You can, of course, feel sorry for Cliff Richard, gaunt after long months of suspicion and police investigation. Just as you can feel sorry for Field Marshal Lord Bramall, similarly put through the sex-abuse ringer. Not to mention Paul Gambaccini, Jim Davidson and rather too many other victims of protracted investigations eventually aborted because of “insufficient evidence”.
Sir Cliff, like many others, wants a reasonable balance of anonymity here – no more accusations from unknown witnesses triggering ordeals which go nowhere and prove nothing. And, in particular, he thinks that BBC helicopter footage of our old chums from South Yorkshire police raiding his home was grotesque overkill.
Does a mild BBC apology for the “distress caused” fit his bill? Not when he and his press supporters want more abject contrition. The corporation’s eventual statement last week only spurred them on: “Once the South Yorkshire police had confirmed the investigation and Sir Cliff Richard’s identity and informed the BBC of the timing and details of the search of his property, it would neither have been editorially responsible nor in the public interest to choose not to report fully the investigation into Sir Cliff Richard because of his public profile.”
What? Public interest in an eventual non-story? Cameras buzzing high over private land? Yet the intractable dilemma sketched in by that BBC defence can’t simply be fumed aside. Journalists exist to tell their readers and viewers what’s happening. Police, in numbers, storming a pop star’s home in Berkshire is self-evident news, available to all Sunningdale passers-by at the time. Suppressing it corrodes any residual trust the press retains. Reporters are there to report the news, not blank it out. If parliament wishes to set different imperatives it can always legislate. Remember Margaret Thatcher’s oxygen of publicity? But enforcing blindness and deafness by statute is really just another slither down the slippery slopes of mistrust and misadventure.
Journalists are there to report what happens, not to fall artificially silent when instructed by higher authority.
