Good news: Today is getting better for tomorrow
The BBC’S Today programme is 60 years old, so I cannot remember radio mornings without it. It has the faults one associates with the BBC in general. Its first presenter, Jack de Manio, was pushed out of his job under pressure from the Foreign Office, which considered him anti-european. None of his successors has dared repeat that career error. All the same, Today has pretty consistently achieved something that radio does much better than television – getting newsmakers into the studio to explain themselves to a large (now a record 7.5 million), intelligent audience.
I listen to more than half of it every weekday and always hear something new and interesting.
Since May, the programme’s editor has been Sarah Sands. There has been grumbling in some quarters that she has made it less newsy. Some resent the fact that she comes to radio from newspapers. Some even complain about her “fat contacts book”, as if that were a sin. I must declare a “backstory”. Ms Sands was my deputy for the whole time I edited this newspaper. She was brilliant, because she was excited by news, understood how to humanise it, and enjoyed mischief.
Politically, I could never pin her down: on the one hand, she was a strong feminist; on the other, she disliked self-righteous Leftists. In other words, she was open-minded (unlike me) and a free spirit. These qualities are just right for Today, and the programme now displays them. It is visible – I suppose I should say audible – in the remarkable interviews she secures. Her mixed cast includes John le Carré, Tom Hanks, Judi Dench, Earl Spencer, Neil Macgregor and assorted Nobel Prize winners, as well as more usual fare, such as Peter Mandelson or David Lammy. (It is not her fault if Boris, when invited, gets gagged on the orders of 10 Downing Street.) The above produce stories that other media outlets follow up. She is also trying to draw more deeply on the corporation’s world network – witness the excellent recent series from Carrie Gracie about how Xi Jinping is stealthily becoming Emperor of China.
Why the moans then? Listeners may not be aware that the news bulletins on Today are not its own, but come from something called BBC News Gathering. At present, they are notably Westminsterish, boring and lazy. They love to find a “report” from a pressure group, trade union or Leftish think tank which says that the NHS is “at breaking point” (or whatever) and attacks the callousness of the Government for not spending more. They never consider that such coverage represents vested interests just as much as would stories supplied by big business.
Under Sarah Sands, Today is, thank goodness, challenging this dreary producer-interest, spoon-fed concept, offering a much wider definition of news as something that people find enjoyable, worth hearing and worth thinking about. This is the Today of tomorrow. I have listened to the programme for half a century, and never found it so stimulating.
On foreign matters, by the way, BBC biases are even stronger – though less noticed – than at home. On Wednesday, BBC World News will hold a debate in Barcelona on the future of Catalonia and Spain, chaired by Stephen Sackur, to be broadcast globally in the ensuing days. The venue and the email by which you must sign up to attend are provided by an organisation called Mediapro, a media company that has promoted the hardleft Spanish political party, Podemos.
Mediapro’s president, Jaume Roures, has declared himself a supporter of Catalan independence. Before the illegal referendum on October 1, he gave a dinner for the Catalan leader, Puigdemont, in which he tried to persuade Podemos, whose leader was also present, to come in behind the referendum. To help Puigdemont, Mediapro set up the media centre for the referendum. Its HQ is where the Catalan government holds its press conferences. Free and fair discussion there will be impossible. You might as well hold a BBC debate about the future of the UK at the offices of the Socialist Worker.
Mr Lammy (see above) discloses that Oxbridge colleges still do not admit many people from the north. This may in part be explained by the map: Oxford and Cambridge are in the south. He does not complain that Liverpool and Manchester are overstocked with northerners. Of course there are other factors, too – about education, ethnicity and class. Few black people reach Oxbridge, Mr Lammy reports.
One must ask an uncomfortable question: aren’t such disparities almost inevitable? Oxford and Cambridge are “world-class” universities, always at or near the top of the global tables. This is because their selection is tough and their academic traditions are strong. If their selection becomes politically correct and their traditions are scorned, they will fall off these lists and won’t be worth studying at.
In every society, the children of the educated have better chances than those of the uneducated. Hogwarts, for instance, founded in the 10th century, is the only School for Witchcraft and Wizardry in Britain, and contains only 280 pupils. Most trainee witches and wizards come from families where these skills are already present. Despite this, some talent, such as Hermione Granger, is Muggle-born, and is often exceptionally gifted. It is good news that the prejudice against so-called “Mudbloods” is reducing and the Muggle-born proportion is growing.
But this process must be delicately managed: you must not destroy the careful work of centuries in the vain pursuit of equality.