Tag Archives: Samir Shah

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.

Is the new BBC Chair ‘a friend of the Prime Minister’ and some other Second Thoughts on the week’s media news.

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‘Samir Shah’ ..he’s one of our own’.

The positive response in the media to the appointment of Samir Shah as the Government’s preferred choice as the Chair of the BBC can partly be explained by relief that the job is going to a media professional not a politician past his or her prime, ‘someone in the City’ or a known party donor. On Sky News Breakfast I welcomed Samir’s broadcasting experience and the fact that he wasn’t ’a public supporter of any particular political party’ or a known donor . I also pointed out that this government does not like to appoint to public posts anybody they regard as ‘woke’ and that Samir has ‘non-woke credentials’

So I was struck by Roger Bolton’s views in his latest ‘Beebwatch’ podcast about how ‘my old boss Samir Shah is to become the new chair of the BBC’. He explained that for the last 3 years of him presenting ‘Feedback’ on BBC Radio Four the series was made by Samir Shah’s independent production company, Juniper. Samir Shah had been the Executive Producer but according to Roger Bolton ‘had made virtually no impression on me at all, we rarely if ever had a conversation and his contribution to the editorial content of the programme seemed to me to be minimal. Perhaps I missed something’ .  

The background is that the BBC announced in August 2022 that a new production company and a new presenter were being chosen for Feedback and reported that ‘Listeners have expressed their anger and disappointment’ at the departure’ of a ‘firm favourite’ who was ‘known for being unafraid to firmly hold BBC senior figures to account’.

On his podcast Roger continued; ‘Samir seemed to spend a lot more of his time on his political interests. He is said to be a friend of the  Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who was said to want him to be Chair of the Victoria and Albert Museum…he is well liked in Government circles’. 

I have no other evidence on whether Dr Shah and Mr Sunak are friends.,

Were ITV’s investigations into Philip Schofield ‘considerable enough’? 

Preparing to be interviewed on ITV News on 7th December 2023 about the publication of a summary of the independent report into ITV’s handing of Philip Schofield’s relationship with a runner on This Morning, I noticed something odd.

It is first worth emphasising that what was published was not the report by Jane Mulcahy KC but her summary of her report. She explained that ‘there are a number of aspects of this Review which are highly personal and private to various individuals’ and therefore the report itself is confidential.

At the end of her summary ITV helpfully published the Terms of Reference which they agreed with the KC at the start of her review. 

The first two points are;

1. To determine and set out the steps taken by ITV in 2019 and 2020 to look into the rumours that Phillip Schofield was in a relationship with a member of the Daytime production team (“Person X”).

2. To consider and set out whether these steps were appropriate and adequate in the circumstances, taking into account applicable/relevant policies and procedures in place at the time and having regard to any legal duty of care owed to Person X by ITV.

I have underlined what seem to me to be crucial parts of the Terms of Reference, especially given the allegations by former This Morning presenter Eamonn Holmes that there were ways in which the ITV management could have established the truth much earlier. In particular he alleged that ITV could have checked their transport records to see whether it was true that the runner was collected from Philip Schofield ’s home on Friday mornings.

I then looked at the summary to find Jane Mulcahy’s conclusions on these points. All I can find is:

ITV’s management made considerable efforts to determine the truth about an alleged relationship between PS and PX following on from the publication of a story in The Sun newspaper in early December 2019. However, in the face of the denials of the individuals involved, ITV was unable to uncover the relevant evidence until PS’s admission in late May 2023.

What does not appear in the summary is any further detail of these ‘considerable efforts’. Given her Terms of Reference to ‘set out’ the steps taken by ITV I would have expected a summary list of these efforts, in particular whether at the time of the original rumours ITV did or didn’t check transport records. I would also have expected her judgement about whether ‘ these steps were appropriate and adequate’. There is no such judgement in the summary other than the words ‘considerable efforts’

My own conclusion is that there is no evidence in the summary to indicate whether the KC carried out her full terms of reference. It is possible that the report itself does have more details of ITV’s ‘considerable efforts’ and the KC’s judgment about them but they have not been included in the summary for some reason. If that was the case it could have been explained in the summary.

Before I appeared on ITV News at 1830 and referred to this issue I asked ITV News to raise it with ITV management but I have not heard any response. 

What is the truth on the Government’s broken ‘pledge’ on the license fee?

The BBC World at One news bulletin report on the higher licence fee (7th December 2023) ended ‘It is an increase of  6.7 % which is lower than Ministers had pledged’. That sounded fighting talk so I checked if it was true the Government had broken a pledge.

I found a letter from the then Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries to the BBC in January 2002

‘From the third year of the settlement period (i.e. from 1 April 2024 and for each subsequent year of the period until 31 March 2028), the Licence Fee will then increase annually in line with CPI inflation’.

That seemed to me to imply but not specifically state that the increase would be in line with the annual rate of inflation rather than choosing a particular month’s increase which is what the Government chose to do. But the Government statement openly admits they have changed the rules of the game.

‘in recognition of the ongoing cost of living pressures faced by families, the government has today decided to change how the inflation-linked uplifts to the licence fee are calculated for 2024….The previous methodology for calculating inflation was the averaged annualised October to September CPI figure of 9 per cent. The new methodology for 2024 uses the annual rate of CPI in September 2023 of 6.7 per cent, and is the approach used to calculate uplifts to benefits’.