Will the BBC speak truth to power?
Joyce Mcmillan fears new Director General Tim Davie’s talk of ‘impartiality’ could be bad news for the Beeb
Keep company with those who seek the truth, and run from those who think they have found it. The French Nobel prize winner Andre Gide said it first, and the Czech Republic’s playwrightpresident Vaclav Havel said it later, even more forcefully; but both were right, and I thought of their hard-earned wisdom as I read my way, yesterday, through Tim Davie’s first speech as Director General of the BBC.
Tim Davie, it should be acknowledged, is pretty much a company man at the BBC, and certainly not an outsider brought in to the corporation to administer an ideological shake-up. In the 1980s, he became the first in his family to attend university, and after Cambridge rose rapidly into a senior role at Pepsico, while standing as a Tory Councillor in the 1990s.
In 2005, though, he made a conscious decision to switch to the BBC, and has worked mainly in those areas of the corporation that have to do with the commissioning and marketing of BBC programmes for a global market; hence his 2018 CBE for services to trade. It’s therefore not surprising that his first speech laid a heavy emphasis on building the BBC’S commercial income, and using its massive online operation more efficiently to market its work. He is also making all the right noises, from a BBC perspective, about challenging the corporation’s London bias, and serving the whole of the UK.
It’s when Tim Davie waxes lyrical on his top priority, though – what he calls “renewing our commitment to impartiality” – that alarm bells begin to ring; for there is no sign in his language, or his stance, that he remotely recognises the scale of disquiet over the BBC’S performance in this area, or the range of different directions from which it comes. It’s clear, and hardly surprising, that he is highly sensitive to the loud clamour of discontent from some sections of the Conservative Party, and of the right-wing press. According to an exclusive story published by the Daily Telegraph on Monday – and littered with not-quite-quotes and comments from so-called “senior sources” – Mr Davie is a fully paid-up subscriber to the rightwing narrative that the BBC is a middleclass leftie enclave which has ignored the Brexit-loving English working classes for too long, and wishes to correct the balance; not least by including more right-wing and pro-brexit views in BBC comedy programmes. It remains to be seen, of course, whether all this chat, repeated across the Telegraph, the Evening Standard and The Times, really represents Mr Davie’s own views, or is just another attempt, by papers with their own vested interests, to jolt the debate about British broadcasting onto more right-wing ground; there is certainly no word about commissioning more right
wing comedy in Mr Davie’s speech as delivered. The tone of the coverage, though, speaks volumes about the constant bullying to which the BBC is now subjected, by Tory politicians whose party has been in government throughout the last decade, and by their media allies.
The implicit threat, at every turn, is that the licence fee system will be ended, and the BBC as we have known it will cease to exist. And only one party in the UK has the power to make that happen, and therefore to command the full attention, and sometimes the fearful compliance, of senior BBC executives: the Conservative Party, and its current leader Boris Johnson. Witness the corporation’s craven U-turn on the singing of Land Of Hope And Glory and Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, in a year when the Last Night of the Proms is not in any normal sense taking place, and when the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement would give any decent person pause about the blatantly imperialist and colonialist words of those songs.
In the aftermath of this row, Tim Davie will therefore have to forgive me for feeling a little less than reassured by his largely bland words about impartiality, and about “seeking a wider spectrum of views”.
The BBC constantly says that if it is annoying everyone, it must be doing something right; and it certainly does annoy many of the 10 million who voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2019, and many of the 50-plus per cent in Scotland who now support independence.
That comforting mantra, though, reveals the essential flaw in the idea of mere “balance” or “impartiality” as a goal; in that it is simply illiterate about the realities of power. No serious journalist, or news-gathering organisation, ever wants to be impartial between truth and lies, or between the powerless and the powerful; because good journalists, like good comedians, never punch down, always punch upward. They don’t foment hate against refugees, but challenge and expose the politicians who are responsible for their plight; they don’t mock the poor, or the paltry benefits they receive in this country, but expose the absurdity of the rich who delude themselves that they have “earned” their billions, and of the politicians who are their mouthpieces, including the present UK government.
And if that mission sits uncomfortably with Tim Davie, who would rather be “impartial”, then he is pro - foundly, and dangerously, in the wrong job.
What the BBC needs now is a brave leader who will insist on the corporation’s right to seek truth, however uncomfortable; a leader who will tell the government to sling its hook, get out of the BBC’S face, and start living up to its frequent rhetoric about great British freedoms, including journalistic freedom.
To judge by his opening statement, Tim Davie is not that leader. And although the small tranche of British opinion that qualifies as the “the great British public” may rejoice in his appointment, it seems likely to presage more disappointment for those of us who see ourselves primarily as citizens, and who now desperately need allies in the fight not for some establishment notion of “impartiality”, but for the solid facts, information, and commitment to democratic values that will help us to fight the growing blizzard of disinformation from those in power, and begin to formulate better ways forward.