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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Iraqi Weapons Reports Bring Venerable BBC To a Defining Moment
With Credibility in Question, Critics Call for Reform
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 30, 2003; Page A10
LONDON, July 28 -- Rod Liddle recalls that when he first interviewed for the job of overseeing "Today," the BBC's flagship news radio program, he half-jokingly set a goal: "I said I wanted a complaint from Alastair Campbell every week." Five years later, Liddle's heirs at the British Broadcasting Corp. have succeeded with a vengeance. Campbell and his boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, who faces the worst crisis of his six years in office, in part because of a "Today" report, are complaining long and loud.
The immediate source of their anger is a "Today" report that drew on remarks by an unnamed senior official to allege that Campbell, who is Blair's chief adviser, and the government knowingly exaggerated claims of Iraq's access to weapons of mass destruction in making their case for war. But their broader accusation is that the BBC -- one of the world's best-known and most widely respected news broadcasters -- has adopted a left-wing, anti-government and anti-American agenda that has colored its coverage of the war.
As a result, "the Beeb," as it is known to all and sundry, faces a defining moment. Critics contend that the flap over Iraq, including the apparent suicide of the government weapons expert identified as the BBC's confidential source, is another reason why it's time to drastically reform the corporation, either by slashing the compulsory fee that TV owners pay to fund most of its operations or by handing over its regulation to a new governing body.
Cabinet ministers and lawmakers have hinted of changes to come. Some inside the organization itself fear it may have gone too far out on a limb in backing a questionable story. Others have come to the BBC's defense, contending that its credibility and independence need to be protected from government interference.
"The BBC occupies a unique position in British life quite unlike any other broadcaster and certainly any newspaper," said Melanie Phillips, a Daily Mail columnist critical of both the BBC and the government. "It has a reputation for trust and believability not only in this country but all over the world. Without that, it's nothing. And that's what the stakes are in this argument."
The Beeb is a unique and somewhat contradictory institution. It is funded and overseen by the government -- the annual fee of about $190 paid by TV owners brought in over $4 billion last year, nearly 80 percent of its income -- yet it fiercely guards its autonomy. It is a "public service" corporation that accepts no commercial ads and is a guardian and promoter of high culture, yet it competes for ratings and scoops with private media companies. Its overseers are well connected in politics, yet they take a certain delight in battling the government of the day.
The broadcaster's current bosses, Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, are a case in point. Dyke donated the equivalent of more than $75,000 to candidates of the ruling Labor Party before becoming BBC director general, and Davies, who is board chairman, is married to one of the chief advisers to Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer and the government's second in command. Yet both men have aggressively entered the fray against Blair and Campbell, standing firmly behind the BBC's reporting and accusing the government of waging a vendetta.
"The real key to the nature of the spat is that Blair and company rightly regarded the BBC as essentially the voice of New Labor and now they feel betrayed," said Norman Tebbitt, the former leader of the Conservative Party who fought his own partisan battles with the BBC during the 1979-90 premiership of Margaret Thatcher. "That's part of the reason for viciousness -- it's like a man discovering his mistress has been unfaithful."
The BBC was founded in 1922 and turned into a state-run corporation five years later when it was granted a royal charter. That charter and an accompanying agreement -- now 32 pages long -- are renewed every 10 years after prolonged negotiation between the government and the corporation.
With its virtual monopoly in the early days of radio -- and later television -- the BBC developed an image as the cultured, high-toned voice of the British establishment: serious, responsible, worthy and dull. Historian Anthony Sampson recalls a time when the BBC News would not report on any issue due to be heard over the next 14 days in Parliament, so as not to sway debate.
But in recent years the corporation has been subjected to fierce competitive pressures, first from privately funded independent broadcasters and now from a host of cable channels. Its audience share has diminished, and it has had to scramble to get a foothold in new technologies such as the Internet and digital television and radio. It has always enjoyed a global role, thanks to the BBC World Service radio network, but it is now developing an overseas following for its satellite television network as well.
The "Today" program, on the air since 1957, has long been one of BBC Radio's most highly visible programs. Government ministers compete for interview slots, even when they expect a grueling interrogation. Yet when Rod Liddle arrived as editor in 1998, he recalled, "Today" seemed to be resting on its laurels -- and losing some of its market share. Liddle decided it was time to liven it up. He hired an aggressive corps of young journalists to look for scoops rather than wait for news to come to them. It was not a concept some of his bosses appreciated.
"We had a group of middle managers who seemed to depend for their jobs on not getting into trouble, and of course the kind of journalism we wanted to do did cause trouble," he recalled. "I would take these stories we'd prepared down a long, dank corridor and these monkeys would tear them up."
Things began to change, Liddle recalled, in the fall of 1999 with the arrival of Dyke as director general. Dyke had once been a program chief for a commercial television network, where he helped boost ratings by introducing a children's hand puppet named Roland Rat. At the BBC, he quickly set out to reduce the ranks of middle management and outside consultants and to create a hipper and more aggressive culture with an emphasis on sports and drama. Some accused him of dumbing down the Beeb. But Liddle says that when it came to news, he quickly began to notice an improvement.
"The mid-level people went away, and the "Today" program started to make a name for breaking its own stories," he recalled. "We began to have real impact. And our ratings began to improve."
One of the newcomers Liddle hired was Andrew Gilligan, now 34, a defense correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. At "Today," Gilligan quickly crossed swords with Campbell, the prime minister's director of communications and a former tabloid journalist.
Not everyone inside the BBC appreciated Gilligan's style. "Rod wanted to stir things up and make waves, and Gilligan was his prot間?" said a former BBC journalist who insisted on anonymity. "But Gilligan developed a reputation for cutting corners. No one ever said he made things up, but he was accused of interpreting and exaggerating information. It's ironic -- he was accused of sexing up a story based on one unreliable source, which is exactly what he accused Campbell of doing." (The BBC said it would not allow Gilligan to answer questions for this article.)
The "Today" program has also been accused of setting a political agenda. Like mainstream media institutions in the United States, the BBC has long been charged with harboring a left-of-center bias against Blair, President Bush and Israel. "Among British intellectuals there's this extraordinary conventional wisdom which regards all American policies with disdain, while Saddam Hussein seems to get off more lightly," said William Shawcross, a British author and a supporter of the war. "There are undoubtedly people at the BBC who share this view."
Critics saw Gilligan as part of this trend. He especially angered Downing Street when he reported from Baghdad that Iraqis were experiencing their "first days of freedom in more fear than they have ever known before" because of a lack of law and order.
For Campbell, the last straw was a May 29 radio report by Gilligan quoting a confidential source as saying the government had "sexed up" a government intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and a follow-up article that Gilligan wrote for the Mail on Sunday newspaper that named Campbell as the official directing the change. Campbell denounced the report as a "lie" in testimony before a House of Commons committee, then appeared on television to repeat the charge.
David Kelly, a government weapons expert, was soon identified as Gilligan's source. Kelly was called to testify before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and said he did not believe he had made some of the remarks Gilligan quoted in his story. Two days later, he committed suicide.
Gilligan and the BBC have stood by his report. But the BBC's leadership erred in characterizing Gilligan's informant as an intelligence source. (Kelly did not work for an intelligence agency, and in the original report Gilligan simply referred to the source as a senior official.) The corporation has yet to explain discrepancies between Gilligan's account and Kelly's.
BBC journalists for the most part have rallied around Gilligan and are heartened by the support they have received from Dyke, Davies and the board of governors. But some have privately expressed reservations, worried that, as one put it, Gilligan may have "over-egged" his report. Two other BBC journalists -- Susan Watts and Gavin Esler -- had spoken to Kelly and had reported stories based on his remarks, but neither said he had mentioned Campbell's alleged role.
Gerald Kaufman, chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Media, Culture and Sport, contended in a letter to Davies that the discrepancies raised "profound questions" about the BBC's credibility. "Those questions are not going to go away," warned Kaufman, who proposes that oversight of the BBC be stripped from the board of governors and given to a new government regulator.
Tessa Jowell, a close ally of Blair and cabinet secretary for culture, warned in the London newspaper the Times last week that, in helping to shape the organization's future, she would "consider very carefully" the findings of an independent government inquiry into Kelly's death. Others contend that threats to the BBC's autonomy are not deserved. "The BBC is far from perfect," said Chris Smith, Jowell's predecessor. "But it's too easy to criticize them for doing the job that all journalists have to do. It's a mistake to allow them to be scapegoated, or to threaten the license fee for political purposes."
One distinguished analyst believes both sides must share the blame. "I believe the 'Today' program has gone too far and does have a bit of a comeuppance due to it," said Anthony Smith, an Oxford media affairs expert who was formerly a BBC-TV news editor. "But everyone involved has got something to apologize to someone else for -- the prime minister, Campbell, the [parliament] committee, the BBC, Gilligan. My prediction is nothing will change because they're all equally guilty."
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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