It seems like only yesterday that I was calling for positive images of journalists. But nothing has ever made me as angry with the press as recent attacks on the BBC documentary Frozen Planet.
I can see the horror of the hacking scandal and the revelations it is unleashing at the Leveson inquiry, of course. But I love to see beauty revealed in the world, and that is what Frozen Planet achieved. I find some newspapers' attempts to undermine this televisual masterpiece and its narrator David Attenborough more repulsive than I can say.
To recap: Frozen Planet showed television audiences this autumn a world that 99% of us will never visit. It sent cameras to the volcano Erebus that belches heat into the Antarctic ice, and under the frozen crust of the Arctic seas. It was rightly adored and acclaimed.
Then a completely standard and legitimate technique, openly explained on the BBC website, of filming in zoos, or the studio, images that cannot conceivably be recorded in the wild, was "discovered" (but it wasn't secret) and "exposed" (but it wasn't wrong). Now tabloid papers are full of self-righteous fury against the Beeb and its most legendary broadcaster.
No one who has admired these programmes can take the accusations seriously. They won't damage the programme in the long term, any more than similar claims damaged its predecessor The Blue Planet. The sheer abundance of rare and unprecedented images in these programmes dwarfs the supposed flaws their critics fixate on.
For me it raises a horrible question. Is newspaper journalism a destructive enterprise?
The BBC at its best is a creative force; it adds to people's lives. Some papers' urge to besmirch one of its greatest achievements begs the question – what do such newspapers add to anyone's life? Where is the beauty in their pages? Frozen Planet opens windows in the imagination. The tabloid attacks reveal that some sections of the British press are the enemies of imagination, education, beauty and – yes – truth.
