Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR NIGEL
CHAPMAN AND
MS ALISON
WOODHAMS
9 NOVEMBER 2005
Q80 Mr Mackay: Perhaps you would concede
that despite offering a slightly different service, one of your
big competitors is obviously al-Jazeera and al-Jazeera is available,
I think, 24 hours a day while your service is only going to be
offered 12 hours a day. That must be very disappointing for you?
Mr Chapman: I would obviously
like it to be 24 hours a day. You know we put forward a bid to
government in the 2004 Spending Review so that we could have some
extra funds for it to be 24 hours a day and we continue to talk
to government about that. Again, I take some reassurance from
the fact that we asked people about the 12 hours a day issue and
they said, "Of course we tend to consume television more
in the evening and so if you are going to be there in the evenings
when it is peak viewing time, and you are going to be there from
the afternoon through the evenings early into the night, that
is fine." We still have a very strong radio service, which
people tend to listen to in the mornings, so if you put the overall
package of what the BBC is doing together, plus its new media
service in Arabic, you have got a pretty comprehensive tri-media
offer for this market which nobody else has got. Al-Jazeera is
a strong television channel, I accept that, in terms of audience
impact, but it does not have a radio service and it does not have
a particularly good web presence. The BBC will be in a position
as a result of these investments to have a tri-media approach
which I think will be very, very powerful under a single brand
which is well respected and trusted in the Middle East. That is
a pretty good platform on which to build. The programmes still
need to be very good and have to be well done to succeed, I do
not doubt that, but you are starting off from a strong base in
terms of both audience expectation and previous historical record.
Q81 Andrew Mackinlay: What concerns me
is that there is a chemistry here for a big bust-up with HMG and
your journalists and to some extent cynicism by your customer
audience, if, for instance—and can I put the scenario to
you—you get a tape from al-Qaeda, at the present time in
our domestic television it is reported that al-Jazeera has shown
footage of an al-Qaeda spokesperson but we do not show the whole
footage. It is a news item that al-Jazeera has shown. If you are
doing an Arabic service, surely you are going to get occasions
when some of your people—one can understand this professionally
as journalists—say we need to show the tape. Your paymasters
HMG or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office say, "Hang on
a minute, we are not paying you this money to broadcast the propaganda
of al-Qaeda." It seems to me that this is something we are
rushing into. This is something where almost as sure as night
turns into day is going to come this dilemma and it might come
fairly frequently. What say you on that?
Mr Chapman: I understand the scenario
you are putting to me. All I would say about that is that the
Arabic television service has to follow the same editorial guidelines
as the rest of the BBC. When al-Qaeda tapes are used in the rest
of the BBC they are used on news merit and they are usually used
briefly to report in the way, Mr Mackinlay, you have said. I expect
the Arabic television service to behave in exactly the same way.
If the Arabic television service strays across the line, which
is what your scenario presupposes, and uses these tapes in an
inappropriate way, then that would be wrong and it would actually
be completely counter to what audiences tell us they want from
the service. They do not want a repeat of al-Jazeera from the
BBC. What they want from the BBC is a trustworthy, independent,
impartial service and judging how you use material like this is
part of being a trustworthy, independent service and I will make
sure, and my team will make sure that we do not use that material
ill-advisedly.
Q82 Andrew Mackinlay: The other question
is what about your capacity to criticise totalitarian regimes
in the region, for instance—and you might disagree it is
a totalitarian regime—Saudi Arabia? Are you going to be
constrained in criticising implicitly or explicitly in your news
these governments?
Mr Chapman: No, we are not going
to be constrained in criticising them. Again, this channel has
to operate in exactly the same way as the rest of the BBC on the
merits of the case and if it is justified to "criticise"
or report developments in Saudi Arabia which the authorities do
not like then we will be reporting them. There is not a special
editorial charter for the Arabic television service which is different
from the rest of the BBC, and it would, frankly, be a disaster
if there was a separate editorial charter for them because it
would undercut and undermine the very values that I think should
lie at the heart of what this service is and which audiences tell
us they want from us. So while I accept there are risks and dangers
those are risks and dangers that we will be fighting very hard
to avoid.
Q83 Mr Maples: What do we spend on the
Arabic radio service?
Mr Chapman: From memory, approximately
£16 million.
Ms Woodhams: Yes.
Q84 Mr Maples: Because it seems to me
that the budget for the television service, I will try and put
it neutrally, is not very much, £19 million a year, to run
a television service when the radio service is already costing
£16 million. I do not know what it costs to run BBC Two but
I think it is £200 or £300 million.
Mr Chapman: Yes but remember this
is not a 24-hour service for a start and that makes quite a difference.
Q85 Mr Maples: Nor is BBC Two.
Mr Chapman: But also the nature
of news services is that you gather in a lot of material for the
start of the day's output, and although you obviously need update
that, we are not expecting people to sit and watch 12 hours of
uninterrupted Arabic TV. This is going to be on a rolling format
where once a fair amount of material is already gathered it is
going to have to be repeated across the day, and most people will
tune in for half an hour to an hour to get the day's news.
Q86 Mr Maples: Like CNN?
Mr Chapman: Yes, so the BBC Two
comparison is not quite right because there you are talking about
built programmes of a distinct 30-minute or 40-minute or one hour's
duration and each one is a special programme. This will be much
more like CNN or BBC World, which is a better analogy, in terms
of bringing you news round the clock and I think it will also
be focusing very heavily on debate and discussion along with its
radio colleagues because I think one of the things that people
are really asking for from the BBC is a forum and a great chance
to debate the issues that affect both the Middle East and the
wider world.
Q87 Mr Maples: So there will be studio
discussions?
Mr Chapman: There will be studio
discussions, live link-ups with bureaux in the Middle East, there
will be a lot of reporting on the ground, not just reporting on
the ground from the Middle East—and this is very, very important—but
reporting on the ground from the world as a whole. The BBC has
a tremendous amount of material coming into London every day from
those places, as I am sure you are aware, so you have got a good
base on which to build.
Q88 Mr Maples: Will you take any of the
current BBC output of news and current affairs and dub it or translate
it into Arabic and use it or not?
Mr Chapman: I think what we will
do in terms of news coverage is use some of the individual pieces
and packages. We will have a look at that but, again, I am quite
wary about the extent to which dubbing is the answer here. You
have got to remember that you are going into a market where there
is already, as we have discussed earlier, a lot of competition,
so a lot of translated programmes which are made for a UK audience,
it feels to me instinctively anyway, does not have that much competitive
edge.
Q89 Mr Maples: You will not have the
budget to make those sort of things for yourselves?
Mr Chapman: We will have to pick
and mix a bit. Let me give an example. There is a very good series
going out on BBC Two at the moment about the history of the Middle
East and the peace discussions and about Clinton and Arafat and
so on. If we were on the air now I would be making a very strong
case that we should be putting that out on the Arabic television
service because that is beautifully made and also of fascination
to that particular audience. So I think there will be some material
like that but a lot of it will have to be generated as live news
and current affairs coverage.
Q90 Mr Maples: Can you give us some idea,
back to this global budget figure of £19 or £20 million—what
is the American station called al-Hurra or something?
Mr Chapman: Al-Hurra, yes.
Q91 Mr Maples: What are they spending
and what is al-Jazeera's budget?
Mr Chapman: It is very difficult
to know the answers to those questions because they are not very
forthcoming about it. Al-Hurra has talked about a $45 million
start-up cost but that includes all the costs to do with setting
up the station in the first place because they had nothing there
at all, it was an empty shell and they had to build all the studios,
all the technical equipment and everything, so I would guess the
running costs of al-Hurra would be in the region of $30 or $35
million a year so not unadjacent to this. Al-Jazeera (and remember
they are 24 hours and we are starting up with 12 under our proposal)
is really impossible to know what they are spending. It is not
a transparent process, if you put it like that.
Q92 Mr Maples: You really think you can
do it for this budget? I am just amazed that it is so small.
Mr Chapman: It is going to employ
150 people, which is a fair amount of people to run the 12-hour
service. It is going to have a presence in key bureaux. Remember,
we have already got a substantial presence in Cairo, we have not
got the television facilities but we have got the staff there,
we have got staff who do reporting for us and file for us (provided
they get the right training) in a number of Arab countries. We
are going to have to expand our bureaux and expand our presence
in Washington, Moscow and places like that which are really critical
to the international agenda if you like, but if you draw upon
the BBC's resources and you draw upon all that news reporting
that is going on already, if you put the new investment alongside
that, then I think we can do it.
Q93 Mr Keetch: I wish you well and I
am sure we all do in this venture. I think it is vitally important
that the BBC has a strong voice in this region, not least because
the region has demonstrated that it is receptive to satellite
broadcasts and we see that by al-Jazeera. I have two questions
for you. Firstly, you mention 150 staff, purely on a technical
basis, is it going to be easy to find those people? Are there
sufficient Arabic speakers out there? Are we going to find these
people to run this service in a professional way? My second and
perhaps more difficult question is we all know there is one Arab
street but it has lots of alleyways and side roads veering off
it and some of the more interesting stories you are going to be
reporting on will be internal stories, pressures in Saudi Arabia
for example for more reform, pressures in other parts for less
reform. Are you going to be able to get into those countries in
a sufficient way to do justice to those internal stories in a
way that al-Jazeera, frankly, sometimes does not?
Mr Chapman: On the issue of finding
staff, I accept it is a challenge. This is a large number of staff
and we cannot just take all the staff from the radio service and
put them across to television service and then have no radio service.
So I have got to find a net increase of 150 staff as a result
of this. The early indications are that many people who left the
BBC in the 1990s to go and work for other organisations, not least
al-Jazeera but others as well, whom we trained incidentally in
the beginning (this is one of the ironies of this whole story),
would be keen to return to us because they have some reservations
about where they are working at the moment and they have some
issues about editorial freedom and independence which they would
have some difficulty with. I am pretty confident that we can attract
a high calibre of staff and the numbers we need but we want to
do it in a phased way. One of the reasons we cannot get this service
on air in the middle of next year is we need to recruit quite
steadily and having recruited we then need to retrain. Even though
people may have worked for us in the past and they may be working
for television services now, it is not the same thing. I am absolutely
determined that we will have a proper training programme, particularly
on editorial values, as well as on the technology of television
and all these issues, to make sure that people will comply and
understand the BBC's editorial standards. The second question
is about what you call the alleyways and byways of the Arab world.
I think that is a challenge and I think it is an important part
of the mix of the output. Whether it will be easier to report
affairs in Saudi I would be surprised because the BBC generally
does not report affairs in Saudi. It has had difficulty in getting
access in recent times, as you know I am sure. In other parts
of the Arab world it is a mixed story. Again one of the issues
they will be watching us for is do we do that and do we do it
in a fair, impartial and even handed way. That is another reason
why it is so important that wherever our journalists come from
(and it is important also to get a mix of people, we do not just
want Egyptians or Lebanese staff or whatever working on this,
we have got to have a mix) that we go about that in a proper way.
Provided we do that, then I think we will be able to bring insight
and new perspectives, if you like, which is what the audience
want from us. I will say one final thing about the audience. The
audience in this part of the world is at home a) with the range
of services but b) also the complexity of them, it sees where
the BBC sits in it and judges us against other people and looks
for certain values and ideas and attributes there. Provided we
can bring those then they do not want us to water those down in
order to curry favour with them. That is not what they want from
the BBC. They do not want us to be partial to particular groups.
That is not what they are coming for. Plenty of other services
already do that in the Middle East. They are coming to us for
a different thing. That is why we have got to hold fast to the
values I talked about so passionately earlier on in my answers.
Q94 Mr Illsley: Forgive me if you have
covered this already, Mr Chapman, just quickly, you have mentioned
two or three times, the trustworthy, independent impartial nature
of the services of the BBC. Are you absolutely convinced that
the target audience you were just speaking about are going to
look at the TV service as being just that or, as a counterweight
to al-Jazeera which has become popular over the last three years
in relation to the Iraq war, is that audience going to look at
you a little more cynically and say this is the British Government's
way of trying to get a counterweight against al-Jazeera?
Mr Chapman: I think we did cover
this earlier on but I am happy to answer that and I repeat what
I said, which is that audiences do look to the BBC for that. They
look to the BBC as part of a mix or portfolio of services they
are going to consume. I am not saying they are going to give up
all their other viewing and just turn to the BBC. They are not
going to do that. What they do do because we know that from the
radio and new media research we do is that they see the BBC as
the gold standard against which they judge other services. So
being there does a number of things. It (a) draws them to us because
of that but (b) raises the overall standard of journalism in the
Middle East from the television satellite operations that presently
exist there, in the sense that people can see the deficiencies
of other people. I think for all those reasons I am confident
we will be able to provide a distinctive offer in the market and
people will use it.
Q95 Chairman: Can I ask you about the
memorandum you sent us. You said you hoped to achieve a market
of 25 million viewers by 2010. On what basis do you get that figure?
Is this just an aspiration or do you have any real data that can
back that up?
Mr Chapman: We looked at the extent
to which there was a likely satellite take-up by the year 2010
in all the key markets that we would expect to have impact with
and then we took a proportion of that and said that is the likely
impact we expect to have, based on the fact that something like
70 or 80% of people said they were either "likely" or
"very likely" to use the service once it was established.
We know there is a high appetite from people who have satellite
television now or who are likely to get it in the future. That
is how we worked out that figure. It is an ambition and it is
a tough one but given the growth of the satellite Arab television
market in the next five years then that would be a realistic ambition.
Q96 Chairman: And these would not be
viewers that you had, in effect, stolen from al-Jazeera? They
might well watch al-Jazeera as well?
Mr Chapman: Yes, indeed.
Q97 Chairman: But you would hope to be,
in effect, the second player in the Arab world for viewers by
then?
Mr Chapman: For some people we
would be the first player, for other people we would be the second
player. I think for the majority we may well be the second player
but that is the way people consume media in that part of the world.
They are quite varied in their usage. They do not lock themselves
on to one channel and say, "Right, I am just going to stay
with that and believe whatever it says." They move around
the market in quite a subtle and sophisticated way, often cross-referencing
and checking one story against others to see whether the channel
they often watch is actually doing it properly. In that sense
we would add something really strong because I know they will
trust us.
Q98 Ms Stuart: We certainly have had
fairly strong support for the Arabic services from other witnesses
we have had so far but I want to take you on to different territory
now. Last year as part of the Spending Review the Foreign Office
set up the Carter Review on public diplomacy. I gather you are
on the Public Diplomacy Strategy Board with observer status?
Mr Chapman: That is right, I have
observer status on that board.
Q99 Ms Stuart: We are hoping to get your
take on a number of issues because we expected to see the Carter
review at the end of September and of course it still has not
seen the light of day, which is usually an indication that a rewriting
is going on. From your position as the BBC World Service what
kind of things would you hope the Carter review will be recommending?
Mr Chapman: I am not sure that
it is my job to put the recommendations of the Carter review;
it is the Carter review's job to come up with that. What I hope
it will say—and I do not know precisely what it is going
to say—is that the strategy that the World Service is pursuing
of a multi-media range of services fit for this century, fit for
the 2010 period, is the right one -because it is the right one.
In the evidence I gave to Patrick Carter and his colleagues I
was very strong about all that and said the World Service did
need to change, it did need to prioritise, there were difficult
choices here but if it were to stay the same it would not be able
to compete properly in the top priority markets it has because
it needs to compete in a multi-media way and it needs to shift
resources in a way that can enable it to do that. That is what
has ensued if you like and what we announced on 25 October was
that sort of strategy.
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