Veteran news broadcaster Nick Jones says the BBC needs to protect itself from the government

AS a journalist who worked for the BBC for 30 years, I can say these last two years have been the most traumatic in its recent history. Against the background of the Hutton Inquiry, I know that the announcement just over a week ago that the BBC will keep its licence fee intact for the next 10 years has been hailed by some as a victory, that it guarantees a sure footing for public service broadcasting for another decade.
But my opinion, reinforced after talking to politicians and political journalists, is that it’s no more than a temporary reprieve.
I hope to throw light on the covert relationship between the BBC and the government and the even murkier relationship between Blair and media proprietors like Rupert Murdoch.
What was overlooked in the satisfaction that the BBC had seen off any reduction in its income and hence its independence – was that a general election is being held in less than two months.
There is no way with polling day so close, that Blair wants to pick another fight with the BBC. The shambles over the terror bill was one nightmare too many.
The Labour Party is trying to bury the criticism of Tony Blair over backing George Bush in Iraq. Labour wants reminders about the lack of trust in the Prime Minister like a hole in the head. So cooling it with the BBC is simply expedient politics, a quick fix and there in lies the danger.
I don’t think the BBC’s management is coming to terms with the political and commercial pressures which have been unleashed; they haven’t even begun to realise how urgent it is for them to define and defend what’s best in its public service broadcasting.
They seem to be just sleepwalking to disaster.
You can tell how bad it is by the continued failure of the BBC to talk with conviction about the value of its services. I’ve never known it appear so cowed, so lacking in purpose and direction. Every other day there are reports of job losses and cuts. Another 1,700 were announced this week. But there is no coherent plan or message to explain to the staff or public what’s going on.
The only definite policy seems to be one of not antagonising the government. The same goes for the culture secretary Tessa Jowell. She’s under instructions to damp down a potential confrontation with the BBC for fear of sparking another backlash over Iraq.
Her green paper engineered a postponement of the inevitable changes. But as we saw with the Communications Act, the most far reaching changes, scrapping all British controls on foreign ownership of television and radio, were slipped in at the last moment, against the wishes of Mrs Jowell.
The government used the act to open the way for the potential domination of our airwaves by big US corporations. We know Clear Channel is already in the wings as a potential purchaser of local radio stations. Channel Five can now be purchased by Rupert Murdoch – giving him his first foothold in British terrestrial television to add to Sky. We discovered subsequently how the media companies manoeuvred behind the scenes with Blair, behind the back of Mrs Jowell, to get those changes made.
It is going to be the same with the BBC once the election is finished. Those who have argued for the top slicing of the licence fee, giving much of the money to other broadcasters, or who want the BBC to be funded by subscription, aren’t going to go away.
Lords Burns and Birt will continue to argue their case as will David Elstein, chairman of the Commercial Radio Companies Association. So will Rupert Murdoch and the Express under Richard Desmond and the Mail group, Associated Newspapers, which already have broadcasting interests. I am sure too that newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Express will go on making heroes out of those who refuse to pay the licence fee. It’s the same on the political front.
The Conservatives want to cut the BBC down to size. These powerful forces want to see the BBC become as under resourced and as marginalised as national public broadcasting in America.
Particularly alarming is Mrs Jowell talking about consultations over putting the BBC onto subscription. Those reviews will start during the next charter period and the aim is explicit: to find an alternative to the licence fee. She says the government’s aim is to preserve choice. She didn’t say her aim was to preserve the BBC. And anyone who has followed the privatising of public services in Britain knows that the tag “preserving choice” really means increasing competition, allowing a free reign to market forces. That’s already happening in Britain’s independent television and radio sector. Obligations on the commercial channels to provide public service broadcasting are being cast aside. What we are getting in its place are unfettered market forces. That process is accelerating and it’ll put the BBC under even greater pressure as it has to come to terms with the digital switchover.
What can ex-BBC journalists like myself do to help? First, speak with conviction about the value of public service broadcasting, how the standards we set have an impact on other journalists and how we can help to moderate the extremism and sensationalism of our newspapers. For example, the BBC’s culture of avoiding gratuitous references to people’s colour, sex and religion has an impact.
So too has the BBC’s stand in refusing to show on television the most gruesome scenes from the videos of tortured hostages in Iraq.
Another priority: with a general election only weeks away we should be encouraging BBC journalists to withstand the pressures they face from the political parties. I appear only occasionally as a talking head but believe me it’s self censorship that rules at the moment inside the BBC. An avoidance of confrontation and an insistence on pre-recording whenever possible when contentious issues are being reported is necessary.
The BBC needs a transparent system for handling complaints, that can gain public confidence. Greg Dyke rejected Alastair Campbell’s complaint about technical inaccuracies in Andrew Gilligan’s report on Dr David Kelly, about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. What we know now, because of Lord Hutton’s inquiry, is the complaint was one a dozen received in as many weeks from Campbell. Another which was rejected by Dyke was Campbell’s demand that the foreign correspondent, Rageh Omaar, should be withdrawn from reporting in Beirut.
In Campbell’s opinion, because Omaar spoke Arabic, because of his family connections, he was considered by Downing Street to be too sympathetic to the Iraqis and the Muslim cause.
What a despicable complaint. But Campbell had been as just critical of other BBC reporters in Afghanistan and Kosovo. That’s the kind of backdoor political bullying that’s possible without a transparent complaints system. If the public had known what Campbell was up to, he’d have been out of a job years ago.
And my complaint against successive director generals and boards of governors is that they’ve allowed it to happen.
They’ve bent the knee in the face of backdoor pressure like that. I know, I have been there, up before them. I’ve had to apologise to politicians for what I believe was fair and impartial reporting.
Dyke should have exposed Campbell from the start and published those letters from the very beginning. Does the BBC have a management that will stand up to politicians now they’ve set a time limit on what could be the BBC’s survival? The first test will be this general election. We know Alastair Campbell, that he’s back helping to direct the election campaign
Campbell will almost certainly be in the driving seat when it comes to working out a strategy to deal with the media. Will the current director general Mark Thompson have the guts to blow the whistle if Campbell tries bully the BBC?
Tessa Jowell’s green paper stresses that ensuring an objective complaints system will be a significant challenge for the BBC Trust, that will replace the board of governors.
I don’t think the BBC can wait as long as that. There should be a system so the government cannot apply improper political pressure behind the scenes. We need to ensure that the BBC’s management doesn’t fail in its duty to viewers and listeners; that it does have the courage to be open and transparent in its relationship with the government and the political parties.
My aim is to mobilise support for the BBC.
We want to encourage the management and staff to determine what should be the priorities in defining and defending public service broadcasting. I started my BBC career 30 years ago as a news producer on BBC Radio Leicester. To my mind the local stations are part of the bedrock of the BBC. What the corporation needs is some vision, some idea of where it’s going and what must be defended.
We’ve not seen much of that yet. It’s not a task that can be postponed.

• This is an edited extract of a speech given by Nick Jones at a conference called Journalism for Sale, organised by Le Monde Diplomatique and the Campaign for Press Freedom at the Camden Centre in Bidborough Street, WC1, on Saturday.