The Wreck of the BBC

Nor, for good measure, declared Lord Hutton, had Blair improperly “outed” Dr. Kelly, the previously anonymous source for the report. Kelly’s exposure led more or less directly to the scientist’s suicide in July.

By contrast, Hutton’s report found the BBC profoundly guilty. The original story by its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, that the government had deliberately inserted a false claim into a published document concerning Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, was unfounded. Worse, the BBC had failed to ensure proper editorial procedures to prevent such an erroneous report from being broadcast. Then, without having properly checked the story, the BBC’s management refused to back down from the report even though some of its own editorial staff were quietly expressing concern about its reliability.

Within hours of the publication of the Hutton findings, which amounted to a forensic flagellation of the entire editorial processes of the world’s largest news organization, the two top figures at the BBC, its chairman and director general, resigned–one falling honorably on his sword, the other forced out by the board of governors.

Then, like a great keening at a funeral procession, the wailing began.

Grand public figures rose up as one to decry the verdict. Media panjandrums took to the airwaves and the newspapers to express outrage and intone gravely that Lord Hutton’s report marked the beginning of the end of the right of free expression in Britain. One claimed to have felt physically sick at what the report would do for press freedom. A prominent news anchor for another TV network said he could not remember feeling more depressed. “There but for the grace of God go all of us,” he wept.

Greg Dyke, the outgoing BBC director general, gone but anxious not to be forgotten, rounded on the judge and the government and said the judgment was a disgrace.

BBC staff coughed up five pounds a head to take out a full page ad in a national newspaper, insisting (the courageous jut of their jaw almost discernible through the newsprint) that they would do their best not to be deterred from bringing the public the truth.

The ranks of the stricken were not confined to the emoting British elite, at least if the BBC is to be believed. Its New York correspondent reported that he was overwhelmed at the outpouring of sympathy he had found on the streets of Manhattan.

“‘Good luck,’ said a colleague from a friendly U.S. network, squeezing my arm with a look of pity and concern in her eyes.” This lonely but brave reporter went on to add, with the pure objectivity and balance for which the BBC is so renowned: “Arch skeptics here see it as just another victory for the ideology that drives the war on terror.” He presumably meant to insert a hyphen before the word “skeptics,” though the omission perhaps gave the statement its truer meaning.

The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty.

If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting.

For Lord Hutton has exposed, from the pinnacle of independent judicial authority, the fatal flaws at the heart of the world’s largest broadcaster. His report has confirmed what critics have argued for years: that the BBC, once one of the cultural treasures of the English-speaking world, has lost its way.

EVEN AS IT PROJECTS its unrivaled resources further around the globe, including the United States, where its news programs are now seen in millions of homes, and its entertainment channel, BBC America, advances on cable networks, its reputation for quality public service broadcasting and objective and fair news is sinking rapidly.

Its news is increasingly tinged by the corrosive liberal bias that permeates so much of the global media. Its reporters and editors share a worldview that would sit perfectly with the denizens of the New York Times, and they hold the same conviction that theirs alone is an objective account of the truth.

Its vaunted public service ethos, the tradition that over the years produced original and creative drama, entertainment, and comedy, has been traduced and subordinated to commercial ambition. It uses the vast resources it receives from a compulsory tax on everyone in Britain who owns a TV set to muscle out privately financed competitors.

And all the time, the BBC regards criticism or calls for accountability as acts of lèse majesté, a kind of high treason against a lovable old British institution (“Aunty,” as the BBC is known) that merits the firm protection of the law. Critics are dismissed as promoting a political or financial agenda, of aiming to destroy the BBC so its commercial rivals might feed on its corpse.

But the David Kelly affair provided that rare moment when this vast, bloated organization’s faults are laid bare for all but the most willing of the BBC’s collaborators.

The details are these: Gilligan, an investigative reporter for the BBC, last May interviewed Dr. Kelly about the preparation of a document outlining Iraq’s WMD capabilities produced by the British government in September 2002, as the Iraq debate was reaching its climax.

Gilligan subsequently reported that a senior British official closely involved in the drafting of the WMD document had told him the intelligence services were unhappy at the way Downing Street had exploited their intelligence for political purposes. Most explosively, this official is said to have told the reporter that Blair’s official spokesman had insisted on inserting–against the wishes of the intelligence services–a finding that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

We now know, however, thanks to Lord Hutton’s inquiry, that (a) Kelly did not tell Gilligan the government deliberately conveyed false information about Iraq; (b) the intelligence service chiefs had themselves inserted the 45-minute claim, not Downing Street; (c) Kelly, though a genuine expert on Iraq’s weapons, had no connection with the compiling of the WMD document; and (d) Kelly, far from being an opponent of the war, as was commonly inferred, was actually a fervent supporter of getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

None of that, sadly, was known at the time Gilligan aired his explosive report on May 29. Within a matter of days, this misrepresented allegation from an unreliable witness had metamorphosed into the conventional wisdom about the prime minister.

Tony Blair’s reputation fell swiftly from that of co-liberator of the Iraqi people to liar and lackey of George Bush who could not persuade his country or his party to go to war against Iraq on honest grounds and so had resorted instead to a wicked distortion. Tens of thousands of British troops had been sent into battle on a falsehood.

As Blair himself told the Hutton inquiry last August, the report amounted to an “extraordinarily serious allegation which, if it were true, would mean we had behaved in the most disgraceful way and I would have to resign as prime minister.”

Blair’s approval rating plummeted. When Dr. Kelly committed suicide on July 17, the public verdict seemed to be that a man who had been valiantly trying to expose government wrongdoing and had been unmasked for his efforts had taken his own life.

The BBC, meanwhile, despite some qualms about the story, stood by it. Without bothering to check in detail with the reporter on his source, and without demanding to see his notes, the BBC launched a vigorous defense of the allegations. Even as the Hutton inquiry began its work, the fighting went on. The BBC insisted its story was right, and the government’s problems mounted. Only last month, as Hutton’s report sparked the crisis, did the BBC apologize for its errors. Probably too late to repair the damage to Blair.

Quite why this single story and its follow-ups had the capacity to inflict so much harm on the reputation of the prime minister might seem a puzzle to American readers. But the fact is that the BBC occupies a position in British public life quite unlike that of any media organization in the United States or, indeed, in the free world. It runs several TV channels, including two all-news services, and several all-news radio networks. It has two 24-hour global news networks. Its main news shows on TV and radio reach upwards of three-quarters of the British people every week.

What is more, with Britain’s print media being politically partisan, the BBC’s past reputation for impartiality has made it much more widely trusted than any competitor. Imagine the influence of the main American TV networks, PBS, CNN, Fox News, National Public Radio, the New York Times, and the newsweekly magazines all rolled into one and you have some inkling of the reach of this giant.

THE KELLY STORY was not an isolated incident. It was merely the most infamous example of a left-liberal bias that refracts all news coverage through the prism of the BBC’s own distinctive worldview.

The BBC’s coverage of the Iraq war itself marked a new low point in the history of the self-loathing British prestige-media’s capacity to side with the nation’s enemies.

Its Middle East coverage is notoriously one-sided. Its pro-Palestinian bias is so marked that recently the London bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post refused to take part in any more BBC news programs because he believed the corporation was actually fomenting anti-Semitism. If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.

Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man’s highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on.

This will be familiar to consumers of news in much of the United States. Liberal media bias is by now, fortunately, increasingly widely recognized. But the difference is that BBC bias is so much more powerful and much more pernicious because the BBC is still seen by viewers and listeners, in Britain and around the world, as objective. And when the BBC conveys its slanted views of the world, there is very little means of checking and correcting it.

I worked at the BBC for six years. I never saw a BBC journalist actively promote his own political agenda. Almost all were honest, hardworking men and women dedicated to reporting the truth as they saw it. The problem was that it was the truth as they saw it.

The sheer scale of the BBC means that “the truth as seen by the BBC” is what gets believed. Aunty is simply too big and too powerful for the modern media era. The BBC is, in fact, a curious vestige of pre-Margaret Thatcher Britain: a massive public monopoly, a Soviet-like bureaucracy accountable to no one. If you own a TV, your almost $200 a year goes into the BBC’s coffers–irrespective of whether you watch it–and, yes, the BBC will prosecute you if you fail to pay up.

Who regulates this Leviathan among institutions, with a heft unrivaled in the world of journalism, entertainment, or anything else for that matter? You probably guessed. It regulates itself. Its board of governors, appointed by the government, does a good line in rubber-stamping virtually anything its management hands to it–the awful errors in the Kelly story being the most powerful example.

The Kelly affair speaks to another aspect of the BBC’s iniquitous and growing strength. The problem was not simply the liberal biases of its journalists. The Kelly affair was the awful culmination of an aggressive strategy in recent years to cement the BBC’s domination.

Greg Dyke, the director general forced out last month, a brilliant commercial TV executive before he joined the BBC, has dumbed down the news in pursuit of higher ratings. BBC News has become edgier, more sensational, more focused on making news rather than reporting it. The BBC has opened the doors and let the foul winds of British tabloid journalism waft through its stuffy halls.

All this is part of a grander design to encroach further into the field of commercial TV–to abandon its raison d’être of producing quality programs that were unprofitable, and instead leverage its enormous power and financial resources to take on all comers–in Britain and around the world.

The great virtue of Lord Hutton’s devastating indictment is that it represented for the first time an independent verdict. The editorial failings it criticized, the tendentious reporting it identified, the massive bureaucracy it exposed, and the troubling strategic vision that underlay it all demand a radical change at the BBC, if the organization’s reputation is to be restored.

The BBC has long been one of the world’s most highly valued outlets for quality broadcasting. In unfree countries, it remains a lifeline and the exemplar of independent media. But Lord Hutton has exposed an institution whose power and influence are now matched by its arrogance and self-righteousness. The learned judge, it is to be hoped, has opened the way to a long-delayed revolution.

Gerard Baker is an associate editor at the Financial Times.