Mick Hartley

A different take on the current BBC crisis, taking a longer-term look, from Graham Majin at Quillette.

The original Reithian BBC journalism was based on what Majin calls the Victorian model, which followed the classical journalistic values of reporting “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” – but not “why”. Report the facts, not values, and let the public form their own opinions. This was especially important for the BBC, it was felt, governed as it was by the Royal Charter that requires it to “provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them.”

This was all a bit dry and dull for the Boomer generation, though. Fired up by the ongoing cultural revolutions of the Sixties and Seventies, they wanted a change.

By the late 1980s, the Baby Boomer generation was moving into positions of power and authority in journalism, and in 1992, a new director general arrived at the BBC. His name was John Birt and his self-declared mission was to destroy the old classical Victorian model of journalism and replace it with Boomer journalism. This was hardly a surprise. Birt’s beliefs about journalism were public long before he was appointed to lead the BBC. During 1975 and 1976, he and his colleague Peter Jay wrote five important articles for the London Times. In the first of these, they attacked the traditional journalistic “who, what, where, when, how” framework, which they said represented a “bias against understanding.” The most important question, they argued, and the one that should be answered first, was “why.” This reversed the old journalistic methodology that prioritised factual reporting, and confined explanation and commentary to the editorial columns.…

The primary job of the journalist, Birt and Jay maintained, was to identify and explain a story’s wider narrative. Constructing these narratives would require crack squads of elite reporters who could help ordinary people to understand the world’s problems: “knowledgeable and educated journalists, sometimes working in teams and continuously blending inquiry and analysis, so that the needs of understanding direct the inquiry and the fruits of inquiry inform the analysis.” In their final article, they repeated their view that Victorian journalism was no longer relevant: “In sum, most journalists, including television journalists, work to obsolete and muddled concepts which need to be replaced by the values of a new journalism.”

They decided that just reporting the facts wasn’t enough. The public needed to be educated.

Birt reinvented journalism at the BBC and introduced a new methodology. Scripts would now be written by senior journalists in the newsroom, and then reporters would be dispatched to shoot supporting interviews and footage. In this way, reality would conform to the pre-determined narrative. In Uncertain Vision, her book about Birt’s BBC tenure, Georgina Born describes a meeting at which Birt told producers he wanted to see far more “scripting and planning in advance.” When he was asked which BBC current affairs shows he liked, he replied, “To be honest, there’s nothing I like.” His implication, she reports, was that the truth of a news story “could be arrived at intellectually.”

And here we are.

As a consequence of these developments, modern BBC journalism now suffers from two major defects. The first of these is the reliance on narrative. Once it has worked out which causes it thinks are good and which are bad, these moral narratives quickly become unchallengeable articles of faith to which group members must adhere….

The BBC’s second major defect is that the need to protect the narrative pushes truth-telling into second place.

So the BBC decides, with the help of Stonewall, that people need to be educated about the joy of trans. They also decide that Israel – Zionism – is wicked, in keeping with long-term left-wing thinking. Truth-telling takes a back seat…