Imagine a general election campaign where a political party can interview itself on TV every day. It’s coming soon courtesy of Ofcom.

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Ofcom have published more than 100 pages of research and new guidance about their rules on ‘due impartiality’ which will probably affect GB News the most. Are we any wiser about the impact on the forthcoming general election campaign?

1. What’s the bottom line?

Last month I wrote an article for the Guardian with a former colleague at Ofcom, Chris Banatvala. We asked three questions, now we have enough information from Ofcom on their current policies to be able to answer our own questions.  

Q Is Ofcom going to allow senior party officials to present election programmes as long as they are not actual candidates? 

A Yes. Under Ofcom’s current interpretation of their rules the Honorary President of the Reform UK Party, Nigel Farage, who is also a director and co-owner of the party, will be able to present his weeknight prime time programme on GB News unless he stands as a candidate.  He will be able to do this throughout the election campaign – even though Reform UK says it will stand around 600 candidates

Q Could a channel host party loyalists from only one side, delivering nightly unchallenged polemics on each day’s campaign news? 

A. Yes unless they are candidates. And party officials, assembly members and political activists will all be allowed to interview representatives of their own party every day of the campaign. Ofcom would probably challenge the word ‘unchallenged’ but the truth is that day after day on GB News contentious statements are made and not challenged and there is little regulatory follow-up.

Q. Will channels with poor compliance records and fewer viewers than the public service broadcasters be given greater flexibility in achieving “due impartiality” on the basis of what Ofcom calls “audience expectations”?

A.The suggestion that Ofcom was operating this two-tier system came from none other than the CEO of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, when she told an event in Oxford ‘the standard for someone like the BBC, which reaches still 70 per cent of the TV viewing audience, [for] the news is a different one from that of a channel that has an audience of maybe four or five per cent of the viewing public. We expect different things. And I think that’s appropriate.”

When challenged before a potential legal action by Professor Julian Petley and the Good Law Practice, Ofcom now say that these were ‘two brief remarks made in the context of a live Q&A interview’ and that the comments ‘were clearly not intended to be, and should not be taken as, an unpublished policy position of Ofcom’. I think that’s Ofcom code for ‘the CEO mis-spoke’.

2. What does the audience research show ?

Ofcom say ‘the report captures a wide range of views but, overall, the audience feedback supports the broad design of existing due impartiality rules under the Broadcasting Code’. Cynics would suggest that’s exactly what the research was designed to do so let’s examine one issue in detail.

Under Ofcom’s current interpretation of the rules politicians cannot present news programmes but they can present ‘current affairs’. As I have pointed out before the distinction between these two genres was not set out in the law that created Ofcom, the regulations Ofcom enforce or the guidance it has provided to broadcasters. It only existed in a blog by an executive.  Now Ofcom is taking the opportunity provided by the research to change the guidance to codify the blog. But is that what the audience research really shows?

When the research project was first commissioned the Ofcom Chairman, Lord Grade, took the unusual step of predicting what it would discover, telling a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference that he was sure the audience would know the difference between news and current affairs.

The evidence from ’29 focus groups with 157 participants from range of backgrounds, reflecting different political leanings and media consumption habits from all across the UK’ tells a different story. This being ‘qualitative’ not ‘quantitative’ the research company Ipsos does not provide numbers of who thinks what but instead attempts to summarise what the groups said. 

Two of Ipsos’s headline points are :

‘Participants thought they could easily distinguish between news and current affairs content and name common features of both in principle. However, in practice, the presentation and style of these types of content blurred the line between news and current affairs which confused participants particularly when a programme contained both’.

Dig deeper and you find the audience was even more confused. Four of the key characteristics they associated with news programmes but not current affairs : ’studio backdrop / presenter siting behind a desk / rolling banner /ticker’ are all prominent parts of Nigel Farage’s programme which he is only allowed to present because Ofcom deems it ‘current affairs’. 

A further irony is that two of the characteristics they associate with news, rolling banners and tickers, don’t actually appear in news programmes such as the BBC’s Six O’Clock News and ITV’s News at Ten. 

This was an especially disappointing result for Ofcom when you consider that the ‘stimulus materials’, the video clips shown to the focus groups, did not include any ‘hybrid’ programmes such as BBC Radio Four ‘Today’, Channel Four News, BBC Newsnight and rolling news sections of Sky News which all have elements of both genres. Such clips would have left the focus groups even more confused since most of the people who make them are not sure themselves if they are news or current affairs or both. Ofcom itself also seems confused. Under its definition these hybrid programmes are probably both news and current affairs. But it always seems to investigate them as news. 

So if the evidence is that viewers think they know the difference but actually don’t, what do they think of the principle of politicians presenting ‘current affairs’ programmes?  

Ipsos is absolutely clear; 

‘The most prevalent opinion held among participants was feeling uncomfortable with politicians presenting current affairs content’.

The raw material includes quotes such as 

‘I just don’t think politicians should be doing all these current affairs programmes, or not as many. Female, South England, 55+’.

‘It undermines the topic they’re presenting or discussing. To be on the safe side, stick with presenters who aren’t associated with politics in any way.” Female, Midlands, 35-54.’ 

But do the viewers think the rules should allow politicians to present these programmes? 

Ipsos says ‘not everyone in this group thought they should be prevented from doing so’. 

Should we be surprised by that when we read that 11 of the 29 groups ‘were conducted with audiences of channels where politicians have been presenting current affairs programmes more regularly’. You might well expect that ‘not everyone’ in these groups would like to stop the programmes they watch. The real question is was there an overall majority of people who thought that politicians shouldn’t present current affairs programmes. Ipsos would know this but we aren’t told.

Instead Ipsos concludes:

‘Across groups there was common concern about politicians presenting current affairs content, but this did not equate to a consensus on preventing them from presenting such content’.

Ofcom go one step further in their press release : 

‘People expressed a range of views about politicians presenting current affairs programmes, but although there were concerns, there’s no clear consensus for an outright ban’. 

So ‘a prevalent view’ among viewers that they are ‘feeling uncomfortable’ has been diluted to ‘a range of views’

The final twist comes when an Ofcom executive, Cristina Nicolotti Squires, a former ITN colleague, appears on Radio 4’s Media Show and announces :  

‘When it came to current affairs they didn’t particularly like politicians presenting it but they didn’t want it banned’.

Now ‘not everybody’ agreed to a ban has been strengthened to ‘they didn’t want it banned’. 

Some evidence base.

3.What subjects weren’t the focus groups asked about?

I can’t find any mention of any groups being asked what they thought of the fact that the politicians who present on GB News all come from the same side of the political divide. 

Nor, it seems, were they asked what they would consider to be a reasonable proportion of a programme that should be given to views which are an alternative to those of the politicians who gave the opening monologue. 

Perhaps Ofcom didn’t want to know the answer.

My colleague, Chris Banatvala adds this important final point : ‘when all is said and done, this qualitative research shows ‘Across groups there was common concern about politicians presenting current affairs content‘. Surely that is the beginning of the debate and not, as Ofcom seems to imply, the end’. 

Where does the Ofcom-GB News row go from here?

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The five ‘guilty’ verdicts by Ofcom against GB News followed by the broadcaster’s angry response suggest there could be an escalating battle between the two sides over the issue of whether politicians, especially MPs, can present political programmes. I doubt it but there could be a bigger, wider and even more important battle ahead.

The creation of GB News has crystallised two separate but sometimes connected issues:

  1. What programmes are serving politicians, especially current MPs, allowed to present on TV ?
  2. When presenters, be they politicians or anybody else, express strong opinions on topical matters how is due impartiality achieved?

Issue 1:What programmes are serving politicians, especially current MPs, allowed to present on TV? 

Nothing in the current law, Ofcom Code or Guidance sets out what a serving politician can present, only what they can’t:

‘Rule 5.3: No politician may be used as a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programmes unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified. In that case, the political allegiance of that person must be made clear to the audience’.

So what is a news programme that a politician can’t present?

The Code itself doesn’t define a news programme but the guidance has this significant section:

‘1.8 In terms of this section of the Code (i.e. the requirement for ‘due impartiality’ and ‘due accuracy’), news in whatever form would include news bulletins, news flashes and daily news magazine programmes’.

One thing is clear : the authors of the guidance intended that the definition of a news programme should cover more than just a news bulletin. ‘News in whatever form’ seems pretty clear. But soon after GB News started inviting politicians from the right – but not the centre or the left – to present daily programmes about the political news of the day Kevin Bakhurst, then the senior Ofcom executive in charge of content regulation, published a blog justifying the practice.

He produced a definition of a news programme which restricted it to a news bulletin. By doing so he argued that the politicians on GB News were not presenting ‘news programmes’ but what he called ‘current affairs’. The term ‘current affairs’ does not appear anywhere in the impartiality sections of the Communications Act, the Ofcom Code on Impartiality or the Ofcom guidance. This was, in effect, Kevin’s Law, there was never a consultation or debate about it. Ofcom now relies upon what was in his blog (he has since left Ofcom) to support its judgements.

The recent Ofcom judgements against GB News show the confusion this has created. When Jacob Rees-Mogg delivers his Moggolgue on that day’s political news, much of which goes unchallenged in the programme, he is apparently a ‘current affairs’ presenter but the moment he mentions breaking news he has been transformed into a ‘news presenter’ which, of course, he’s not allowed to be. Hope you are still with me. The obvious solution is not too difficult, every time news breaks inside these programmes the presenter should hand over to the newsroom presenter. That’s if GB News wants a solution rather than escalate the issue for its own reasons.

But none of this solves the bigger problem as we approach the local and General Elections, should politicians be allowed to present programmes about that day’s political news whether or not you call them News or Current affairs.

The simple and best solution: politicians should not be allowed to present programmes which report and debate the controversial issues of the day especially political news unless there are exceptional circumstances. That’s what we thought the rules said so why not return to that.

Which takes us onto …

Issue 2; When presenters, be they politicians or anybody else, express strong opinions on topical matters how is due impartiality achieved?

This issue has been overlooked during the row about politician presenters but in fact it is equally important .

What the Code currently says:

‘5.9: Presenters and reporters (with the exception of news presenters and reporters in news programmes), presenters of “personal view” or “authored” programmes or items, and chairs of discussion programmes may express their own views on matters of political or industrial controversy or matters relating to current public policy. However, alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented either in the programme, or in a series of programmes taken as a whole. Additionally, presenters must not use the advantage of regular appearances to promote their views in a way that compromises the requirement for due impartiality. Presenter phone-ins must encourage and must not exclude alternative views’.

A number of points arise from this:

  1. The implication of the first part of the first sentence is that news presenters and reporters in news programmes may not express their own views on current controversies or current public policy.
  2. However  presenters of non-news programmes can do so subject to the condition that alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented in the programme or a series of programmes. This is explained in the guidance: 

‘1.48 Broadcasters are free to include ‘issue-led’ presenters in their programming, as long as they maintain due impartiality as appropriate. In clearly signalled ‘personal view’ programmes, many in the audience are comfortable with adjusting their expectations of due impartiality. However, in order to maintain due impartiality, alternative viewpoints should be adequately represented’.

How adequate does the representation of alternative viewpoints have to be? The Code and Guidance are not prescriptive about this. According to a Guardian article :

‘The broadcast code enforced by Ofcom is clear that opinionated hosts are fine but “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented”. It has not specified what exactly that means, but GB News insiders believe 10-15% representation for differing views is probably adequate’.

Ofcom refuses to put a figure on ‘adequate’ but I believe the figure of 10-15% is an accurate statement of the view inside Ofcom and GB News. Is that a satisfactory figure for Ofcom when the 85-90% of political views expressed on GB News come from the same perspective in every primetime programme every night?

The implications for the General Election campaign are serious. Ofcom has still not grappled with this issue of whether leading supporters of the same side (only actual candidates are disqualified during election campaigns) can appear night after night giving an unchallenged monologue on that day’s news. On Ofcom’s current interpretation of its code it seems this can continue during an election campaign. Surely that has to change. Can we really have election campaign coverage presented by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage where they and like-minded folk are free to say what they like about other parties but Labour and Lib Dem supporters get only 10-15% of the programme airtime between them to respond?

COULD NIGEL FARAGE BE AN ‘IMPARTIAL’ BROADCASTER ON GB NEWS DURING THE GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN?

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Nigel Farage, not normally a man for self-doubt, has admitted it ‘could be tricky’ choosing between party politics and broadcasting during a General Election campaign. Interviewed for  Politico’s ‘Westminster Insider’ podcast ‘Inside GB News’ about his future as the Honorary President of the Reform UK Party he replied:

‘if I want to cover a General Election for GB News under a period of purdah, it could be tricky couldn’t it, could be very difficult and I think ..but I don’t know, I’m thinking very hard about it. But I think it is an either/or choice’

So if Farage stood down from Reform UK and focused on covering the General Election for GB News would he run into trouble with Ofcom rules on GB News which now calls itself ‘Britain’s Election Channel?

To look ahead at what might be possible I first monitored his current output for a fortnight . Farage regularly echoed Reform UK’s attacks on Rishi Sunak’s ‘Brexit failures’ asking viewers ‘why do we believe a word they say’. For the past two nights Farage has quoted from what he calls his ‘Rwanda Files’, apparently leaked documents from the Home Office.  He says that Sunak ‘wilfully deceived the nation’ over ‘Stop the Boats’ when he said in March last year that under the Illegal Immigration Bill  immigrants on boats would be removed from the UK ‘within weeks’. Farage says the Home Office knew that couldn’t happen. After his first attack there was no coverage on his programme of any response from the Prime Minister or the Home Office, the second night saw a one paragraph quote from the Home Office.

The most common ‘Farage’ format is best described as the  “I agree with Nigel’ nights: 

  1. Opening monologue;  a familiar narrative of illegal immigrants and the crimes some have committed, the shortcomings of the Government’s Rwanda Bill and Britain’s ‘exploding population’.
  2. An interview with a GB News correspondent who plays a relatively straight bat on an issue of the day. 
  3. Interviews with experts: these are not the ‘fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’ who David Cameron once said comprised Farage’s UKIP party. They are Daily Telegraph correspondents, former army officers and chaplains to Queen Elizabeth. What they have in common is that they agree with Nigel. Sometimes they tell him that and sometimes he tells them.
  4. Captions summarising the reaction of viewers so far, normally three people who agree with Nigel.   
  5. A second monologue, titled ‘WTF’, in which Farage attacks his usual suspects such as the EU, Prince Harry and ‘senile’ Joe Biden. 

The irony about this format is that the rare occasions when a guest completely disagrees with Farage produces the best television. Labour supporter Scarlett MccGwire refuted his claim that the anger of Muslim voters over Gaza could be the start of ‘sectarian politics’ in Britain and damage Labour. She replied that ‘you are much more dangerous’ for the Conservatives because ‘you are going to make sure they lose the election’.   

During my monitoring  there were fewer interviews with MPs than I expected. Over the period I counted six Conservative MPs being interviewed by Farage, all were Brexiteers, but there were no Labour or Liberal Democrat MPs.  

That kind of imbalance wouldn’t previously have been countenanced by broadcasters or allowed by regulators but the current Ofcom regime have emphasised the freedom which they are currently giving to broadcasters to provide impartiality in their own way.

In the podcast interview Farage emphasised the editorial freedom which he’s been given by GB News. So what could a Farage election campaign programme look like ? 

1. Ofcom say that during election campaigns ‘It is not acceptable for presenters to use their position to encourage and urge voters to support political parties or candidates’. Farage is smart enough to avoid the call to action which got Talk Sport presenter James Whale into trouble with Ofcom during the Mayor of London election in 2008:

‘if people did not vote for Boris Johnson then they had only themselves to blame if “Livingstone gets in for another term”.

2. Ofcom also say ‘Due weight must be given to the coverage of parties and independent candidates during the election period’. GB News could solve this by extending the news bulletin that precedes Farage’s show to include more campaign coverage clips.

3.Since Ofcom seem to have no problem with the ‘I agree with Nigel format’ expect more ‘experts’ who tell Nigel, as one did during my monitoring period, ‘you’re quite right’.

4. The biggest change to the Farage status quo would have to be the selection of guests from political parties: 6-0 to the Tories won’t wash in an election. And Reform will certainly expect a say.

So there’s a possible template, now Farage has to make his ‘either Reform or GB News’ decision: either campaign for Reform and lose friends in the Tory Party by costing them votes or stay on air on GB News building an even bigger profile and preparing for a future Tory leadership election. 

I’VE  READ ALL 10,101 PAGES OF BBC BASHIRGATE EMAILS (SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO) AND WHY 1,737 OF THEM JUST SAY ‘LPP’

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The most prominent initials in the documents released on January 30 are LPP, that’s Legal Professional Privilege. It appears on no fewer than 1,737 of the 10,101 pages, and that’s not including when it is expressed in a longer form as ‘Legal Privilege -s42’ a reference to Section 42 of the Freedom of Information Act which provides confidentiality for advice from lawyer to client.

The BBC has held back from public view hundreds of pages of internal emails covering crucial moments in its handling of the so-called ‘Bashirgate’ affair. They have long said that they would withhold entirely approximately 300 emails for legal reasons. I’ve no way of confirming that that’s the number they’ve withheld but reading through the files you encounter page after page of LPP.

This tactic is a very big bet by the BBC. Until now it has not had to explain these redactions to anybody but In the next stage of the legal process, which is scheduled to come to a head in March or April, it will have to provide justifications to a judge. If he disagrees with their rationale the hidden emails may become public.  The most persistent campaigner for transparency, Andy Webb of Blink Films, will certainly be pressing for that. 

One crucial test will be whether the redacted communications were made for what the Information Commissioner’s Office calls ‘the dominant (main) purpose of seeking or giving legal advice’. So, for example, does a group email between BBC executives count as ‘legal advice’ because one of the participants was an in-house lawyer. 

As a result of all the redactions it is impossible to come to any firm conclusion on the BBC’s handling of the release in 2020 of key 1995 and 1996 documents about Martin Bashir’s interview with Princess Diana. The three months covered in 2020 focus on the autumn when 3 rival broadcasters, ITV, Channel Four and Five , prepared programmes for the 25th anniversary of the interview.  The BBC which in 2007 had said it didn’t have any documents and then said in June 2020 that it did but wouldn’t release them, now decided to release some. But beyond that it went from ‘the BBC does not intend to take any further action on events which happened 25 years ago’ to appointing a former judge, Lord Dyson, whose report was damning about Martin Bashir’s conduct back in 1995. Quite a policy shift. So if, as most people now agree, there was a cover-up back in 1996, was there an attempted cover-up in 2020 which began with ‘tell them nothing’ but under pressure ended with ‘let a Judge find out’? 

We can’t be sure because of the withheld documents, there is certainly no firm evidence of it so far.The only hint of any ‘smoking gun’ is in an email from a BBC solicitor to a former BBC executive alerting him on the 19th October 2020  that documents in which his name is mentioned are about to be released that day. The key sentence is ‘we are not releasing all of the internal investigations documents at this present time’ which implies the BBC knew there were documents which would not be released.

The other key takeaway after my reading of the ten thousand:

In 1996 BBC executive Anne Sloman wrote an internal note after reviewing how Martin Bashir had got his exclusive interview with Princess Diana. She concluded: ‘The Diana story is probably now dead, unless Spencer talks. There’s no indication that he will’. 

25 years later BBC bosses clearly didn’t heed that warning. They failed to pick up the warning signs that Princess Diana’s brother was going to talk and very loudly at that, and the Daily Mail would help. 

On 21st October 2020 film-maker Andy Webb, commissioned by Channel Four, emailed Charlotte Morgan in the BBC Press Office. He set out the BBC’s traditional account of what happened back in 1995 and went on: 

‘We have recently spoken with someone intimately connected with these events and have received a different account. Our information is that at an 11.30 am meeting at Althorp on August 31 1995 Earl Spencer was told by Mr Bashir that he, Bashir, had a contact within MI5 who had important information regarding surveillance of Princess Diana’. 

Webb set out a series of facts as revealed to him by ‘our source’. He never named the source but it must have been obvious to any reader that these details could only have originated from Earl Spencer. Webb ended by asking: ‘ Given the many conflicting versions of what really took place, and as you have pointed out, the historic importance of the Panorama broadcast, has the BBC given any consideration to a full independent inquiry to determine what actually happened? ‘

In the BBC Press Office Charlotte Morgan seemed to understand the implications. She circulated Webb’s email to 8 top BBC people including Phil Harrold, Chief of Staff to DG Tim Davie. Harrold seems to have been the ‘go to’ person in the email chains. She added a covering note:

‘ What timing. Sorry to disturb your evening’s viewing. Channel 4 are not letting this rest. They have a ‘source’ (who seems very well connected to Earl Spencer), challenging our timeline and calling for a ‘full independent inquiry’. I mean what can we say beyond that a quarter of a century on, we can only go on contemporaneous BBC records, as we made clear to them previously, and with the testimony of the Princess herself, in the form of her note? Clearly we need to discuss. Charlotte’. Phil Harrold replied: ‘No worries,I’ll arrange a call for tomorrow’ .

There are no released emails about what was said and decided on that call or what was discussed with Tim Davie, but at 1158 on October 23. Charlotte Morgan emailed Andy Webb ‘‘the BBC does not intend to take any further action on events which happened 25 hears ago’. The request for an independent inquiry was ignored, the BBC was not going to budge. 

Later that day, at 15.01, Lord Spencer emailed Tim Davie for the first time setting out his detailed case against Bashir. He concluded: ‘If you agree that something needs to be done, now, then I look forward to hearing from you as to what you might propose. Yours sincerely, Charles Spencer’.

An email thread between the two men began in which over the coming weeks, step by step, the BBC would have to back down from its ‘do not intend to take any further action’ position and eventually agree to an independent inquiry. 

Towards the end of the correspondence, on 3 November, Phil Harrold circulated a draft of Davie’s proposed next response to Spencer. It contained the line: ‘I am also happy to meet with you, along with senior editorial executives who are close to these issues, to discuss this directly.’

In the eventual email this was watered down to ‘If you would like to put more to us, I would be happy to engage further’. Tim Davie never met Earl Spencer.The BBC must now be reflecting on whether, despite that warning from history, they missed a key opportunity.

This is not the end of the story.

The BBC now has until Tuesday February 13 to explain in detail to the tribunal judge why it has withheld so many emails for legal and other reasons . Andy Webb then has until February 27 to challenge their arguments.

The tribunal has the right to inspect text which has been redacted by the BBC.

Eventually there will be a hearing sometime after March 11.

If any emails are ordered to be released that probably won’t happen until the end of March.

One other legal option is for the BBC to appeal against the tribunal’s finding and take that to a higher court.

There is a lot at stake for the British Broadcasting Corporation.


 

40 YEARS ON FROM THE MINERS STRIKE, MEMORIES OF MY STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH THATCHER’S SECRETIVE ADVISER.

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The battle between Margaret Thatcher’s government and Arthur Scargill’s union is rightly regarded as a turning point in 20th century Britain. So it is no surprise that it has been revisited, reviewed and re-enacted in British TV documentaries and drama.

Having seen most of them and appeared in a few, ’Miners Strike 1984 – the Battle for Britain’ gets my vote as the best yet. This three part series for Channel Four, filmed and mostly directed by Tom Barrow for Swan Films, is being scheduled on Thursdays at 9pm and all the episodes are already available online .

The films focus on ‘three powerful stories’: the divisions in the Derbyshire village of Shirebrook where striking and working miners came to blows, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ and the subsequent attempt to jail miners for ‘riot’ and the story of the businessman David Hart who once told Margaret Thatcher ‘victory is yours and yours alone’ and set out to make it happen for her. As Thatcher’s adviser on the black arts of propaganda he helped organise and fund the working miners committee which successfully campaigned to get striking miners back to work. 

While I was Editor of Channel Four News (C4N) the Miners Strike from 1984-5 was the story that first proved the value of a primetime hour of TV news every weeknight. We sent reporter Jane Corbin to live in Shirebrook and her work is revisited in the first part of the new series. We also sent camera crews to stand alongside the pickets at Orgeave, other news programmes chose to stand behind the police lines.  As for David Hart, the focus of the third part of the series, I met him once in strange circumstances..

In August 1984, five months into the strike, Channel Four News planned a live TV debate between the leaders of the National Coal Board (NCB) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Such encounters were extremely rare but at C4N we had built a reputation for serious coverage of the issues and both sides had a degree of trust in us,  Arthur Scargill was quick to agree to represent the NUM and the NCB put forward their Director of Industrial Relations, Ned Smith, a former miner.  Scargill would be live from Leeds and Smith would be on a live link from NCB HQ in London. The C4N presenter, Peter Sissons, a former ITN Industrial Editor, was an obvious and perfect choice to chair the debate .

There was a lot of media interest in who would come out on top in the debate and the Government helped to brief Ned Smith.  As I went into work on 22nd August 1984 all seemed organised for the big event and I was certainly not prepared for a mid-afternoon call from the NCB Press Office: ‘Stewart, I think you’d better come round to the Coal Board. I can’t say any more at the moment’.

As I arrived at the NCB I caught sight of Ned Smith leaving the building, and from his body language it looked as if he was in a huff. I was told he was getting a train home. Not exactly what I was expecting a few hours before the biggest TV event of the strike so far. My assumption was that the live debate was off for some reason but surely the Coal Board wouldn’t just pull out at the last minute handing a PR victory to Scargill.  Wondering around the NCB offices half-hoping that someone might just turn up to appear live, I discovered that the Coal Board would be represented by none other than the Chairman himself, Sir Ian MacGregor. “I will do it myself” he told me.

A Scot by birth, a U.S citizen by adoption, an industrialist toughened by confrontations with American unions he had been recruited to sort out British Steel  and then assigned by Margaret Thatcher to confront coal. 

Half of me was delighted, C4N would pull off a real scoop,  MacGregor and Scargill exclusively together live. The other half of me was worried, a few weeks before I had made a film with MacGregor to present his view on the dispute. At the same time a young producer called Michael Crick produced a film with Scargill. It was no contest, Scargill was a much better performer than MacGregor who seemed to have trouble reading a script. I wondered if he was dyslexic.

As we approached transmission at 7pm I discovered that earlier that day there’d been a mighty row between MacGregor and Smith with multiple changes of mind about who would appear for the Coal Board. Now the hard reality was that we were about to go on the air with an inexperienced and unprepared TV debater on one side. No wonder Scargill seemed pleased when told of the change of opponent. But as MacGregor and I walked into the makeshift studio at the NCB, I realised the Chairman was not going to be without a bit of help.

For there stood a man I had never met before, who was never introduced, a mustachioed, balding figure clutching a set of cue cards. I later discovered he was David Hart, an adviser to both MacGregor and Thatcher. In the short time he had to prepare the Chairman Hart had hand-written phrases on his cue cards for MacGregor to read out  Hart himself said nothing, he just stood off camera shuffling his home made cue cards.

Once Sissons began the questioning MacGregor, sweaty top lip glistening under the TV lights , would sometimes look to the side of the camera to read what Hart wanted him to say but at other times was confident enough to fly solo. It was never in doubt that Scargill would navigate himself and be more fluent and so it turned out. Both men began each answer strongly but then got lost in the details, it was MacGregor who got most lost. The exchanges made it clear just how much they disliked each other.

To wrap up the debate Peter Sissons observed that the general public would conclude that these two men had no common ground whatsoever and would ask ‘what are we to make of it?’. Neither respondent had a convincing answer. 

The encounter made news for the fact that it had happened at all rather than what anybody said. It proved there was no way to bridge the gap other than for one side to eventually knock out the other. Seven months later as more and more of the striking miners became working miners the NUM gave up and went back to work. David Hart’s work was done, Margaret Thatcher had her victory.

Extracts from the debate are available to view on the Getty Images news archive website gettyimages.co.uk. To see the first extract type in 1447914031 and for the second extract type in 1447914076

DID THE BBC ‘CHOP UP’ THE CULTURE SECRETARY OR JUST MISS THE STORY?

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It was an unusual comment for a Culture Secretary to make even if it was ‘just said in passing’.

It came during an interview by Amol Rajan with Lucy Frazer MP on Radio Four’s Today programme at 07.33 on 22nd January. The peg was her announcement that morning that as part of the mid-term review of the BBC’s Charter, Ofcom would be given powers to regulate BBC content online..

Answering a question which was actually about the impartiality or otherwise of the GB News channel, Ms Frazer pivoted to say that the BBC had covered her policy statement ‘in different ways so far that morning’. Challenged by him to clarify what she meant she said  ‘i just happened to notice, which I just said in passing, the way it has been chopped up during the course of the morning, has sometimes put the BBC’s perspective forward, sometimes put the  Government’s perspective forward, I just thought that was an interesting remark’.

‘Fascinating’ replied Rajan before ending the interview.

Listening back to the hour and a half of the Today programme which preceded the interview I could find nothing which amounted to ‘chopping up’ her statement other than the journalistic craft of summarising long documents in an accessible way.

So in Today’s news bulletin at 0600, the news summary at 0630 and the Culture correspondent’s report in the 0700 bulletin there were references to the DCMS statement about extending  Ofcom’s powers of regulation to include BBC online content and also the BBC’s response.  I could see no bias in the way this was presented. 

What was more noticeable about the BBC coverage that morning was the contrast with its counterparts on ITV  and Sky News. 

In an article in the Daily Telegraph to accompany her announcement, the Culture Secretary wrote: ‘audience perception that the BBC is not sufficiency impartial is an ongoing issue and it is clear more can be done’.

This line was picked up in the review of the papers at 06.09 but not in any of the news bulletins or, most importantly, with Ms Frazer in the interview. Instead Amol Rajan spent much of the interview asking about the future of the licence fe, a subject not covered in the Government’s announcement. Conscious of this, half way through the interview the Culture Secretary pivoted to the issues raised in  her statement.But still Rajan did not pick up on her comments in the Telegraph.

By contrast Kay Burley on Sky News asked Ms Frazer if she shared the view, alleged to be held by viewers, that the BBC was not sufficiently impartial. Ms Frazer replied: “I think that on occasions it has been biased.

“We have seen recently it’s had to apologise for its own reporting in relation to the attack on the hospital in Gaza”.

When asked for evidence of bias and whether the BBC’s story was biased or a mistake, Ms Frazer struggled. “The evidence of bias is what audiences believe is the content of the BBC”. She believed perception was evidence.

There was a similar exchange with Susannah Reid on ITV Good Morning Britain.

Who did the first TV coverage of the Post Office scandal?

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SECOND THOUGHTS BLOG 9/1/24

ITV is quite rightly getting credit for waking a wider world up to the Post Office scandal with the drama ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’. Now I discover that an ITV regional news bulletin in the South of England provided the first TV coverage of the problems sub- postmasters were having as a result of the Horizon computer system.

On February 2nd 2008 Meridian News reported on what 15 years later would turn out to be one of the most memorable episodes in the drama:

‘A postmistress who admitted fraud has walked free from court – after villagers came to her rescue. Jo Hamilton had called a meeting to explain to neighbours in South Warnborough near Basingstoke why cash had gone missing from their post office. She said couldn’t cope with the computer system. Well, the village soon rallied round, and raised thousands of pounds to help pay the money back’.

It appears the next broadcast was in September 2009 when S4C covered the Post Office scandal on a series called ‘Taro Naw’. The programme reported on the case of a jailed Anglesey sub-postmaster and wondered whether there were more cases ‘across Britain’. It is now available again on iplayer here with English subtitles here

The first BBC coverage I can find was three years later also in regional programming in the South of England, on Tuesday 7 February 2011. 

At 7.05 a.m BBC Radio Surrey Breakfast transmitted:

BBC Surrey Jingle: “BBC Surrey. With Nick Wallis.”

Good morning. You’re about to hear a special investigation by BBC Surrey Breakfast. In November last year, a listener called Davinder came to me in a bad way. His wife Seema, who was a Postmistress in West Byfleet, had been sent to Bronzefield Prison in Ashford for stealing more than £70,000 from her own Post Office. In a very emotional phone call, Davinder told me his wife had never taken a penny from the business, but had fallen foul of a problem with the Post Office’s computerised accounting system.’ 

That evening BBC 1 South broadcast an investigation by the same journalist, Nick Wallis, in the Inside Out regional TV documentary strand. The billing was: 

‘A special investigation by the Inside Out South team into the sub-postmasters who have fallen foul of the Post Office’s Horizon computer system’. 

You might think that in the light of the extraordinary interest now created by the ITV drama the BBC might now consider putting the regional Inside Out report back on the i-player. After all it is available on youtube.

But raising its profile on iplayer might risk reminding viewers that the Inside Out strand was scrapped amidst controversy in 2022. 

The Press Gazette reported then:

‘The BBC’s director of policy has said the refresh of its regional current affairs programming which is resulting in the cancellation of Inside Out is “long overdue”.Clare Sumner told Ofcom that Inside Out, which was cancelled with the loss of 29 jobs this year as part of plans to save £25m across BBC England by March 2022, was no longer making the same impact it did when it launched almost 20 years ago.Its audience has been in decline for ten years, she said’.

ITV’s Meridian News in the South of England followed up their original coverage in December 2014. They reported that ‘now postmasters and postmistresses across the South have gained the support of their local MPs’. Former postmistress Jo Hamilton and local MP James Arbuthnot were interviewed.

A few years after the 2011 BBC regional broadcasts Nick Wallis got network showings for reports he made for The One Show on BBC 1 in 2014 and a special UK wide Inside Out in January 2015. Panorama picked up the network current affairs baton with John Sweeney’s ‘Trouble at the Post Office’  in August 2015 and Nick Wallis’s own Panorama in 2020. The sub-postmasters told their story in another Panorama ‘The Post Office Scandal’ in 2022. Wallis was also commissioned to present a radio/podcast series for BBC Radio 4 last year, he was an adviser to the ITV drama and has been freelancing on different news outlets since the ITV drama began. 

Next up for Nick Wallis; more than 20 dates, starting at the Marine Theatre,Lyme Regis on 23 March, for his one man show ‘Post Office Scandal -the Inside Story’ . Some real life versions of the characters you saw in the drama have agreed to answer questions, as has what Wallis calls ‘a major anonymous source in my book’.

SECOND THOUGHTS 22/12/2023

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THE BBC’S ‘BASHIRGATE’ COUNTDOWN CLOCK IS TICKING.

At the BBC the countdown is underway to a crucial moment in so-called ‘Bashirgate’, one that goes to the heart of how the current BBC Executive have managed recent developments in the affair. The tribunal which hears contested Freedom of Information cases has set a deadline, believed to be January 24th, for the BBC to release documents to journalist Andy Webb.  Last month the tribunal strongly criticised the BBC  for failing to release a large number of emails relating to Martin Bashir’s 1995 interview with Princess Diana on Panorama. It said the corporation had been “inconsistent, erroneous and unreliable”. Andy Webb wants the release of over 3,000 internal BBC emails sent between September and November 2020 . This period includes the dates between Lord Spencer first asking the BBC for an independent inquiry into the events of 1995, the BBC’s initial reluctance and their eventual decision to agree to what became Lord Dyson’s inquiry.

The BBC can only withhold certain documents if it can convince the tribunal in the remaining days that it has the legal right to do so. A release of key documents would make it possible to compare this internal evidence with the public account given by the Director-General Tim Davie in an interview on the Today programme. A transcript is in my timeline of the Bashir affair.

Last weekend it became clear the BBC is facing further potential jeopardy, that it may have committed a criminal breach of the Freedom of Information Act. A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office said that following a complaint by Mr Webb under section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act the “case has been referred to the criminal investigations team who are currently reviewing the material provided”. Section 77 says ‘any person to whom this subsection applies is guilty of an offence if he alters, defaces, blocks, erases, destroys or conceals any record held by the public authority’.

This review would be a first step before any more detailed inquiry by the criminal investigations team. Investigation is a most unusual step, there has only been one previous conviction for the offence which carries an unlimited fine.

CAN BROADCASTERS CAMPAIGN?

As a regular critic of Ofcom for what I believe is its failure to enforce the impartiality rules on GB News,  I now believe it has gone too far the other way.

Let me explain. Cast your mind back to the General Election election campaign of 2017, that’s the one where ‘strong and stable leader’ Theresa May wasn’t as popular as PM as she thought. Throughout the election campaign she had refused to take part in a head-to-head TV debate with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. In the next year, 2018, Sky News launched what it called its ‘Make Debates Happen campaign’. The Head of Sky News was interviewed about it on the air and Sky News started a petition ‘for an independent commission to monitor regular leaders’ debates and make them a permanent election feature.’ Jeremy Corbyn supported it,Theresa May didn’t. I was struck at the time by how unusual it was for a broadcaster to run a public campaign which divided on party lines. Ofcom took no action.

Now Ofcom has decided against GB News after a programme which promoted a ‘GB News- branded campaign called ‘Don’t Kill Cash’. This campaign included a petition which called on the Government to “introduce legislation to protect the status of cash as legal tender’.  GB News had argued that the campaign was ‘not about a matter of political controversy or current public policy’.

The decision will leave all broadcasters, not just GB News wondering whether they stand on ‘campaigns’. At ITN I always tried to avoid the word, my advice was ‘call it an investigation’.

‘DORRIES TELLING TRUTH’ SHOCK.

There appears to be growing momentum behind Alan Rusbridger’s admirable campaign to get a proper response from the BBC to allegations that a board member, Robbie Gibb , tried to interfere in the process leading to the appointment of the Chair of Ofcom, which is of course the BBC’s regulator. The issue was raised by MPs during the hearing to confirm the new BBC Chair but Samir Shah didn’t want to comment on it. This month there was also evidence from a source ‘who worked closely with’ Nadine Dorries when she was DCMS Secretary. It was Ms Dorries who first made the allegation against Gibb in her her book ‘The Plot’. The book has been widely criticised for being less than factual  but this particular allegation has never been denied by anybody. Jake Kanter, a widely respected media correspondent now working for the American website Deadline, reports that the source tells him that Gibb “campaigned” for his preferred candidate to become Ofcom chair. 

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SECOND THOUGHTS 2

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How to conclude the BBC’s Lineker ‘psychodrama’

The more that MPs pressed Samir Shah for his views on Gary Lineker’s social media posts the more it sounded like the Chair-Elect of the BBC didn’t just think the football presenter had broken the rules Samir Shah wanted the system changed less than three months after it was announced.

“We need to find a solution to this”  he told his fourth questioner on Lineker, Clive Efford MP, at the pre-appointment hearing of the Culture Committee. “It has being going on for too long and it may be that the social media guidelines once again need to be looked at to make sure we somehow get this out of the public eye’. Dr Shah wanted to bring an end to what he called a ‘psychodrama’. 

’Don’t criticise the character of individual politicians in the UK’ seems a clear enough piece of BBC guidance to me and I’m not sure changing it would ‘get this out of the public eye’. The real choice is between enforcement and abolition.  The enforcement guidelines say  ‘For contract freelancers/presenters who are found to have breached the guidance there may be consequences including non-renewal or termination of contract’. But the BBC seems determined to avoid what they would see as a ‘running commentary’ on who has and hasn’t broken the rules and what consequences have followed. We still don’t have the BBC Executive’s judgement on the Lineker posts that their next Chair is so clear about. 

I have long thought the direction of travel is towards freedom of expression within the law for presenters other than those in news and current affairs.That solution may be the only way to conclude the psychodrama.

Are the next BBC Chair and the King on opposite sides in a culture war ?

“I’ve never been involved in any political activity at all. I’ve not been a campaigner” Samir Shah told Damian Green MP who took him through a checklist of any potential conflicts of interest.  Samir may not be a ‘campaigner’ but it is fair to call him a ’culture warrior’. He actively supports an organisation which says it is on ‘the most active front in a new culture war’.  The History Matters project was launched by leading centre-right think tank Policy Exchange in 2021 to ‘document the re-writing of history as it happens’ including the removal of certain statues on public display and the renaming of buildings and places. It claims such ‘action is being taken widely and quickly in a way that does not reflect public opinion or growing concern over our treatment of the past’. Samir Shah has been the Vice-Chair and is still a panel member of the project and he has  criticised institutions which are “far too readily acquiescing to noisy activism”. History Matters regularly lists examples of ‘what is happening’ without offering any judgement on them. The October 2023 ‘project compendium’ includes such undeniably woke events as an autumn festival at Kew Gardens ‘to celebrate Queer Nature’ but I was surprised to see Item 14 .’King Charles supports research into the Royal Family’s slavery links. The Palace have given researchers full access to the Royal Archives and the Royal Collection to investigate the family’s historic ties to slavery….The Palace has said that King Charles takes the issue ‘profoundly seriously’. Surely the Chair-Elect of the BBC doesn’t have a problem with that.

Growing demands for action on election misinformation

A leading expert on broadcasting regulation has warned that Ofcom may not have the right skillset to cope with the flow of fake news during the next General Election. Former Ofcom Director of Standards Chris Banatvala told a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference that such was the innovation in technology that there could be fakery which is “so sophisticated that anyone can get fooled, including the regulator itself”. His warning follows a call by the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean ,for a public information campaign before the next election which would warn voters how they could be tricked by AI-powered misinformation.

Chris Banatvala was on a panel on fake news which I chaired which also included Marianna Spring, Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent at the BBC and Chris Morris, CEO of FullFact.The video is recommended for anybody interested in AI and fake news.