BBC: A Journalistic Disaster Waiting to Happen

Christopher Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, claims he will be able to find a new director-general for the beleaguered broadcaster within weeks instead of months. (Reuters Photo).

 

Jonathan Eyal - Straits Times | November 15, 2012

London. Christopher Patten, the chairman of the BBC, Britain's state-funded broadcaster, claims he will need "weeks rather than months" to find a replacement for the corporation's director-general, who resigned after one of its TV programs falsely accused a retired top British politician of child abuse.

But the BBC will need more than just a few swift personnel appointments before it recovers its poise, for the organization is facing the worst crisis in its 90-year's existence. Its biggest problem is journalistic quality, precisely the attribute for which the BBC used to be universally admired.

At first glance, the events which led to the hasty departure of director-general George Entwistle last Saturday, look like a classic British storm in a teacup: a scandal involving sex and politics treated seriously by a domestic audience but baffling to all foreigners.

As part of a broader investigation into previously known cases of pedophile at a children's home, a BBC program broadcast earlier this month allegations by a former boy resident at that home. He claimed he had been abused by a senior politician from the ruling Conservative party. Although the program did not name the person, few had problems in identifying Lord Alistair McAlpine, the party's former treasurer, as the supposed offender.

But the allegation was a complete fabrication; the BBC used an unreliable witness. That put an end to the career of Entwistle, who was appointed as the BBC's boss only two months ago.

The reason the managerial blood-letting proved so serious is that the child abuse episode comes on top of many other scandals.

Last month the BBC was rocked by revelations that the now-deceased Jimmy Saville, its star TV presenter from the 1960s to the 1980s, abused tens or even hundreds of young girls, often on BBC premises. The broadcaster not only appears to have ignored these crimes, it also shelved a planned investigative TV program which would have exposed Saville's sordid private life.

Internal investigations are pending on all these scandals. But what has already emerged is hardly flattering. For "Auntie" — as the BBC is affectionately known to generations of Brits — has turned out to be neither prim nor proper, and not particularly wise either.

One explanation for the decline in professional standards is that the broadcaster is simply trying to do too much: "The BBC is not like a newspaper or any other TV channel. It produces 40 hours of output for every hour of real time, day and night," says Richard Sambrook, a former executive and now a university lecturer in journalism.

Another contributing factor is the BBC's relentless race for audience share. This was never its mission: the broadcaster carries no advertising and is funded by a £142 (S$276) flat yearly tax levied on every British household in order to produce programs which no commercial network would consider. But the BBC always refused to be a niche media supplier.

It launched a plethora of radio stations and popular TV soap operas, and used its vast network of bureaus around the world to produce an Internet news portal currently attracting 20 million weekly visitors in Britain alone.

The consequence is a mad race for scoops. So journalists who worked on the recent allegations of child abuse did not bother to check whether their "witness" could even recognize the senior politician who supposedly molested him, although the same journalists did have the time to advertise their supposed "revelations" in advance on Twitter. Fame before facts: precisely what the BBC claimed to avoid.

Ultimately, however, the BBC's biggest problem is that it is a monster employing 22,000 people in addition to no less than 65,000 freelancers.

It promotes in-house because it clings to the idea that good journalists are automatically also good managers, and it ends up with plenty of both, but no effective management.

The result is that, as Patten joked over the weekend, "there are more senior leaders at the BBC than in the Chinese Communist Party." And they have pay packages to match: No less than 102 top managers are paid a salary equal or better than that of the British prime minister.

But the managerial output is poor. "Office politics was turned into a highly skilled art — backs were covered, memos cascaded up and down bureaucratic levels" is how Jackie Ashley, a former BBC journalist, recalls her life in the organization. It is a culture which almost invites disaster.

As the last British governor of Hong Kong and a political heavyweight, Patten can brave out the current controversy. He is also right to point out that some of the criticism against the BBC comes from newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch which were implicated in even graver violations of journalistic standards.

Still, Patten knows that the BBC brand has suffered a bad hit: "We're a news organization and our credibility depends on telling the truth," he admitted on Sunday.

In order to stem the problem, he is likely to recruit a director-general from outside the BBC and separate the top managerial job from the editorial one, hoping that both will be performed better.

Ultimately, however, the BBC will have to learn how to be humble and accept that, like all other news outlets, it is not infallible. That won't come easy to a corporation which always believed that it held the monopoly on criticizing others.

Reprinted courtesy of The Straits Times