Thirty-six hours can be a lifetime in politics. On Tuesday morning there were journalists all over London fine-tuning obituaries of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the prime minister was being cheered so riotously that the speaker had to threaten to suspend the British parliament. Barely had Blair sat down than the obituary writers turned their attention to another subject altogether: the chairman of the hated BBC. The Labour loyalist who wondered aloud whether a dukedom might be an appropriate honor for Lord Hutton was only half joking.
The distinguished law lord's final act of public service before retiring was to deliver a long and considered -- if narrow -- report into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, notable for almost completely exonerating the government, civil service and intelligence services and for reserving its sharpest barbs for the BBC and its journalists, managers and governors. In those circumstances it was inevitable -- and right -- for the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, to resign. Director general Greg Dyke soon followed. Whether the overall balance of Lord Hutton's conclusions was reasonable is more questionable.
There is a certain sort of judge -- thankfully rarer these days than in the past -- who pays lip service to the principles of a free press without displaying much understanding of, or sympathy for, the circumstances in which much journalism is produced. Modern developments in the law of defamation take some account of the right to be wrong. In other words, judges are required to consider the chilling effect on free speech if every journalistic slip is punished as the gravest of civil offences. British courts now take into consideration whether the story was in the public interest, the nature of the source, the lengths to which the story was checked and so on.
Judged by these criteria, the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan got more right than he got wrong in the 19 radio broadcasts concerning the government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction in which he was involved on May 29. This was a subject of the clearest possible public interest. His source was a reliable, knowledgeable and admired public servant.
Gilligan knew from other sources -- and other respected journalists were reporting the same -- that there was, indeed, disquiet within the intelligence community as publication of the dossier became imminent. Kelly told another BBC reporter, Susan Watts: "They were desperate for information ... they were pushing hard for information which could be released."
Kelly told yet another BBC reporter, Gavin Hewitt: "Number 10 spin came into play."
This was a legitimate, important story that no news organization would, or should, have ignored. But it is also apparent that, in telling the story repeatedly -- both on air and in print -- Gilligan made errors. He was at times sloppy in his use of language and made serious accusations that were simply mistaken. The BBC should have been much quicker to identify those errors, to correct them and to apologize.
Why wasn't it? One reason frankly lies in the quixotic, often intemperate style displayed by Alastair Campbell, Blair's former press spokesman, in his dealings with the media. He had led a prolonged, furious -- and, some would argue, improper -- assault on the BBC over its coverage of the war. It was a natural instinct for the governors to want to assert the corporation's robust independence. Another reason lies in the confusion between the governors' dual roles as regulators and protectors. Yet another lies in the rather arcane and bureaucratic processes by which the BBC considered formal complaints about its journalism. It should have been a simple matter for Campbell to complain, and for the BBC to correct. It is by no means clear that the still rather opaque new system of complaints will be much better. Davies' successor has much work to do.
But have a sense of proportion. Of all the corporation's fiercest newspaper critics, not one has any kind of process for dealing with complaints, let alone an independent system for correcting and apologizing promptly and prominently. You could scan the pages over coming days for corrections over all the wrong predictions on Hutton or Tuesday's parliamentary vote on university tuition fees. There won't be any.
The fact is that the BBC, in most of its editorial processes most of the time, simply towers over the army of enemies who will now be queuing up to kick it in the teeth. That is why it scores 92 percent in surveys of public trust -- compared with, for example, 11 percent for the Sun. If there are journalistic lessons to be learned from this affair -- and there plainly are -- they should be learned by every editor, reporter and subeditor in the country. On that score Campbell is surely right.
A huge responsibility now settles on the shoulders of the BBC's replacement director general. The new appointee must, of course, ensure that the BBC operates according to the highest standards of accuracy and impartiality, set up independent and transparent systems for dealing with complaints, and, most important of all, make sure there is no collective failure of nerve in the corporation -- particularly given the forthcoming process of charter renewal and the fact that the new chair of governors will ultimately be appointed by the prime minister. BBC journalists must go on probing, must go on asking awkward questions -- and must go on causing trouble.
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