Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  I have always been wary about people who use the virtue of hindsight to claim that Blair always knew he was going to war on a false prospectus, because at the time the belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was shared by many opponents of the war. The argument of France and Germany was not that they did not exist but that more time should be allowed to find them. I was personally against the Iraq War. However, naïvely or not, I found myself being convinced on that night in the north-east, as we talked overlooking the Tyne, that the Prime Minister was sincere about the need for consensual international action and about the existence of the weapons. That view was, of course, tested during the later Hutton Inquiry. However, I had already experienced Tony Blair’s certainty about foreign policy. As the war in Afghanistan started, we did an edition of Breakfast with Frost live with the PM from near Chequers, and as we drank coffee afterwards, Blair mused on the difference between domestic and foreign policy. Foreign policy, he said, was much more about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – pointing then to the Taliban and the links with Al-Qaeda that had brought about the catastrophic loss of life on 9/11. Domestic policy, by contrast, was hugely more complex; it was much harder to work out what the best course was for health or education or crime. There was complete openness on his part about the moral dimension to foreign policy, however unconvincing his critics might find it.

  Back in the newsroom, it was the domestic issues of immigration and asylum that were proving tougher to sort out. One night on the Ten O’Clock News we broadcast a package from a racially diverse part of Britain, where ethnic minorities had become a majority of the local population. People there were interviewed – vox pops, as they are known in journalism – about how they felt about the immigration that had led to the current ethnic mix. Only one white man was featured, and he said everything was grand and he was perfectly happy with the way his neighbourhood had developed. Concerned about how representative he was, I emailed the reporter the next morning: ‘Just wondered: did all the people you spoke to think the majority/minority racial position was good? I’m just curious. What I wonder is whether we represent diversity well (which we should) but also whether we represent diversity of opinion well (which we also should!).’

  The reporter, a very good chap generally, replied that the vox pops had been fraught with difficulty because of the ‘problem’ of the white population, many of whom were, in his view, ‘fairly rabidly racist’. It was a nightmare in terms of what could be used in the piece, he said: if they had used the ‘hard’ white voices, it might have been illegal in that it could have been construed as inflammatory. Hence the decision to use the one man who had expressed a positive view.

  I shared this with colleagues on news board, who were as appalled as I was. It started, of course, from good intentions: not to stir up community tension and to think about what is put on air. But it ended with an unacceptably sanitised piece of reporting, and this was a textbook example of how not to put together a report with vox pops.

  It was around this time, too, that BBC local radio identified for its staff its typical target listeners, imagined as a middle-aged couple called Dave and Sue. A leaflet for all local radio stations included a section on their hypothetical attitudes. ‘Now it’s an established everyday reality that Dave and Sue live and work alongside and socialise with people from different ethnic backgrounds,’ producers were told. ‘They are interested in and open-minded about adapting aspects of other cultures into their own lives – in entertainment, medicine, belief, food, clothes and language. Their community-minded attitudes mean they are interested both in projects which advance social cohesion in this country and in international development issues.’ It must have been something of a shock to the writers of this leaflet when many real-life Daves and Sues went off and joined UKIP.

  I went into battle in the summer of 2003 with the BBC’s Editorial Policy team, who circulated minutes from an advisory meeting about coverage of asylum seekers. This was playing strongly, ahead of the much bigger debate about immigration. The meeting criticised television news for ‘muddling up’ asylum with war and terrorism, and said that people were ‘already making a link’ – which was not unexpected given that a story of the time was about some asylum-seekers trying to poison people with Ricin. The Editorial Policy people disliked our use of ‘iconic’ pictures of the Sangatte refugee camp, whatever that meant, and it concluded that we should take care to use reliable information and not stoke up prejudice – which is correct – but asserted that this area was ‘being led by an angry tabloid agenda and extreme right-wing groups’.

  I sent a truculent email back.

  I should make it clear that I abhor racism, and I accept 1,000 per cent the need to reflect all debates with balance. But the asylum debate is one where we’ve done rather badly in reflecting the concerns of our audiences or the genuine crisis faced by the government in dealing with the issue; and these minutes read like a pure liberal-defensive response rather than a quest for range and diversity in our journalism.

  I shared the correspondence with one or two like-minded souls, including Jeff Randall, who had been brought in by Greg as business editor to ensure a broader range of real-world views made it on air. Jeff certainly managed that. He wrote to me: ‘Does anyone in the BBC’s Policy Unit/Thought Police read Richard Littlejohn? They should. He reflects popular opinion far more accurately than the views of those whose idea of a good night out is reading the Indy over a vegetarian meal in a Somali restaurant.’

  We had already shown our commitment to broadening the debate on air. A Newsnight special with Tony Blair and an audience of voters devoted the first twelve minutes to questions about asylum. Current Affairs did a film for BBC One about our porous borders. I also went further than normal in putting the debate about coverage into the public arena. In the autumn of 2003, I was interviewed by Tim Luckhurst in The Independent and I had an uncoded bash at Editorial Policy, arguing that we had been very slow on the asylum issue. ‘Two years ago, when it started being raised, we did not realise the level of popular unease about the issue,’ I said. ‘There was a sort of easy knee-jerk tendency, a kind of metropolitan ease, of saying “Oh, it’s all got up by the Daily Mail or got up by the BNP or whatever.” I don’t think that is true.’

  This did not make me popular – sainthood was ever more elusive in the hurly-burly of news – and over the years I have lost plenty of battles, some deservedly. But I did feel some vindication when, a few years later, the fact that the BBC had been slow on asylum-seeking and then immigration became the official line of the Trust and the management, with Helen Boaden telling a Trust review that the BBC in general had a ‘deep liberal bias’ on immigration when she became director of news.

  As my boss, after Richard Sambrook had moved to BBC World News, Helen was an ally on another awful policy dilemma, where what seemed at the time to be a lonely position has become, thankfully, orthodox. It was in 2004 that hostage videos started to be part of the weaponry of terror groups, with videos of Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan being distributed to the international media showing them in captivity and begging for their lives. It seemed obvious to me that showing these videos was playing into the terrorists’ hands, and I felt viscerally that it was an abuse of human beings to show them on television in a state of great distress. I therefore restricted use to just a still, at a time when other news outlets such as ITN and Sky were showing extensive clips. Many of my editorial colleagues were, according to a subsequent front-page story in Press Gazette, ‘outraged’. One editor said, anonymously, ‘There was a feeling of great despair in the newsroom; everybody else was using it and we were going out on a limb without understanding why.’ Looking back at one of my memos to editors at the time, I am not sure what this anonymous individual misunderstood:

  In television news, we will stick with a still, and no audio, from the Margaret Hassan video. This is because she is clearly enormously distressed and under extreme duress. However, we should report in indir
ect speech some of what she says: in particular, we should include the line that she is asking troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.

  The last line was to make sure that we could not be accused of censoring a political message, while being under no illusions about the circumstances in which it was uttered.

  With the backing of Helen Boaden and Mark Byford, I was blunt externally too, telling one newspaper: ‘The distress is so obvious, it’s awful to watch and we didn’t think there was any merit in showing it.’ I debated the BBC’s policy that year on radio and television programmes, in newspapers and on public platforms. I was pleased that other broadcasters gradually came over to the BBC’s position – and indeed by 2015 the UK industry standard had become more conservative, often not even showing stills from terrorist videos. The feeblest argument ever is that other people, whether it is rival broadcasters or social media, are doing something so we should too. When I left the BBC, Helen’s farewell note to me referred to that episode: ‘I was thinking last night of that time when I first arrived in news when you faced down the TV newsroom over showing videos of Al-Qaeda kidnap victims. There was a lot of pompous posturing, but you were utterly resolute and clear.’ So, thankfully, was the rest of news management, even when I was being roasted by the Press Gazette.

  Terrorism was the dominant theme of my last few months in television news, as it had been through 9/11, the subsequent wars, the bombings in Madrid and the murders of the British hostages. July had started brightly with the build-up to an event whose significance for me I could not yet imagine: the awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London. In our editorial meetings I had long teased the editors not to bother about London because Paris was going to win the bid, but as we got nearer to the vote in Singapore it was manifest that our capital was more in contention than we had imagined. I gently changed my position on the likely outcome, and promised everyone there would be cakes at the afternoon editorial meeting if the IOC chose London.

  We watched the voting process in the TV news office, courtesy of a BBC News and Sport co-production: Dermot Murnaghan in Singapore for news, Sue Barker for sport and Barry Davies doing the commentary. When Jacques Rogge said the word ‘London’, I think for the only time in my life I jumped into the air with excitement, doubtless to the embarrassment of those nearby. Cakes were ordered immediately, and we put on special programmes on BBC One through the afternoon to celebrate what had initially looked like a most unlikely victory.

  The next day we had more news specials that could not have been more different in their content and tone. Bombs had exploded on three London Tube trains and on a bus, and from the initial reports it was apparent that casualties were on a devastating scale. In times like these, journalists can only operate by separating the job in hand from the human reaction to what is unfolding before them. The day was a blur of activity in the newsroom with rolling news on all channels, and a mass of logistical problems for reporters and crews as transport came to a halt and the communications networks collapsed under the pressure of events.

  If the public are frightened, journalists and their families are not exempt – and we had our own moment when the threat of terror was literally on our doorstep. Just as we were about to start broadcasting the Six O’Clock News from Television Centre, we were told there was a suspicious vehicle right outside. In a building that had been blown up only four years before, we were not inclined to put our staff at risk, but we also knew that, in the aftermath of the IRA bomb, the structure had been made tougher and safety had been increased. More to the point, on the night that more than fifty of our fellow citizens had been killed in a terror attack, we could not conceive of failing to broadcast the main network news. Our staff and presenters wanted to carry on, so we did.

  For me, it was only when I got home that night, close to midnight, and watched our output retelling the story that the devastation of the day hit home: the lives lost, the families bereft, the injured whose future had been transformed by fanaticism. I therefore make no apology for my anger when I saw some of the reporting of the aftermath of the London bombings by Fox News. A contributor claimed that ‘the BBC almost operates as a foreign registered agent of Hezbollah and some of the other jihadist groups’ and Bill O’Reilly wrote a commentary titled ‘How Jane Fonda and the BBC put you in danger’.

  With the support of the BBC press office, I went much further than BBC management normally does, with this short statement in reply: ‘I am writing this in a building which was bombed by Irish terrorists. My colleagues and I are living in a city recovering from the wounds inflicted last week. If I may leave our customary impartiality aside for a moment, the comments made on Fox News are beneath contempt.’

  Fox News did not like this. They asked me to appear on a number of their programmes. The O’Reilly show request came on a night when I was with BBC colleagues at a concert in Kew Gardens, and it was an easy choice between expressing solidarity with London by showing the city’s life was continuing or sitting in a studio being harangued – and doubtless edited – for the greater glory of Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly attacked me and the BBC again anyway, and one of his contributors exemplified why ‘beneath contempt’ was about right for Fox: ‘The BBC has a long history of having soft-peddled terrorism in the Middle East. And the London attacks have exposed them as an unfair, unbalanced, and unreliable journalistic enterprise.’ Sitting under a summer night sky in Kew listening to Bjorn Again was definitely a better option than feeding the Fox propaganda machine. I was subsequently put on O’Reilly’s ‘cowards’ list of people who were too afraid to appear on his show – alongside Bill Clinton, Jeb Bush and, even more unexpectedly, Barbra Streisand, and there, in cyberspace, I proudly remain to this day. The episode was a useful reminder that, despite the BBC’s inclination to feel more comfortable with a liberal agenda, applying a Fox-style conservative agenda would be a grievous error too. The ideal remains an independent and intellectually rigorous journalism that challenges all shades of opinion.

  By the summer of 2005, my energy was flagging after five years of being on the hamster-wheel of news. I had applied for the controllership of Radio 4 in the autumn of 2004 and had rightly been beaten by one of my bosses, Mark Damazer, since he loved the station as a whole while I, as in my PM days, only truly loved its news programmes. I have still never made it more than ten minutes into a radio drama, which would have been a poor qualification for the job. But it made me realise how keen I was to move on and how there was a world beyond the News Centre, with all our channels chattering away incessantly. I had therefore watched with interest the departure of Peter Salmon as director of sport, and had idly wondered whether I might be in the running, when two things happened. Peter sent me an email saying I should think about applying for the job, and I bumped into Mark Thompson in the coffee queue at Mangiare in the White City Media Centre. Mark did one of his slightly stuttery bits of musing as we waited to pay for our cappuccinos: had I maybe thought about being director of sport? I still have no idea whether he would have contrived this conversation with me somewhere else or whether he just found it convenient to offer the role to the next person he met in a fast-food shop, but it sent me walking back to Television Centre with a spring in my step. More wars, terrorism and political crises – or on to running a whole division with Match of the Day, the Six Nations and the Olympics? I had no doubt which path was the more appealing.

  CHAPTER 9

  SPORT

  IKNEW SOMETHING ABOUT the culture of BBC Sport from my time on 5 Live. It was an impressive outfit: tremendous at covering the set-piece events like World Cups and Olympics, and confident about its importance to the BBC. It had lost some major sports rights, with Formula 1 and cricket creating the most damaging gaps. But the blow of football highlights disappearing to ITV, in the ill-fated form of The Premiership, had recently been reversed – and Match of the Day was back on BBC screens each week. It seemed a more cheerful place than television news: it had customised its floor in Television Centre with a
running track painted on the lino in the corridor, and a garish rendering of a golf course and assorted-sized balls. But I spotted early on that the devotion to sport of the division’s senior producers was absolute. They could never understand why an over-running snooker match was not kept on BBC One, even if it meant vanquishing the news or Strictly Come Dancing or whatever else lay in its path, and it was taken for granted that the only sensible course for BBC management was to pump squillions more money into sport and give it as much airtime as it wanted.

  At the time of my move to sport, I was busy with another extracurricular project. Greg’s ‘Making It Happen’ had been replaced by Mark Thompson’s ‘Creative Future’ initiative, which was designed to work out the shape of our programming in what he called ‘an entirely new chapter in broadcasting’. I had originally been asked to lead the work on knowledge-building, which was a slightly hazy concept around specialist factual content, documentaries and websites, but, to my relief, Mark suggested that I move over to sport’s Creative Future team instead. It would give me a ready-made vehicle for reviewing the strategy of the sport division. However, it meant we had to tackle what people talked of as ‘the Grandstand problem’ right from the start.

  I had grown up with Grandstand. In the black and white era it had brought sport into the living rooms of Britain, and all the best action was there. ITV’s World of Sport was never serious competition, since it seemed to be made up of horseracing from minor courses and large men in leotards taking part in professional wrestling. The Grandstand brand took in the Olympics and, initially, the World Cup too – though that later moved under the Match of the Day banner. But Grandstand had been all-conquering and confident, and for decades it was the flagship of BBC Sport. By 2005, though, you could choose your cliché: it was either a sinking flagship or a limping warhorse, but either way round it was in trouble. Football Focus had been floated off from the start of the programme, and Final Score had become a programme in its own right at the end. In between there were some days with strong live events, but others when there was a menu of highlights from disparate sports: rugby union, basketball, golf and horseracing were on the agenda in one hour of a single programme in the summer of 2005. This might have retained an audience in the analogue days of restricted choice. But in a digital world, where Sky had introduced dedicated sports channels with live action from the start to the finish of each event, the Grandstand mix no longer captivated. Nor did it reflect the more enterprising scheduling of events: Six Nations rugby was moving to 5.30 p.m. or even 8 p.m. kick-offs, way outside the Grandstand zone. The programme’s critics carped that its fading rights portfolio meant it was no longer what it was, but they would have been furious if it had emulated its heyday, when live Test cricket was interrupted for a visit to Royal Ascot. The last redoubt of believers in the programme was in the fifth floor BBC Sport offices of Television Centre.