Mehdi Hasan, the PCC and Me

Some months ago I told the strange story of the BBC Radio programme ‘What the Papers Say’, transmitted on Sunday 29th July 2012.  The account is to be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/07/what-the-papers-didnt-say-and-what-they-did.html

 

Alas, the programme cannot, as far as I know, still be heard on the BBC website. I felt ( and feel) that it was most interesting that such a person as Mehdi Hasan had a position as a BBC presenter on Radio 4, whereas I had actually been told by a senior BBC executive, to my face and without any elaboration,  that I would never be permitted to present a programme on that station.

As a result, I wrote the following article in the Mail on Sunday:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/am-i-an-animal-a-cow-or-just-another-victim-of-bbc-bias.html

 

This was published on 4th August. Mr Hasan (who by this time wasn’t speaking to me any more, and hasn’t since)  responded through an article in the ‘Huffington Post’ , which is discussed in detail here 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/quote-unquote-getting-it-straight-with-the-huffington-post-and-mehdi-hasan.html

 

I made it clear that I was unhappy at the presentation of my alleged words as a direct quotation in this article.  

 

This issue has now been resolved by the Press Complaints Commission. Why were they involved?  I tried quite hard to get Mr Hasan and the Huffington Post to reply to my question about whether they had a shorthand note, or a recording of the words they had attributed to me in quotation marks.

 

I am very old-fashioned about journalism, having been trained in the lost days when even provincial evening newspapers had serious libraries of their own, and when News Editors would ask, with narrowed eyes ‘Have you got a proper note of that?’ if a reporter produced a quotation which fitted particularly neatly into his story. It wasn’t, exactly, that they didn’t trust their reporters. They just knew that one day they might have to stand up in court and defend the story, or at least be able to defend it against the cold, beady gaze of the paper’s own lawyers. So the News Editor required a full and legible note, in the Pitman’s Shorthand we all had to learn (minimum speed 120 words per minute) and which was so ordered and regular that another Pitman-trained reporter could read your note as easily as he could read his own.  You might have been as certain as you liked about the accuracy of the words, but no News Editor, Editor or lawyer would have accepted your certainty without the backing of a note or a tape (though a witness to the conversation would do in most circumstances).

 

Since then, shorthand has declined (the classical notations have I think largely been abandoned in favour of sketchier, wrigglier,  more personalised and undisciplined squiggles than my teacher, the estimable Mrs Whittaker, would have tolerated) . And many modern journalists have come to rely on tape recordings which (while cumbersome when you are searching for a crucial passage) are even more undeniable than a clear shorthand note.  But what if you have neither, nor a witness? Is it then legitimate to present what you *think* someone said as what he definitely and exactly said?

 

Anyway, I eventually decided to ask the Press Complaints Committee to take up the matter, as at least this would ensure that the ‘Huffington Post’ acknowledged my question. And after much back-and-forth, which shall remain confidential,  the quotation marks have come off the words which Mr Hasan attributed to me. And the PCC has placed the following account on its website  here

 

 http://www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=ODEzMw

 

 

 

As I’ve always said, I can’t definitively say that I didn’t use those exact words, nor do I specifically dispute them, nor can I deny them, because I lack a shorthand note of my own, or a recording,  and because they were said several years ago. However, the precise wording Mr Hasan uses  seems to me to be remarkably convenient to his argument, and my old News Editors, wise in the ways of the trade, would certainly have asked him if he had a note of that. Or a recording. Or a witness.  What emerges from all this is that he did not have either a note or a recording, or a witness, but was prepared, even so, to present the words as a direct quotation, enclosed in quotation marks. They’re now not enclosed in quotation marks, which I think is important.

 

Let’s call that Case One, in Mr Hasan’s Way with Words.

 

Then there’s Case Two. For this we must go back in days, weeks, months and years gone by to 27th August 2009, when Mr Hasan and I attempted an internet-based debate on BBC bias. One of Mr Hasan’s contributions to this is to be found here

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/mehdi-hasan-bbc-wing-bias-corporation

 

 

In this article (which is a separate question in itself, so completely does it miss the point about the BBC’s bias against moral, social and cultural conservatism) you will find the following passage ‘Then there is the claim from small-c conservatives such as Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips that they are ignored by the BBC. Is this the same Hitchens who is a frequent guest on BBC1's Question Time (according to the screen and cinema database IMDB, he has appeared on the show every year since 2000, and twice in 2007)? And the same Phillips who is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze?’

 

Now, I have made many public complaints about my treatment by the BBC, since I was rather poorly treated on a Radio Five Live programme back in about 1995 or 1996, when I had recently returned from America,  and about which I wrote in the Guardian media section.  But I don’t personally recall having complained of being *ignored*, then or later.

 

It would have been silly, as  I was plainly not being ignored. Mr Hasan is right to say that I have made many appearances (though as a guest or panellist rather than as a presenter, a role I have been allowed precisely twice by the BBC in 17 years of broadcasting) . I have checked my own newspaper’s cuttings library, I have used Google and I have used a reputable database which scans all publications in this country and have yet to find any instance of my complaining about being ‘ignored’ by the BBC.  I think this is because I haven’t done so, though – as usual, I am open to correction. It wouldn’t, I think, be the first word which occurred to anyone encapsulating my attitude towards the Corporation.

 

Yet Mr Hasan makes it . And lo, he immediately has evidence to hand that this claim by me that I have been ignored is not justified.  The fact that I don’t appear to have made such a claim slips past unnoticed by most readers.