Emily Maitlis is finally free to say what needed
saying: the BBC has lost its nerve
Gaby
Hinsliff
In a raw and personal analysis, the former Newsnight
presenter reveals a broadcaster that has been cowed by government
Thu 25 Aug
2022 17.12 BST
When Emily
Maitlis was growing up, everything stopped for the news. Her father would tune
in religiously to the evening bulletins and nobody was allowed to interrupt the
pips. The news mattered. For his daughter, it still does. She slid into
journalism virtually by accident, but takes it very seriously indeed. As a
Newsnight presenter she didn’t just live from headline to headline, but would
stand back and reflect on the craft. In her memoir Airhead, in which she
analyses old interviews and teases out the often uncomfortable ethical dilemmas
raised by questioning a Donald Trump or a Steve Bannon, you occasionally catch
a sense of frustration between the lines; something she seemingly wants to say
but can’t. This week, having left the BBC to start a new podcast with fellow
former BBC stalwart Jon Sopel, she finally let rip.
Populism,
she argued in a clearly cathartic appearance before the Edinburgh TV festival,
was tying the media up in knots. Politicians were acting in ways that are
“deeply and clearly deleterious to basic democratic government”, trampling over
constitutional norms, making “things that would once have shocked us now seem
commonplace”. But journalists still clung to an old idea of impartiality and
balance – that both sides must get an equal say, and let the viewer decide –
which is effectively now being weaponised against them. To have a pro-Brexit
economist debate a pro-remain one on air was not “balance”, she said, if
economists generally were so overwhelmingly against leaving that it took hours
of ringing round to find one lone maverick in favour. Broadcasters now reject
such false equivalence on topics where scientific consensus is overwhelming,
from climate change to vaccination, so why not in economics?
Yet the
heart of her lecture was something unmistakably more raw and personal. Two
years ago, after a call from Downing Street, her bosses publicly rebuked
Maitlis over a Newsnight monologue accusing Dominic Cummings of having broken
Covid rules with his lockdown jaunt to Barnard Castle. There was, she claimed,
no “due process” to consider whether a script that had been cleared by the
programme’s editors was actually defensible. It was almost as if someone wanted
to send a “message of reassurance” to No 10.
There’s
nothing new about spin doctors ringing up broadcasters or newspaper editors to
rail against unflattering coverage. It happened regularly under Blair and
Brown, just as it did under Cameron, May and Johnson. But when that furious
late night call comes in, what matters to reporters is knowing that – at least
so long as your story is right – someone has your back. Once those in power
learn that your boss will surrender at the first hint of displeasure, they’ll
keep pushing. Reporting “without fear or favour” becomes virtually impossible
if someone senior in your organisation seems open to both. In its handling of
that complaint, the BBC effectively hung one of its most senior female
journalists out to dry. One wonders if they’d have done the same to Jeremy
Paxman. The Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, meanwhile, seemingly
continues to enjoy great licence to offer his views on Twitter.
The BBC is
hardly alone in being accused of having an incestuous relationship with power.
Maitlis will now host a show for LBC, which recently offered up presenter
Rachel Johnson interviewing her father, Stanley Johnson, about her brother
Boris Johnson. James Slack, the former director of communications to the
latter, is now deputy editor of the Sun – which must have made for some awkward
morning press conferences when the big running story was a raucously drunken
Downing Street lockdown leaving party held for one James Slack. There has long
been a pretty greasy revolving door between Fleet Street and Downing Street,
but viewers expect a publicly funded institution such as the BBC to rise above
all that; to remain unimpeachable and unflappable, whether under fire from left
or right. Instead it looks increasingly cowed, still spooked by a referendum
result it didn’t foresee six years ago, and worryingly inconsistent.
Why has our
national broadcaster lost its nerve? The government’s threat to remove the
licence fee, a sword of Damocles now constantly hanging over its head, is the
most obvious answer. Another might be the installation of Richard Sharp, a
pro-Brexit Tory donor, as chair. Maitlis, however, took aim at what she called
an “active Conservative party agent” on the BBC board – a reference to Robbie Gibb,
the smoothest of smooth operators, who has moved seamlessly between politics
and journalism all his life. (Having initially worked for the then Conservative
shadow minister Francis Maude, Gibb moved to the BBC, then became Theresa May’s
head of communications, before returning controversially to the BBC, where he
wields significant influence over journalistic output.)
Yet the
BBC’s troubles go well beyond any one individual. The corporation is buffeted
by forces it cannot seem to grip; a chilly commercial climate, a post-truth
political culture where even categorical denials from No 10 can no longer be
believed, but also rising tensions with some staff who see neutrality as
uncomfortably close to complicity in the current climate. The basic journalistic
principle of divorcing your own feelings from the story sits increasingly
uneasily with a younger generation of reporters, and perhaps also viewers,
raised to “call out” what they believe to be wrong and to prize authenticity.
It will take more than a revised set of corporate guidelines to reconcile all
this with the still timeless need for trusted news free of bias. But if the BBC
can’t square the circle then its stars will keep leaving, each time declaring
that they want the freedom to say what they think. Only Maitlis, however, has
so far used it to say what actually needed saying.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário