If the BBC loses its impartiality, it loses its whole reason to exist

WHAT a can of worms. First the BBC censures Breakfast News journalist Naga Munchetty for breaching the strict guidelines on impartiality, then director- general Tony Hall overturns the ruling.

From now on, whenever a member of BBC staff is criticised by the complaints committee, there might be appeals to the D-G to step in. This messy situation could drag on for a long time.

I am a huge fan of Tony Hall, and it’s very likely he has access to facts in this case which the rest of us don’t know about. I hope his decision to overrule was made on the basis of such privileged information, and that he hasn’t simply caved in to outside pressure.

Pressure

The BBC has a paramount duty to be impartial. It has always been the case, certainly since I first set foot in Broadcasting House in about 1983, that racism was not covered by the impartiality guidelines, because there is no defence for racial discrimination: it is not to be treated as a matter of opinion.

In the case of Naga Munchetty, two issues have become muddled. When the widely respected 44-year- old journalist reported on a tweet last July by U.S. President Donald Trump, calling on four congresswomen of colour to ‘go back to the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came’, she rightly called it out as racist.

But then, with the encouragement of her co-host Dan Walker, she added that she was ‘absolutely furious’. A lot of other people must feel as angry as her, she added.

Of course, I sympathise with her feelings. And I feel strongly that BBC journalists are overworked, required to do News24, the online news site and radio, as well as the traditional TV news. Under such pressure, they sometimes don’t get time to think, let alone to craft what they are going to say.

But these excuses must not become a reason to let standards slip. However hard the job, everyone must be held accountable.

My understanding is that the BBC received one complaint from a viewer about this exchange. It accused Walker of being ‘very unprofessional’ in asking Munchetty for her personal opinions, and said, ‘She foolishly complied with his request.’

The complaint was reported to say: ‘Personal commentary on controversial news stories is surely going too far and is way outside of their remit. They are employed as presenters, not political commentators.’

By the time the complaint had worked its way up through the internal system to the third stage, where it was reviewed by David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial and policy standards, Dan Walker’s role was apparently no longer under consideration. He escaped without censure.

So, too, did the producers of BBC Breakfast that morning: whether one of them was talking into Walker’s earpiece, instructing him on the line of conversation, we can only speculate.

Since the identity of the complainant has not been released, we also cannot know whether the case was politically or even racially motivated. There is much in this business that is far from transparent, and when the D- G feels obliged to get involved it is obvious the complaints procedure has broken down. That is unacceptable.

But the one thing that ought to be clear is that Munchetty was not at fault for identifying the President’s tweet as racist. That was perfectly proper.

Where she strayed was by discussing her emotional reaction, and imputing it to other people. This deserved a mild reproof from the standards committee, which she received: even if she hadn’t stepped right over the line, she put a toe across it.

For this, she deserved a light rap across the knuckles. It is imperative that any breach of impartiality is treated seriously. But the ruling produced howls of protest from both inside and outside the BBC.

In a letter to the Guardian, the actors Lenny Henry, Colin Salmon and Adrian Lester, and the journalist Krishnan GuruMurthy, were among about 40 media figures, all people of colour, who labelled the ruling ‘both a misunderstanding of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and a form of racially discriminatory treatment’.

They wrote: ‘Racism is not a valid opinion on which an “impartial” stance can or should be maintained.’

But no BBC executive ever said it was. That was never the reason for Naga Munchetty’s reprimand.

The writers went on to state the obvious, that it was a ‘ludicrous implication’ to suppose that ‘racism may be legitimate’. Again, no one at the BBC standards unit was saying any such thing.

But the misconception soon spread, enabling the comedian Nish Kumar to quip on Newsnight: ‘Racism to me is like gravity. There’s a position that is correct and a position that is incorrect.’ Very clever, Nish. But by missing the point, you risk undermining the BBC’s age-old reputation for impartiality — something at the core of its mission as a broadcaster.

Undermining

No journalist at the BBC, whatever their background, should be immune to constructive criticism.

Naga Munchetty strayed into an area of comment and opinion, when she should have stuck to branding the President’s tweet as racist.

She failed to remain impartial, and I can’t stress too strongly that this is unacceptable. If the BBC loses its impartiality, it loses its whole reason to exist. Tony Hall needs to address this. The BBC is the most widely watched news source in Britain. Its reach on radio, television and the internet is unparalled. Furthermore, it is publicly owned and funded. It must never be captured by one interest or another. It is staffed by human beings and so there will sometimes be mistakes, but the corporation must always be seen to be striving for perfect impartiality.

Support for the licence fee would soon vanish if the BBC began taking sides, mixing commentary with reportage, and allowing journalists to introduce personal opinions.

Naivety

It must be said that the BBC doesn’t just get this right most of the time — it remains impeccably impartial. I am particularly in awe of how Laura Kuenssberg and Katya Adler remain perfectly balanced in the Brexit bearpit. Who’d want their jobs at the moment?

One area where the BBC does fail, I believe, is in the double standard it applies to EU politicians and their British counterparts. Every word spoken by a UK government official is subjected to scrutiny, quite rightly. But the comments of European ministers and officials are taken at face value, when it seems plain they are posturing and bluffing as part of their negotiating position.

I don’t think that’s wilful impartiality on the part of the BBC, however, merely naivety.

It’s a problem I understand well, because we faced similar difficulties when I was chairman of the BBC. At that time, the flashpoint was the Middle East, and we were frequently accused of favouring either the Israelis or the Arab States.

Though I knew with certainty that we were rigorously impartial in all our reporting, I also felt it was important to stand up to scrutiny. So I commissioned an independent report to examine our coverage. As I expected, it did not identify any serious bias.

In the same spirit, I believe Ofcom should step in to the Munchetty row for an independent perspective. Until this happens, I fear the controversy will continue to eat away at the BBC’s precious reputation for impartiality. Nothing could be more damaging.

Lord Grade was chairman of the BBC, 2004-2006.