The INTEREST in DISINTEREST

The story of the BBC and the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid to be distributed in Gaza has had a good run – almost a fortnight. My devoted readers, who naturally hold off from forming an opinion on such matters until I have instructed them as to what to think, may have grown impatient for my finding. I have stayed my hand because it seemed to me that the point I would make was so painfully obvious as to be superfluous. But no. No one, at least in my hearing or sight, has advanced my argument and so, if only out of compassion for my devotees, I unburden myself here.

The broad lines of the issue are readily sketched. Medication, surgical supplies and indeed safe places in which to tend wounds and save or amputate limbs; food; shelter; clothing and bedding; sanctuary; the basic infrastructure of trade and agriculture: all these and more are urgently required by the populace in Gaza. The DEC, a federation of 13 aid charities including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, readied a television appeal that, at the draft and shooting script stages, the BBC agreed to broadcast. Then the Corporation decided that, “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of a news story”, it would not after all record and carry the appeal. ITV cameras shot it instead and the short programme was carried by ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Sky followed suit with the BBC.

The DEC has been putting together these packages for years and the BBC has always been happy to transmit them. The first refusal to carry an appeal based on an objection concerning impartiality came from the BBC over the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, though it had broadcast the appeal for the Lebanese citizens whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 1982. You can be sure that, both through official channels and by more informal means, various Jewish, pro-Israeli and Zionist interests will have worked on the BBC between 1982 and 2006.

Authoritative figures in politics and the Anglican church have weighed in to criticise the BBC’s decision. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, declared that “this is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality”. The former BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP, Martin Bell, wrote that “the coverage of the 22-day conflict was flawed by a misconstruction of the concept of balance – as if a war were a general election and the main protagonists entitled to equal airtime”. The DEC chief executive, Brendan Gormley, had made a similar point: “The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime”. But even the Board of Deputies of British Jews noted that “there is no doubt that any appeal which simply seeks to raise money for innocent civilians should be applauded”.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, makes a fair point when he says that “the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”. Ministers such as Douglas Alexander and Hazel Blears would have done better to decline to be drawn into this matter.

The BBC rulebook states that “impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC … It is a legal requirement and should also be a source of pride”. It is with this text at his back that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, has led the BBC’s counter-attack and refused to budge.

But here’s my take on this. By what criteria is the BBC’s coverage of Gaza – or of any other issue where different factions contend – to be read as impartial? Most of us got most of our information about the Israeli assault from television and print news coverage. That there was widespread revulsion towards that assault among people with no tribal axe to grind is evident. By a week ago, the BBC had received 15,500 complaints about its stance. That is fewer than the number of complaints engendered by the Ross/Brand farrago, which says a good deal about contemporary public concerns (and indeed the mobilising power of The Daily Mail). But it is still an impressive response. Public confidence in the BBC’s editorial judgment has clearly eroded.

Is the conviction that the BBC has been over-zealous in applying its own rules in fact a result of sympathies among the public fostered by the BBC coverage that is supposed to be impartial? It was clear to me, as a regular viewer of BBC Television News, that a great deal more emphasis was placed day-by-day on the impact of missiles and then ground weapons fired into and in Gaza than on the impact of rockets sent into southern Israel by Hamas. But then that is only right and proper. The casualties in Gaza were a hundred times those among Israelis and many of the latter were invading military (some were victims of “friendly fire”). Had the BBC angled its coverage to favour Palestinians in the ratio 100:1, it would have been remarkable but would it have been merely just? Had the BBC made as much of the Israeli casualties as of the Palestinian, that indeed would have been a travesty of the facts.

But what are facts in these stories? In the first place, the facts that are presented by the reporters and their crews are necessarily selective. The information gleaned on the ground and passed on by reporters may be polluted by propaganda or may in subterranean ways of which the reporter is not even aware be skewed by the reporter’s own inclinations and prejudices. Furthermore, in recent years, very much more comment and “interpretation” has been permitted to – indeed, encouraged from – location reporters. These days, to-camera pieces in particular, narrated footage in general, often carry very little objective information. News reports tend to be largely a mishmash of rumour, conjecture, prophesy and received opinion.

How scrupulous, would you say, is the BBC on the matter of, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe? President Mugabe himself would dismiss the BBC’s coverage as “all lies”. Indeed, because of these “lies”, the BBC is banished from the country. Our own feelings about Mugabe are substantially created by impressions formed on the basis of a very few verifiable facts – the rip-roaring inflation, the evidence of refugees leaving for South Africa – and a lot of subjective allegations and images – claims of repression, descriptions by Mugabe’s enemies of the continuing inability to agree on the composition of the new government, Mugabe’s own lofty disdain, anecdotal evidence of hardship and disease. But the “crisis” in Zimbabwe, you could argue, is a construct fashioned by BBC reporters. We want to think badly of Mugabe and the BBC plays to that prejudice. And what else do we have to go on?

What of other issues? Is the BBC impartial about racism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gang culture, Andy Murray, climate change, Holocaust denial, paedophiles, the Queen? The BBC would no doubt wish to unbundle these matters and would then argue that it cannot be expected to stand neutral on illegality and that stances subsumable under notions of patriotism do not require disinterest. It ought, though, to accept that philosophical debate would be appropriate about each element, and that satisfying no one on anything is not exactly the highest common denominator to aim for.

What the BBC cannot be allowed to offer as an acceptable method is the one alluded to by Martin Bell, treating war – and by extension every issue – as though it were a general election. This is the philosophy of the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nor, as I have argued, does the BBC anyway uphold this kind of balance, however vaunted its fastidiousness. Even its coverage of parliamentary and party politics – the stuff that is most nearly like a general election and is most readily policed according to notions of equal or proportionate airtime – is plainly moulded by such subjective and highly partial notions as whether the government (or indeed each of the opposition parties) is “in trouble”. I am convinced that some wonk at, say, the Glasgow Media Centre, could soon come up with a chart that showed that by far the majority of news bulletin mentions of any figure in British politics could be listed under the general heading “in trouble”. After all, it is trouble – whether prime ministers up against it or children being killed or the south of England evidently paralysed by a heavily predicted snowfall – that gets the news editors’ cheeks up. In that sense, the row about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal was actually nothing more than a thundering good news story.