and National Interest: the BBC's Experience Stephen Whittle Controller Editorial Policy, BBC Introduction We are living through what the Chinese call "interesting times". The world as we knew it has changed. Over the past five years both war and the rumour of war have put immense strains on our traditional means for resolving disputes within and between nations in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. To that has been added the impact of global terror networks and the uncertainties they have left in their wake. The consequences of September 11, 2001 have indeed become defining moments for us all. Those horrific events in New York and Washington shook the kaleidoscope and started off a chain reaction that has reverberated through Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf, Bali, Morocco, Spain and Iraq. We feel the impact of those events as citizens, because of the savage violation of civil society, but also because we have been through war in Afghanistan and now Iraq - a war which has bitterly divided the international community as well as individual nations. Moreover, it is a war which more than one year on has not brought a clear resolution to the future of Iraq and has had an impact on conflicts in the wider Middle East. The consequences are still unknown and to a certain extent are unknowable. We live in less certain, more nervous times in which little can be taken for granted. The international kaleidoscope continues to turn, producing new patterns and arrangements involving international institutions such as the UN and the EU but also individual nations and their citizens, not to mention the tremors that reach right into the heart of the world economy. What has that got to do with the BBC and its relationship with the British government? Rather a lot, because how the BBC deals with the reporting of current events and how it reflects the national debate about whether war is justified, goes to the very heart of what it means to be a public service broadcaster. And it has put the BBC's relationship with Government to the test, especially as the war in Iraq was unpopular before it even began and subsequent events both in Iraq and the UK have made it more so. The Government has been under pressure internationally, but more crucially domestically, including from within the governing party itself. Even a 177 seat majority is sometimes not enough in a democracy. So it's at times like these when there is a greater sense of public space, public interest, and indeed public anxiety, that public service broadcasting comes into its own as a place where people can come together to learn about what is happening and discuss its consequences. Over the past two years, the BBC has become even more aware that, even if Britain is a more diverse and fragmented society that in the Twenties or Thirties, with a plethora of media choice at its disposal, there is still a need for a place where people feel they are being told the truth about what is happening in the world; where they can rely on impartial analysis to help them make sense of events; and where a debate can take place in which all voices can be heard, including those who might wish to question the course being set. It is equally important for the BBC as a world broadcaster, whose reputation as the conveyor of reliable and impartial information is prized highly and can be lost carelessly. It is not without its challenges. As one former BBC leader once put it: "When the nation is divided, the BBC is on the rack." Our editorial values Let me first explain our editorial values, then look at how we got to where we are, and detail some of the tensions that have marked our relationship with successive Governments over the years. I would characterise the relationship between the BBC and the Government as one of wary familiarity. It is not a marriage though we are bound together, come what may. We each need the other, but we are each suspicious of the other's motives. It may not always make for a comfortable relationship. One satirist once characterised it as the relationship between a dog and the lamp post. But in the end, we hope it works for the benefit of democracy. Our editorial values stress our independence from undue influence from any quarter including the Government. We seek to be: accurate and impartial, providing reliable information open and honest with our audiences and contributors clear, sourcing our reports and testing their reliability a place where a national debate can be engaged None of that is to suggest the BBC is virtuous above all other broadcasters, but to try to give a flavour of what the public service tradition in broadcasting represents. In sum, it is to be reliable, fearless and independent, enabling our viewers and listeners to make their own judgements while at the same time remaining accountable to them. The historical context That is no accident. It has a lot to do with the way the original decisions were made about broadcasting in Britain as a public and not merely private asset. From the outset, Britain took the route of public service rather than public profit and laid an obligation on the BBC to be accurate and reliable but above all impartial. But the big question is how to define public service broadcasting and maintain the BBC's editorial and ethical values in a much more competitive broadcast ecology, with the challenge of new media services and a very different society? Just how different we perhaps don't need reminding. But a few indicators might be instructive. The BBC now broadcasts 40 hours across all its services for each actual hour and provides around 1.7 million web pages. We have two national analogue television channels, seven digital channels, five national radio services and four digital radio networks, plus national regional and local services. We have more than 50 million people hitting our web site each week. The BBC also finds a way into over 200 million homes around the world through BBC World and other satellite services and BBC World Service is heard in more than 120 countries. In Britain, alone, there are now roughly 400 tv channels and over 250 commercial radio stations. More diverse media use is matched by a more diverse society. Britain is now a much more mixed and cosmopolitan society. There has been a move away from traditional family values. Fewer couples marry. There are more single households as well as a decline in the number of households containing children. There has been a general loss of confidence in the old institutions -- Parliament, the legal system, the churches -- people are more likely to put their trust in the armed forces. We have become more individually driven in both our consumerism and in our moral universe. "Independence" rates higher than "community"; "self belief" more than faith". There is a real tension between freedom and responsibility. Why public service broadcasting is different Faced with all that, should the BBC simply give up on its traditional approach to editorial ethics? Part of my response would be to do with where I began and the concept of the public space and community. My argument would be that broadcasting, and especially television, remains not just a creative medium of entertainment but also a key channel of information. It is the means, especially at times of crisis or difficulty, of providing some social glue in a fragmented society. Our sense of what was taking place in Manhattan on September 11 2001, or in Iraq last March, or more recently in Beslan came from a combination of startling images, and the immediacy of it actually happening in real time before our eyes or ears. We did not want to let the story go. We gathered around televisions or radios in real communities as well as virtual ones to share both the events and our feelings. It's hard to do that with a newspaper or a magazine. Television remains a potent and powerful medium, a reflector and sometimes an influencer of society. Indeed, it only really works when it reflects our experiences back to us. We have to be able to recognize what we are being shown as our truth, our experience, our reality. As broadcasters, we are dealing with a sophisticated and discriminating set of audiences who judge the output according to their own life scripts. If we do not reflect accurately, we cease to be trusted. Part of the reflection is to pick up on the way in which the national mood shifts and national values develop. Politically and culturally, we have come a long way from a sense of the governors and the governed. The BBC has to put politicians to the test. For a publicly funded broadcaster, the BBC, the challenges are greater because of the means of our funding. We are financed directly from a Licence Fee which everyone who has a television is required to pay. We take no advertising. Our income is vast: 2.7 billion a year. Part of the consequence of that is that we are required to have no faith or politics of our own. Our role is to seek to reflect the nation, and the nations, to each other, as well as the wider world context. It is the mission to inform and explain, and the responsibility to ensure that all voices are heard even when those voices make for uncomfortable or challenging listening. If the original decisions about the BBC's impartiality and public service were taken in a very different historical context, and perhaps for partial reasons, it's at times like these that we realise how important a framework they laid. A survey carried out at the British General Election in June 2001 suggested that broadcasters were the most trusted of the media when it came to reporting the campaign. The BBC scored high, with 77% agreeing it was to be trusted, ITN was close behind at 74%. By comparison, the newspapers were trusted by 41%, while 45% said they were biased. A more recent survey suggests that the gap has further widened. Of course, the journey to where we are now has been uneven. There have been difficult stages on the way and not all of them to the BBC's credit. It is absolutely the case that when the British Government of the 1920s gave the BBC its first licence it wanted to keep this new beast broadcasting under control. The potential power of the new medium was recognised and therefore the BBC was defined by a Royal Charter and given a public mission to inform, educate and entertain (probably in that order) and was required to be impartial. The BBC also held the monopoly of all broadcasting in the UK until 1956. The BBC versus the Government The first run in with the Government came quite soon, during the General Strike in 1926, when the Government wanted to take over the air waves to ensure that it controlled the story. To the BBC's credit, the first Director General, though by nature an autocrat, resisted, and maintained the BBC's independence by the standards of the time. The Second World War, unsurprisingly, saw the BBC take much more the role of the national rather than a public service broadcaster. The nation was at war and under threat. Very few could be found who disagreed with the need to resist Hitler come what may. It was a national struggle. Even so the BBC broadcast the truth even when the news was grim. But whether a contemporary BBC would broadcast code messages to secret agents is a debateable proposition. One also has to remember that the mood of the times was very much one of deference to authority. BBC journalists would literally go on bended knees to get a minister to say anything, let alone answer a question. Over the last 50 years that deference has moved through respect to scepticism and on to directness, and occasionally contempt, causing Cabinet Ministers to walk off live programmes, political leaders to be asked about their drinking habits, and Prime Ministers, if they pray with George Bush. Politicians are given a testing time. To their credit they take it, for the most part, as their duty. It is when the stakes are high, that the pressure comes. So at election times, BBC news rooms ring with he sound of calls from the parties trying to pressure the coverage into giving them greater prominence or to spin their version of events. It is part of the cut and thrust of a lively democratic process. One that for the most part we are used to and know how to resist. But it does require experience and a strong nerve, and you can't afford to make too many mistakes. Sometimes, we have mistaken impartiality for dullness or used it as a means of ignoring inconvenient issues or views. But more recently, from Suez via Northern Ireland to the Falklands, the Gulf, the Middle East or the former Yugoslavia, we can tell a better story both about reporting as accurately as we can, as well as seeking to reflect all significant strands of thought and opinion. It has not been an easy journey. Breaking free of the expectation of being the national or even a state broadcaster has been challenging. After the relative consensus of the Second World War, attitudes within British society began to shift. The election of a Labour Government, the start of the welfare state, and the gradual social changes that accompanied the post war period found an interesting turning point at the time of Suez in 1956 when the British government colluded with the French and Israelis to invade Egypt to take over the canal. It was a divisive move which produced strong cross party reaction in the UK. The Prime Minister broadcast to the nation and the leader of the opposition demanded a right of reply. The BBC was put under pressure to say "no" but decided he should be able to speak. That decision was based partly on a sense of fairness but also on a realisation that the war policy was deeply unpopular with large numbers of people and therefore the right of reply filled a democratic need. Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq When the United Kingdom came under attack from the IRA in the Seventies, the BBC had to do some serious thinking. The issues ranged from the language to be used to describe the various groups, whether to seek interviews with people seeking to undermine or even overthrow a legitimate government, and indeed how to report them at all. All broadcasters in the UK struggled with the issues raised, but it was the BBC that experienced some of the heaviest governmental pressure. Our journalists were often in danger on the ground. Our editors were given a hard time in the office. Eventually the Government passed specific legislation forbidding us from broadcasting the voices of those they identified as terrorists. Legislation it took almost ten years to remove. But we had to go on reporting what was happening in a significant part of the UK even if what was happening was inconvenient or indeed shocking. Our audiences needed to know; it was their democratic right. A further point of tension was the Falklands war in 1982. When the British task force sailed into the South Atlantic, there were a few journalists on board but they were unable to file their stories without military support. Back in London, the BBC took two basic decisions. To avoid any confusion, the BBC would describe the task force as "British" and not "our" troops. The BBC was becoming more aware of its role as a global broadcaster. The second decision, given the fog surrounding information from the south Atlantic, was to assess the competing claims coming from the British and the Argentines and each night on one of the major news programmes try work out what was happening. When the BBC's director of news described a widow in Buenos Aires as being on a par with a widow from Portsmouth, the then Government erupted in rage. The Chairman of the BBC and the Director General were summoned to a meeting at which they and the BBC were attacked as unpatriotic. But the BBC held its line, even though it cost much in the way of political support. But the principle had been established. At the time of the first Gulf war in 1991, the BBC published for the first time its war guidelines which explained its position in trying to report accurately and fairly, how it would describe British forces, make clear the restrictions under which it was operating, and its general approach to the images of war. The guidelines helped defuse tensions but there were still complaints because the BBC kept a presence in Baghdad during the conflict which led to accusations of it being the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation. Similar complaints occurred in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. As a global broadcaster, the BBC has become increasingly aware of the way in which it is relied upon to be an impartial source of reliable information about what is happening in key tension points around the world. For example, in the Middle East what the BBC broadcasts is poured over in Israel, the occupied territories and the neighbouring states. Again, during the Afghan war, the BBC was being monitored by the Afghan people and the Taliban and in Pakistan as well as other parts of the region. As it became obvious that war in Iraq was likely, the BBC was conscious of the fact that British society was divided almost half and half. It therefore put plans into place to ensure that its staff were seen to remain neutral, reminding all those responsible for output that they should not take part in anti-war protests and that every effort had to be made to ensure that in both on-air discussion and on-line message boards we should seek to reflect the pro as well as the anti-war voice. That was sometimes difficult to achieve as the balance of calls and messages was strongly against the war, so presenters had to subject callers to rigorous questioning. Again, we published our war guidelines and sent correspondents to every part of the region. Embeds went with the coalition forces, reporters remained in the Gulf, in Iran, Jordan, Turkey and Baghdad. We tried to give a full picture of events, reporting both successes and setbacks knowing that we were being listened to inside Iraq as well as by the invading forces. A nervous British Government tried from time to time to suggest that we were treating Saddam as having the same moral status as the Prime Minister and criticised what they saw as "negative" reporting. The conflict, though, was relatively swift. The Iraqi forces were overrun and the major challenges came from the fact that this was a 24 hour media war with unparalleled access to images of war and death, and the new media issue of Arabic news channels ready to broadcast more gruesome images than are customary in the West, to the point where the BBC was accused of bias because it would not run the most shocking of the images. And as always in war, occasionally "facts" from military sources were reported which turned out subsequently to be an exaggeration. But the tensions with Government came to a head once the war was over. On May 29 last year, the BBC broadcast a report on its main domestic radio news and current affairs programme based on a source within the British intelligence community. His charge was that the Government had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, specifically a claim that they could be used with 45 minutes of an order to deploy them, and that the intelligence community was unhappy. This was not a new allegation, but it was the BBC that was reporting it, and the BBC journalist went further than expected in saying that the Government "probably knew it (the claim) was wrong". This broadcast lead to probably the bitterest conflict ever between the BBC and Government. To keep a long story short, the source, Dr David Kelly, was eventually named with the help of his employer, the Ministry of Defence, and then committed suicide. The Government launched a broadside at the BBC and set up an Inquiry. The judge who chaired the Inquiry, Lord Hutton, found the BBC at fault in allowing the broadcast to be made using those words. While in the court of public opinion, the feeling was that the Government had gone too far in its campaign against the BBC and it lost significant amounts of trust. The whole affair rekindled the debate about whether Britain was right to go to war, and the basis on which those decisions were made. It is a study in the new political and media reality. Public confidence depends on a belief that they are being provided with reliable information from a trusted source. The BBC continues to occupy a very significant place in British society which ironically both public and politicians recognise. That is why the conflict was so bitter and explains too that when the Lord Hutton found against the BBC rather than the Government, the public voted in opinion polls for the BBC. This is a delicate balancing act. Each side has to be wary of treading over the line and loosing that vital public trust. To help bolster its own systems, the BBC has subsequently strengthened its approach to the circumstances in which it will rely on an anonymous source, the importance of reliable notes, and the need to put accusations directly to those affected. New challenges; old tensions The relationship between the BBC and the Government contains old tensions but they produce new challenges. We have to work on two fronts. On the one hand, we have to get the story right. On the other, we have to resist the inevitable pressure coming from lobbyists, or the politicians and their spinners from every part of the world, seeking to keep the coverage to their agenda. When a Government is under pressure, it is unsurprising that it tries to kick the messenger. The fact that impartiality is a legal requirement on all conventional terrestrial broadcasters in the UK is a considerable advantage in staring down the spinners and others who seek to bring pressure to bear. For the BBC, its credibility is crucial. It counts not just with the domestic audience, but also with the many millions around the world who have come to rely on the BBC for reliable reporting of the events that directly affect them. The BBC is truly a global information provider. It is a basic tenet of democracy that citizens need to know and be able to make informed decisions. For example, if part of the reason for war is to defend democratic values, the BBC cannot afford to compromise on editorial independence and integrity to ensure that citizens are informed. Nor can we afford to be thought to be a state as opposed to a public service broadcaster. There is a big difference. The other big challenge we face is ensuring that all significant views are represented. Again, that will sometimes be difficult when a key part of war is the propaganda battle. But the arguments have to be won on their own strength rather than attempting to rig the debate. Islam: a test of impartiality The new challenge posed by the current international situation is the sensitive and difficult issue of Islam. It is clearly a large part of what motivates Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaeda and others who are influenced by them. It is an increasing factor in Iraq as well as what is happening in the occupied territories in the Middle East. You can also see it in the reaction of even moderate Muslim opinion in the West, not to mention the fault lines that exist between the West and the Islamic countries in the Middle and Far East, Africa and the Mediterranean. It tests the abilities of the broadcasters in new and difficult ways. Reporting Islam poses various challenges. It is a complex faith with many subtleties. Moreover, we are reporting from within a post-modern environment, and usually from a secular worldview. We have to address Islam as three different realities: Islam as a religion: We often underestimate how religious the rest of the world is. How do you report religion in a secular age and society when journalists can be uncomfortable with or ignorant about the subject and betray their partiality and prejudice? Islam as politics: "Islamists" are a minority among Muslims. "Islamism" is a 20th Century phenomenon, a relatively new development in the religion's history. How do we provide enough context? Islam as a bundle of social issues and attitudes: For example, Islam does not share many western secular assumptions about such things as the rights of women? We should not be apologetic. But how do we report it straight? And, of course, there is the perennial problem of finding the people who can in some sense speak for the community. Who are the significant voices? No single spokesperson can speak for the whole Muslim community, just as no single voice can represent the whole of any religion. Many of them have agendas that need to be challenged. At the same time, we must not fuel the flames of prejudice and intolerance. We have to be careful in our choice of words and who we claim speaks for the community. These are old tensions, but also new challenges. As events unfold and the debate intensifies, some of these issues will come into sharper focus. Overall, the impartiality requirement is, in my judgement, an important guarantor of important democratic values. It continues to serve us well in serving well-informed citizens who feel they know where they can turn for unbiased information on which to base their decisions. Yes, the new world opens up new channels and offers a myriad of choices. Many will argue that this choice renders the old rules obsolete. But there is still a value in providing a space where the rules are clear, and where people can be sure that the information is reliable. But it takes courage and determination. The BBC is fortunate both in its history and its funding. Even so, the cost can sometimes be high. What helps maintain the commitment to accuracy, the telling of truth, and providing an opportunity for those voices to be heard, is the realisation that it is a crucial part of our democracy. It enables our audiences to understand what is happening in the world as well as giving them the opportunity to make informed choices. It remains a vital contribution. It also means that relationship with Government will go on being wary. Profile Page Top Stephen Whittle is the BBC's Controller of Editorial Policy. His role is to ensure that the BBC sets and observes the highest ethical and editorial standards. He was previously Director of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. Stephen joined the BBC in Manchester in 1977 as a producer from the World Council of Churches -- where he had been Deputy Director, Communications. He has produced across both radio and television and was Head of Religious Programmes for the BBC. He was educated at St Ignatius College, Stamford Hill and at University College London.