What the Butler Said - My Continuing Struggle with the BBC

The BBC Trust has rejected every part of my complaint against ‘What the Papers say’ last July,  so much so that it makes me wonder quite why they apologised on air for what they had done at the time. Those who wish to read their decision can find it at

 

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/esc_bulletins/2013/jan.pdf

 

and scroll down to pp.20 -32

 

My own original description of the problem can be found by going here

 

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

 

The Guardian, who picked up the BBC Trust judgement unprompted by me, have published the following account

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/12/peter-hitchens-what-the-papers-say-bbc

 

which of course comes with a  free smorgasbord of saliva-flecked comments from the lovely readers of ‘Comment is Free’ (but Personal Abuse is Even more Free) about what a dreadful person I am, how I am whining , etc etc , how I can’t take mockery - and also emphasising that I do indeed sound just as stupid as I was made to sound on the programme. Alas, the original broadcast is for some reason not available on the web. I have my own personal recording, and occasionally, during this controversy, I have replayed it to myself to remind myself just how much of a distortion it was. I wish I could share it with you.

 

The point, of course, is not that I was traduced. As I say, I’m used to that – quite possibly more used to it than any living English person, as I am the target of so much Internet slime from so many different directions that I doubt anyone equals it, in sheer quantity - though much of it is so repetitive that, for all I know, it is mass-produced by 12-year-olds in a small sweatshop in Canton.   Few of my critics could endure for a minute the sort of stuff which is directed at me all the time without limit, and all the more so if I ever stand up for myself. I’ve said it before – anyone who went to an English boarding school in the 1950s and early 1960s really has little to fear from this sort of thing. I have experienced the worst that childish spite can come up with. The point is, that what happened on WTPS was not done by feral prep-school boys. It was done by a huge national broadcaster, financed by a licence fee levied on the basis that it has an absolute duty to be impartial.

 

Therefore *if it hoses me with slime, it must hose my opponents with equivalent quantities.  Selective slime is partial slime.* How hard is this to communicate? Abuse is fine on the BBC, provided that it’s equal opportunity abuse. But it’s not.

 

If the BBC used caricaturists, of the modern kind, who portray leading politicians as rotting corpses, or as animated contraceptives, or as drowning in excrement, they would absolutely have to find cartoonists who were prepared to do the same thing to all sides. As such cartoons in fact appear in independent newspapers, with no commitment to impartiality it doesn’t matter. But itnwould, on the BBC. The key distinction is over *the official commitment to impartiality of the licence-funded broadcaster*.

 

The point is that the BBC has a duty of impartiality, clearly stated in its own founding documents and often referred to with pride by senior BBC executives.

 

So, if it uses a gross caricature of me, and if it alters my words to change their meaning , and if it also (not long before) staged an on-air show-trial of me and my views on drugs, and my competence to hold them *in my absence*, then one has to ask the following question.

 

When did the BBC ever do anything comparable to a prominent commentator of the Left? The answer is that they didn’t. never have, and won’t now. Take my old friend Jonathan Freedland, whose career is in some ways a parallel of mine – former foreign correspondent, author of books of social and political commentary, writer of comment articles in a national newspaper. Jonathan has for some years been a  regular presenter of programmes on BBC Radio 4.

 

Some people will sneer that I am no good at presenting. Well, I have written and presented several substantial programmes for Channel 4, including one on the threat to Civil Liberty and one on David Cameron which were reasonably well-reviewed at the time.

 

I did, once, long ago, present a very brief programme on crime and punishment for Radio 4 (before that ‘never’ was uttered) which was quite well-received at the time but which predates Internet radio and which is lost to posterity.  I did once apply and get shortlisted for a BBC News job, reporting foreign affairs,  many years ago. I had no problem with the screen test and the rest and was only eliminated at the final stage of interviews, despite a rather nasty whispering campaign against me. I’ve made a number of short films for Andrew Neil’s Thursday night show ‘This Week’.  I was for some time the co-presenter of a rather successful (in audience terms)  radio commentary programme on the then Talk Radio, in which I achieved genuine balance  by the novel method (invented and asked for by me) of having a left-wing co-presenter who disagreed with me about everything. It ended because my co-presenter had a falling-out with the station chief and it was hard to find anyone else to fill his role, and also (I suspect) because a double-headed programme was a bit expensive. The BBC , around the same time, came up with a programme which had some similarities with our format,  but their version inserted an ’impartial’ presenter in the middle, and the two opponents were only really foes in a party-political sense, not in the far wider moral, social and cultural way in which I and Derek Draper differed. The BBC never could understand that bias was very little to do with party politics.

 

I also presented a TV programme on Britain’s entry in the Common Market for BBC4 (which I was asked to do at very short notice after the original presenter was suddenly unavailable) , and it can’t have been that bad, or why was I soon afterwards asked to present another documentary  by the station’s then boss, about grammar schools?  The person involved invited me to a lavish dinner, took me to one side, showered me with praise and said they longed for me to undertake this important task, to which they were personally committed. After I had lined up a production company and a director, as asked, this plan mysteriously dematerialised without explanation. A programme on the subject eventually emerged, with another presenter.  Likewise a producer’s wish to have me as a regular panellist on the ‘Moral Maze’ was vetoed at a high level, and a very senior BBC executive later told me to my face (over a lunch to which I had invited that executive)  that I would ‘never’ present a programme on Radio 4. That was the word this person used. They felt no reason to explain why. It was self-evident to them.

 

I was, and this is crucial, to be allowed to make occasional appearances on ‘Any Questions’ (the radio equivalent of ‘Question Time’), and as a guest in discussions in which I could be ‘balanced’ by at least one person with differing views.

 

But the executive understood – as so many readers here don’t seem to, and as Jonathan Freedland on Twitter today seems not to, though he really ought to know better – that  the panellist or guest is far, far weaker than the presenter. The panellist does not choose what he discusses. He does not choose the timing.  He does not get the last word. He doesn’t even know how long it will be before the presenter stops him from speaking (though in my case he can safely assume that it will be pretty soon). He has to compete for time with other panellists who disagree with him, and with a presenter who is almost invariably in the grip of an unconscious bias made far worse by his conviction that he thinks he is impartial.

 

I also remember when a BBC executive wrote in the Spectator that BBC2’s Newsnight - then on the look-out for new presenters – would of course consider conservative journalists for the job. There had been some talk of David Aaronovitch being hired, which raised questions about impartiality in some minds.  I immediately wrote in to suggest myself, and my reward was a nice lunch with a man called George Entwistle, who I seem to have come across somewhere since. But I was not considered for the new presenter’s job.

 

Leave that. It’s the task of Sisyphus to explain the obvious to my critics, who don’t know because they don’t want to know.

 

The problem remains that the BBC simply cannot grasp that it is not impartial. Even Andrew Marr’s statement that : ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’ Has not reached the minds of most BBC people (though its former DG, Mark Thompson, was beginning to see the point shortly before he left) .

 

 

Hilariously, it has only recently begun to grasp that some people think that Jeremy Hardy may be a bit left-wing, and the Radio 4 News Quiz also a little less than impartial on the British political divide.  How one copes with such semi-consciousness, I am not sure. In this case, the BBC has so far been judge and jury in its own cause. I hope to take it further, and if I succeed, I shall let you know how I get on.