measures were put in place to reduce executive pay following fierce criticism from the press. Among this executive cadre are around a hundred or so senior managers in editorial policy who on average earn just over £100,000, and the most senior of whom can earn two or three times that.56
Below these senior editorial managers, we see similar patterns of privilege. In 2006, the Sutton Trust examined the educational backgrounds of 100 leading news journalists in the UK, of whom 31 worked at the BBC. It found that 54 per cent were privately educated and a remarkable 45 per cent had attended Oxbridge.57 Educational background is of course an indicator of shared class background. But it is also in itself a profoundly important basis for elite cohesion, forging along with other formative experiences, if not a shared set of ideas, then at least a shared demeanour and set of dispositions. Elitist recruiting practices – which are naturally justified in meritocratic terms, even if they are recognised to create serious problems in terms of legitimacy – thus create subtle forms of institutional and cross-institutional cohesion.
In the case of the BBC, recruitment has also been much more explicitly political. In combination with the strong Oxbridge orientation, there has, since the 1990s especially, been a greater movement of personnel between the BBC and Westminster. Before this – from the 1930s to the 1980s – the Security Service exercised a secret veto power over appointments to thousands of positions in the BBC which were referred to as ‘counter-subversion’ posts. As we will see later, this practice was not concerned with excluding agents of the Soviet Union from the BBC for the purposes of national security. Rather, it was mechanism intended to prevent the employment of persons whose politics MI5 regarded as too radical for admission to public life. Moreover, the practice was not imposed on the BBC by the secret state. It was encouraged by the BBC leadership, who regarded it as a useful mechanism for the maintenance of ‘impartiality’, complementing and protecting other systems of editorial control. Here, once again, we see the classic conflation between ‘objectivity’ and the national interest as defined by the British state.
What are the more mundane mechanisms of editorial control which operate at the BBC? The sociologist Philip Schlesinger describes how BBC journalists see ‘themselves as working in a system which offers them a high measure of autonomy’ and are generally not cognisant of the fact that ‘orientations first defined at the top of the [BBC] hierarchy’ work their way downwards through a ‘chain of editorial command’, becoming ‘part of the taken for granted assumptions of those working in the newsrooms’. He found BBC journalists to be ‘a mass of conformists’ who adopted ‘the model of corporate professionalism provided for them by the BBC by degrees varying from unreflecting acquiescence to the most full-blown commitment’.58 The former BBC executive, Stuart Hood, at around the same time, similarly wrote of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the editor or producer as a ‘programme ethos – a general view of what is fitting and seemly, of what is admissible and not admissible, which is gradually absorbed by those persons involved in programme making’.59 The learning process that establishes these rules and conventions is evident in historical accounts. Hendy notes in his history of Radio 4, for example, that: ‘Over time, producers had learned to adjust their ideas to what they knew to be acceptable.’ For instance, the celebrated radio producer Geoffrey Bridson tried
offering the Home Service [the forerunner to Radio 4] a series of trenchant documentaries on subjects such as nuclear armament, Soviet Russia, McCarthyism, poverty or racial conflict, but soon found that even these were rejected, mostly for being ‘too controversial or too political’. The BBC, he concluded, had come to regard the Home as the place ‘to reflect the most respectably orthodox opinion as it already existed’.60
As is fitting for an Oxbridge institution, the BBC’s ‘programme ethos’ has been fostered in a subtle, almost collegiate manner, but in a decidedly hierarchical context. Tom Burns notes that it ‘is drummed into producers … that if there is any doubt in their mind about a topic, or viewpoint, or film sequence, or contributor they must refer up to their chief editor, or head of department’. He also observed, though, that the significance of ‘referring up’ was more ‘symbolic rather than operational’, and quotes Anthony Smith’s observation that: ‘There is seldom any doubt about what the man above you thinks on any important issue. You can therefore avoid referring upwards by deciding them in a way which you know he would approve of.’61 In a 1973 policy document called Tastes and Standards in BBC Programmes, Huw Wheldon, the managing director of BBC television, was quoted as saying, ‘The wrath of the Corporation in its varied human manifestations is particularly reserved for those who fail to refer’.62
The process of ‘referring up’ controversial political matters to your superior, Schlesinger notes, was developed as part of a broader system of bureaucratic authority which ensured that staff conform to what he calls the BBC’s ‘corporate ideology’. Broader organisational control, he explains, is exercised through the development and distribution of internal policy publications and the selection and promotion of staff, which acts as an informal ‘sanctioning process’.63
These various mechanisms are not just ‘ideological’. A journalist need not accept the dominant news values of editors, and may even find ways of subverting them. But a bureaucracy like the BBC functions in such a way that makes the opportunities for this somewhat limited. Furthermore, the pressures for conformity are not merely internal to the BBC. Class and educational background influence who is recruited in the first place, and those lucky enough to win out in the competition for a highly prestigious post will not only have to develop a strategic understanding of ‘office politics’ and what is expected of them by colleagues and superiors: they will also enter a broader set of relations with individuals and institutions outside of the BBC. A political correspondent, for example, is not only required to develop a certain understanding of what BBC editors expect in terms of what they report and how. They are also required to familiarise themselves with the broader world of formal politics and authoritative political commentary. This is all part of the BBC’s Establishment culture. Indeed, its ‘corporate ideology’ is essentially an institutionalisation of political compromises negotiated and renegotiated between senior BBC management and the broader Establishment of which they are a part. As Tom Burns perceptively remarked in his study, ‘the relationship between the producer and his superiors reflects the relationship between the BBC and the powers that be outside’.64
A good illustration of this is from January 1970, around the time of Burns’s study, when Charles Curran, the new director general, summoned a group of BBC journalists and producers for a meeting at his office. Curran had succeeded the liberal Hugh Greene the previous year, and his instincts were more conservative. He opened the meeting by referring to the perception that BBC journalists had adopted an anti-Establishment line, and that they reserved their most severe questions for people associated with authority. The journalists and producers countered that it was their job to remain sceptical of authority, but always free from personal bias. Curran, however, concluded the meeting by explaining that while he acknowledged it was part of a BBC journalist’s role to put critical questions to authority, it was nevertheless part of his job as director general to see that authority was treated fairly.65
Another revealing incident from that same period is a 1975 dinner meeting between the then BBC chair Michael Swann and the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. Over dinner, the two men discussed the influence of sixties radicalism at the BBC. A memo of the conversation states:
Talking about the ‘hippie’ influences at the BBC, Sir Michael Swann said that, while he would not pretend that the BBC was completely clear of problems of this kind, it was a picnic compared with Edinburgh University [where he had been vice chancellor]. Nonetheless he thought too many young producers approached every programme they did from the starting point of an attitude about the subject which could be summed up as: ‘You are a shit’. It was an attitude which he and others in the management of the BBC (Sir Michael Swann particularly mentioned Huw Wheldon) deplored, and they would be using their influences as opportunity offered to try to counter it.66
That the prime minister sympathised with these efforts is evident from another file recording a meeting between Swann and Wilson two years earlier, the minutes of which noted that ‘discussion