In Defence of the BBC

Bashing the Beeb sounds like it should be a euphemism, but it’s fast turning into a new national pastime, taking over from the short-lived but intimately related sport of Hunt the Celebrity Paedophile. The Beeb came late to this sport, with the result that they missed the opportunity to be the first channel to bring it to the masses in 2011, and then tried too hard to play catch-up last week. And now the media have moved on from this sport and on to Bringing down the Beeb, a Jenga-like game where they aim to take out as many BBC executives as it takes for the ancient structure to collapse.

First up, of course, had to be George Entwistle, the hapless Director-General whose 54 days in office represents the most disastrous short-term tenure since Brian Clough took the helm at Leeds United in 1974. David Peace is probably writing the book about it already.

Entwistle’s ‘crime’ was to behave like a rabbit caught in the headlights when faced with the Lord McAlpine allegations. The headlights were the flurry of accusations levelled at the Beeb over its decision not to air allegations about Jimmy Savile. Blinded by these, it immediately jumped at the chance to redeem itself by outing another public figure. The cautiousness it showed about Savile had got it into trouble and it wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The end result was a story that soon fell apart, but it was a story they would never have run if the glare of the Savile headlights hadn’t been harming its ability to make rational decisions.

Now they are condemned for doing what they failed to do in 2011, which is to run a story without double and triple checking the facts first. They can’t win. And not just on the expose that wasn’t. If Entwistle hadn’t quit there would have been demands for him to be sacked and allegations of contempt at their failure to react given the significance of the mistake, but once he did the honourable thing and resigned, there was an immediate reaction against the £450,000 payoff he gets. The payoff was included in terms of employment drafted long before anyone knew the BBC could get caught up in a crisis that appears to be this large. It equates to one year’s salary. To me it seems entirely reasonable and indeed less generous compared to ‘get-out’ clauses in other Chief Executive’s contracts. Next to what it took to get rid of Bob Diamond, who presided over a bigger institutional disaster at Barclays, it’s peanuts. And even if it isn’t, the issue is the BBC appointing people on contracts that give them a year’s salary if they resign, rather than giving a year’s salary in this instance. But in Bringing down the Beeb, finer details are avoided and glossed over.

This brings us to a closer examination of what the Beeb did and didn’t do in relation to Savile and McAlpine. In the case of Savile they chose not to report allegations that, for all they appear to be genuine and the tip of an iceberg, are still unproven in a court of law. They were allegations that, for whatever reason, were not pursued while Savile was alive. If they had gone ahead with the Newsnight report, and the allegations had turned out to be unsubstantiated, the public reaction would have been outrage. ‘The memory of charitable hero Savile being defamed so soon after his death and with him unable to defend himself. How disgusting’, would have been the condemnation from the newspapers that now condemn them for not publishing it, in spite of never running stories about him themselves.

In the case of McAlpine, the BBC reported allegations without naming the alleged offender, responding to the general public frenzy for anyone who might possibly have ever done, or been accused of, anything to be named and shamed. The internet did the rest. How does this differ to the wave of super injunctions we were told were stifling the press and protecting the guilty last year? The only difference is that the allegation turned out to be misplaced. Is that enough to justify the wholesale witch hunt and seeming desire for destruction of the BBC that is going on now?

Okay we expect the BBC to have higher journalistic standards than tabloid newspapers, but it’s still worth noting that allegations and retractions have been going on for years and normally they are settled with compensation and apologies, not wholesale resignations, unless they achieve the same scale and critical mass as the phone hacking scandal, which this one doesn’t.

Of course it’s distressing for McAlpine to be named, but various other celebrities have been accused, arrested, and even prosecuted, in relation to underage sex or rape allegations that have turned out to be false. The law and the press have not afforded them anonymity. One or two bad journalistic decisions do not constitute a major crisis and should not be allowed to bring down a great broadcaster, but that’s what it seems the media are hell bent on doing. In the meantime, the genuine victims of child abuse in the Welsh care home are forgotten and the caution that lead to the Savile story being shelved last year may re-appear just as quickly as it went, with obvious consequences for other famous perpetrators and their victims.

It’s time for some perspective. Large sections of the public got caught in a shameful moment of voyeuristic desire, insanely excited by the imminent naming of famous paedophiles. That desire lead to an ill-advised decision to jump the gun, and now the people who caused them to make that decision, by stoking the desire, deny all responsibility and turn on the organisation that made the decision, without considering how easily it could have been them in the firing line instead. It’s time to move on from Beeb bashing and get back to real stories and sensible behaviour.

Great Expectations

Ed Milliband almost let me down this week. The reason for this had nothing to do with the contents of his speech, but everything to do with the fact that it seemed to come as a surprise to every journalist and political commentator wheeled out to talk about it afterwards.

Until his speech I’d been getting wound up to the point of blogging about how nothing in politics comes as a surprise any more. Every speech, be it to a conference or Parliament, is preceeded by a news story beginning with the words ‘in a speech today x is expected to say...’

If you haven’t noticed this just google the words ‘expected to say that’and over several pages you’ll find a dazzling array of examples including‘Danny Alexander is expected to say “Fair taxes in tough times means everyone playing by the same rule book,’ ‘ Yvette Cooper is expected to say: "Look at the Libor scandal that emerged this summer. It is a multibillion pound fraud,’ and ‘George Osborne is expected to say that he’s never ate a pasty in his life, but did once have a sausage roll and understands the dietary issues that face the working class.’

All of a sudden, Milliband appeared to have bucked the trend, and I lost the chance to moan, but then I came across this on the ITN website “In a highly personal keynote speech to the Labour conference, Mr Miliband will draw on his own memories of attending a comprehensive school in north London, and speak of classmates failed by the education system because they were not suited to academic exams and university.” Normal service was resumed.

Why this irritates me so much is that it’s another example of a world where people are so impatient that they can’t wait for an event itself, and everything has to be trailed in advance. For example, unlike any other person ever to sing a Bond theme, Adele cannot wait until the official announcement, she has to tweet about it to a world who also don’t want to wait four days till something that we all knew anyway is finally made public. Newspapers do the same. The Guardian a few weeks ago had at least two ‘stories’ that were little more than teasers for interviews elsewhere in the paper. One was with JK Rowling, and the other was, once again, Danny Alexander. Is there such a lack of real stories that papers have to make quotes from their own interviews into separate articles? Just take some pages out rather than repeat the same thing twice.

This trend for sneak previews began with TV, and the same nervous executives with attention deficit disorders that decided we couldn’t be trusted to tune in on two seperate weeks for a mini-series, we had to watch on consecutive nights in case we lost all interest and forgot about it. They then decided that even if a programme was on the next night, we might still not tune in if we didn’t have some idea about what was coming, and as a result they gave us the twenty-second glimpse of the next episode that is meant to give us a scene that we’ll be eagerly waiting for, but actually destroys any of the suspense by showing us the hero will still be alive, and the villain will strike again.

I can only assume that political advisers believe they have to satisfy the same level of impatience and imagined anticipation when it comes to political speeches, but political conferences are not rock gigs. Do they imagine a whole conference, or nation, full of people sitting through a 90 minute long speech waiting for the words ‘Look at the Libor scandal’ to emerge, just as they would wait for the opening bars of Mr Brightside to tell them their favourite song is on the way at a Killers gig, or for the lights to focus on the guitarist at a rock gig to tell them this is the long solo and it’s time to go to the bar?

It doesn’t happen, and, with the exception of the power and style of delivery that Milliband managed on Tuesday, it just means there are no real surprises coming from the party conferences or any other political speech. Maybe it’s ‘focus group’ politics taken to its logical end with every announcement tested in advance for consumer satisfaction, so that any unpopular ones can be quickly replaced with a sanitised family-friendly ending. I seem to remember that this was what happened with David Cameron at last year’s Tory party conference, where a controversial part of his speech was trailed and quickly altered after it was clear that it was not popular. I tried to google this to find out what the announcement was, but googling ‘David Cameron u-turn announcement’ produced more results than ‘expected to say that,’ and discovering this was where I decided to end this post.

In my next post, I’m expected to say a lot more rubbish about anything that is getting on my nerves. Bet that’s got your attention.

Naked Royals here!

What do London buses and nude Royals have in common? You get none for ages and then two come along at once. Less than a month after Prince Harry was caught letting his hair and his pants down in Las Vegas, Kate Middleton is now the talk of the internet simply for daring to sunbathe topless, and for not realising someone might take photos of it. Fortunes are being made in legal fees, and outrage at this gross invasion of privacy is helping our newspapers get over the disappointment of not being able to print the photos.

It's worth looking back at The Sun's justification for publishing the Harry photos, both to see whether it would justify publishing the Kate photos and also because it said so much about the Sun and its readers. They claimed there was a "clear public interest in publication" and it was important its readers were fully informed about a "legitimate public debate about a man who is third in line to the throne." Do you need to show the photos in order to do this? Maybe this proves that 'Sun readers' is an oxymoron, and all they can actually do is look at pictures? A legitimate public debate is an exchange of words, theories and arguments, not pictures. If you need to see the picture to help you understand the debate, the chances are your contribution to it is not going to be defining.

Also, when did the Sun keep its readers fully informed about anything? This is the paper that ran the headline 'Gotcha' during the Falklands War. It's the paper that employed Richard Littlejohn without a right of reply from a sensible person. And, as we were reminded last week, it's the paper that ran the headlines about Liverpool supporters after Hillsborough.  To now claim it believes its important to keep its readers fully informed is to reject almost its entire history and ethos, but then double standards have always been a key part of these.

Joining the Sun in claiming that there was "clear public interest in publication" was Louise Mensch, who claimed the interest was "demonstrable" as well as clear, as if to suggest she had some empirical research to prove the claim. What Mensch and the Sun failed to realise was that 'what the public are interested in' and 'what is in the interests of the public' are not one and the same thing. I'm not saying this as some high-minded statement, I'm simply making the point that most of the things that interest us are not things that will protect us from tyrannical abuse, dictatorship, and the erosion of fundamental human rights - things that are in the public interest. The things the public are interested in include football, reality shows, and famous people in embarrassing situations preferably involving sex or at least some form of public nudity.

On that basis, there is a clear and demonstrable interest in pictures of Kate Middleton Windsor, or whatever she's called, without her top on, and its probably at least as strong as the interest in the Harry pics. Because I'm not aware of any poll asking 'which member of the Royal Family would you most like to see without any clothes on' I can't definitively say that the interest in naked Kate is higher than the interest in naked Harry, but I'm guessing that it would be. So, are there double standards if no-one is calling for publication of the Kate photos? The counter argument may be that there is not a legitimate debate about her behaviour, let alone a debate that Sun readers have to be informed about, but that only works if you buy into the theory that this was the reason Sun readers wanted to see the Harry pictures, rather than because they were pictures of a Royal with his clothes off.

Taking away the legitimate debate argument, what are we left with? The answer is the difference in public perception. Kate is seen as a sensible young woman on holiday doing what a lot of other women on holiday do. Prince Harry is seen as a Royal 'comedy-turn', the role that Prince Andrew used to hold, and Princess Margaret held before him. The difference in the nature of the photos is a by-product of this. Harry was acting like other incredibly rich people his age do, and how not so rich people his age would if only they could afford it. This makes him fair game to the press, and Kate is  is not really comprable to him, even if Princess Eugenie sounds as if she might be. Does that mean it isn't double standards, or that it is but with justifiable reasons? Maybe we just can't compare the two, and instead should look beyond the immediate Royal Family, although not all that far beyond them, to see whether Kate is being given preferential treatment. 

Here's the decider - Any newspaper or other media organisation criticising the taking and publication of the photos should ask themselves what would they have done if the photo was of Pippa Middleton? My guess is most of them would have published it, and they are giving Kate Middleton a protection and status they would not give anyone else. The well established principles of the nude photos and sex tapes industry appear to be that the more famous or wealthy you are, and the more embarrasing or intimate the evidence is, the more interest the public will have in seeing it. There should not be a Royal exclusion clause from this, and there should be no difference between these photos and any other sneakily taken topless photo of a famous woman. Whether that means they should be published or they should be banned and the photographer charged with a criminal offence is a different issue, but common standards should apply.  Meanwhile to anyone who was stumbled on this page while google searching for nude royal pictures, all I can say is if you have made it this far down, well done, but please note that just because Kate might now be a member of the royal family, it doesn't mean to say she's going to look any better than a lot of the other nude pictures you can find just as easily without ending up clicking on blogs like this by mistake.