Ah … we can agree on something. My real concern is that those guidelines are at risk of being hijacked by, among others, an organisation called Embrace, which the BBC recognises as the voice of black and ethnic minority staff and which is represented at high-level management meetings. In an internal document to senior figures in the BBC, Embrace said it ‘understands there is not necessarily a consensus on the use of the N-word, however we believe this to be a matter for debate within Black communities, and not one for the BBC’. That is simply outrageous.
JH: Because?
JH: Because the BBC is responsible for ALL its editorial decisions. It cannot be excluded from the ‘debate’ by any special interest group.
JH: So you’re saying the N-word should be treated like any other. Really?
JH: Of course I’m not. There’s no question about it being highly offensive in a way that very few words are. But the BBC simply cannot ban a word. Any word. The very notion should send shivers down the spine of anyone who believes in the sanctity of free speech. The next step is banning thoughts. Ask Orwell about that.
JH: I wondered how long it would take you to trot out that old cliché. The fact is that the BBC took note of what its critics were saying and changed its mind. Maybe it should have done it more often in the past. It’s a publicly funded organisation dammit!
JH: Except that in my fifty years with the organisation there was never the sense that its senior management was being effectively held to ransom by people on its own staff in self-appointed ‘advisory’ groups who tell the bosses how things should be done. They themselves have largely no editorial responsibility and they all have much the same agenda. They are, in the modern sense of the word, about as ‘woke’ as it gets. I have spoken to editors and very senior bosses who admit they feel intimidated. It has a chilling effect.
JH: You exaggerate again. There have always been pressure groups telling the BBC how it should report stories. What’s different now?
JH: Everything is different in this digital age. Older people like me had precious little choice in what we watched and listened to, and the broadcasters had to meet standards set by the regulator. If they didn’t they could lose their licence to broadcast. But young people have always known a multi-channel, multi-platform, social media universe, most of which is impossible to regulate. So pretty much anything goes. And Twitter is a malign force in this universe where battles have to be fought and won, where forces can be mobilised, pressure applied and arguments are cheapened. The BBC top management have allowed – or even actively encouraged – the rise of the woke warriors and are now allowing them to frame the argument. They are the real power in BBC News today. And that is profoundly worrying.
JH: So if we have the dubious pleasure of meeting again in another year or two are you seriously telling me BBC News will have become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the equivalent of what Harold Wilson once memorably called a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’? Except, obviously, it would be ‘people’ rather than ‘men’ and Wilson was talking about striking dockers.
JH: No. Because there are still many good and brave people inside the BBC who share my fears. And, I believe, many more outside. So let me end with a quote of my own – from a poet rather than a politician. He was G.K. Chesterton. His poem was called ‘The Secret People’:
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
For we are the people of England … that have not spoken yet.
PART 1
1
By the time I joined Today in 1987 I had been a journalist of one sort or another for thirty years and I’d been exposed to pretty much everything our trade had to offer. I had been a magazine editor at the age of fourteen – though whether the (free) Trinity Youth Club Monthly Journal with its circulation reaching into the dozens properly qualifies as a magazine is, I’d be the first to admit, debatable. I’d had the most menial job a tiny local weekly newspaper could throw at a pimply fifteen-year-old – and that’s not just the bottom rung of the ladder: it’s subterranean.
At the other end of the scale I had written the main comment column for the Sunday Times, the biggest-selling ‘quality’ newspaper in the land, for nearly five years. I’d had the glamour of reporting from all over the world as a BBC foreign correspondent – not that it seems very glamorous when you’re actually doing it. I’d had the even greater (perceived) glamour of being the newsreader on the BBC’s most prestigious television news programme.
And I had reported on many of the biggest stories in the world: from wars to earthquakes to famines. I’d seen the president of the United States forced out of office and the ultimate collapse of apartheid. I’d seen the birth of new nations and the destruction of old ones. So on the face of it I had done it all. But, of course, none of it properly equipped me for the biggest challenge in broadcast journalism: the Today programme.
Presenting a live radio news programme for three hours a day, day in and day out, is bound to test any journalist’s basic skills, not to mention their stamina. You need to know enough about what’s going on in the world to write decent links and ask sensible questions. You need enough confidence to be able to deal with unexpected crises.
You need the stamina to get up in the middle of the night and be at your best when people doing normal jobs are just finishing their breakfast and wondering what the day holds in store. And you need to be able to do all that with the minimum of preparation. Sometimes no preparation at all.
But thirty-odd years of trying to do it tells me you need something else. You need to know who you are and what you can offer to a vast audience that’s better than – or at least different from – your many rivals. My problem when I started was that I had no idea what I was offering. I had done so many different things I wasn’t at all sure who or what I was.
Was I a reporter?
I’d like to think so. Reporting is, by a mile, the most important job in journalism. Without detached and honest reporting there is no news – just gossip. At the heart of any democracy is access to information. If people don’t know what is happening they cannot reach an informed decision. I like to think I did the job well enough. I had plenty of lucky breaks and even won a few awards. But I was never as brave as John Simpson or as dedicated as Martin Bell and I never had the writing skills of a James Cameron or Ann Leslie. I did not consider myself a great reporter and knew I never would be.
Was I a commentator?
Positively not. Columnists may not be as important as reporters, but they matter. The best not only offer the reader their own well-informed views on what is happening in the world, they cause them to question their own assumptions. They make the reader think in a different way. I very much doubt that I managed that.
Was I a newsreader?
Well, again, I was perfectly capable of sitting in front of a television camera and reading from an autocue without making too many mistakes. Not, you would accept, journalism’s equivalent of scaling Everest without oxygen. Whether I had the gravitas to command the attention and respect of the audience is another matter altogether. Probably the greatest news anchorman in the history of television news was Walter Cronkite, who presented the CBS Evening News in the United States for nineteen years when it was at its peak in the 1960s and 70s. Cronkite not only had enormous presence and authority, he had a relationship with the viewers that any broadcaster would kill for. It can be summed up in one word. Trust. He was named in one opinion poll after another as the most trusted man in America. He also happened to be a deeply modest and decent man.