The BBC suffers from liberal “groupthink”, a former corporation apparatchik reveals in his memoirs, predictably promoted on the front page of the Times on Monday. Gosh, who’d have guessed it? You can find a sample behind the Murdoch paywall.
Roger Mosey, editorial director and much else in his BBC decades, engages in less than scintillating breast-beating about past failures: over the Jimmy Savile affair; over gaffe-prone royal occasions; over its less than candid handling of immigration policy; and the “Groundhog Day” quality of its torpid corporate governance.
Nothing wrong with that. Get it all off your chest Roger, now that you’re safely installed as master of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Did anyone explain that the appointment requires a mixture of deft corporate governance and fundraising skills? Most of the BBC’s funds are raised for it by the licence fee. Corporate governance? Don’t ask.
But anyone who works inside a large institution can recognise the tragicomic way things can go wrong, how routine decisions can be judged harshly with hindsight, how senior suits can be hopelessly out of touch with their staff, let alone with customers.
This failing is not confined to the BBC or the NHS, though most of the newspapers would have you believe it is peculiar to the public sector or elective politics. Just say the words “Barclays bank” (HSBC or RBS if you prefer) and you get my point.
The vices may be different: old-fashioned sexism (read the stream of court cases); corruption (why so few court cases?); and plain greed being more pervasive in the City than paedophilia, so far as we know. But human frailty is much the same.
The church, the town hall, the boardroom and the training squad – even the popular charity which harasses potential donors – all are routinely found wanting nowadays. High-minded universities seem to be bad at addressing a resurgence of aggressive sexual behaviour. And so on. Between you and me, not even the Guardian is yet perfect.
The problem nowadays is the size of the megaphone that amplifies the noise generated when failings are exposed. A storm in the mainstream media can lead to hasty decisions made under pressure, ones which may later be repented at leisure.
That’s always been so, though mainstream media was much more complicit in establishment cover-ups in the days when Britain still had an establishment. Commercial pressure makes it much more nihilistic these days.
But in 2015, unmediated social media, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, can generate even more ferocious typhoons and are far more easily manipulated by interested or malicious parties. “Calumny is a little breeze,” as Basilio explains in Rossini’s Barber of Seville in the pre-Twitter 1810s.
What is striking is that it is usually the amateurs who get hit disproportionately in this sort of process. Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt made a clumsy joke far from home about women in the labs which touched a raw nerve among women who know there is still real prejudice holding them back in science (with the effect of dragging down average pay too, a recent report suggested).
But the spectacle of UCL (I am a graduate of UCL) sacking him, to be followed by other panicky institutions, was awful. Was there no sense of proportion in the corporate hierarchy, no recognition of his distinguished services or his record in helping female colleagues (as some testified), no notion that the prof’s defence should be heard before the execution?
It was embarrassing. Liberal causes are not served by illiberal actions. But contrast that with Fifa’s Sepp Blatter. A serious tough guy, he withstood years of mounting evidence of systemic corruption – all credit to Mr Murdoch’s Sunday Times for expensive and risky investigative reporting and to the BBC – before resigning the other week. Moral? The tough guys tough it out. Will Blatter escape? We’ll see, but my current hunch is yes.
Which takes us back to the BBC and the Times. Mosey’s confession of BBC weaknesses will be picked up and amplified in Tory Fleet Street which is already gunning for the Beeb and its licence fee, as Jane Martinson explains.
With its customary efficiency, later editions of Monday’s Daily Mail have already hoovered up the Times account and added its own gloss: “Liberal BBC out of touch on migration, says its ex-director.”
It’s true. As a fan of the BBC who has appeared on its outlets for years, I know many such instances of out of touch, well-meant editorial myopia which just inflames Ukip sentiment. It makes mistakes, we all do. The difference between the BBC and the Mail (and other newspapers) is that the Beeb is much more transparent and accountable, if not today, then sooner or later.
Most of them (read Decca Aitkenhead’s glorious comic interview with the Express’s Richard “Dirty” Desmond) have an active commercial interest in doing down the Beeb that goes well beyond legitimate public interest. Close students of the Murdoch press, much of it excellent in many ways, know how much its editorial views conform to the main tenets of Rupert Murdoch’s core beliefs.
So a candid executive memoir about the phone-hacking and BSkyB affair would make Mosey’s book far duller reading. Not least interesting would be the chapter explaining how loyal non-hacking journalists and their contacts were betrayed to the police to save Murdoch’s corporate skin in the US courts. The hacks were mostly acquitted (and rightly so) in British ones, their paid contacts were less lucky.
The lesson seems to be that relatively open institutions such as the BBC – or even Tim Hunt’s UCL – are vulnerable to public pressure, justified or not, in ways that more hard-nosed bodies are not.
Everyday the NHS gets it in the neck from the media for failings – some more real than others . How often do you read about the mistakes of private hospitals and doctors, some of them pretty spectacular, their failures having to be picked up by the taxpayer via the NHS? Not too often: they have good lawyers (as do newspapers).
So before the Twitterati next whip up a storm, they might ask themselves if they are doing the corporate oligarchs bidding. What’s more, they’re doing it for free. At least David Cameron draws a salary for menacing Nick Robinson.
