Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-28)
MS LYSE
DOUCET AND
MR DAVID
MUNK
6 JUNE 2006
Q20 Mr Davies: I am simply saying
it is very hypocritical to ignore that whole dimension, which
is what has been happening in this morning's discussion. I believe
in a free press and I believe in the invisible hand, and, therefore,
if everybody pursues their own commercial interest, at the end
of the day we probably would have a better world than if they
do not, but there are these commercial interests there, are there
not?
Ms Doucet: I did say that the
business of some papers is to sell newspapers. That is the reality.
But I will let the newspapers respond.
Mr Munk: You could have picked
two better targets than the BBC and The Guardian when it
comes to that. Certainly at The Guardian, although we are
run commercially, obviously, we are run by a trust. We are in
a slightly different situation than a—
Q21 Mr Davies: Mr Munk, I wish I
had had the Murdoch press in front of me. I agree, you are among
the most high-minded people in the media, nevertheless, you this
morning are representing your industry.
Mr Munk: I would not claim to
do that. Having worked on a tabloid as well, I do think the tabloids
do a brilliant job in some instances, and obviously they fall
down, like we all do, in other instances. However, I would say
that our job is not to bore our readers. It really is not. We
have to have in our minds the fact that what they are going to
read in the morning is going to interest them to some extent.
It may not be everything. It may not be 40% or it may not be even
10% of what is in our paper that they are actually interested
in, but there will be something that will interest them, that
will make them buy the paper the next day. Of course, that is
a commercial decision to some extent, but if the question is:
"Do you put stories in the newspaper which you think are
commercially far more popular than other stories?" the answer
is: "Absolutely not."
Q22 Mr Singh: You touched slightly
on this a moment ago; the relationship between the media and the
humanitarian agencies and the NGOs. What kind of relationship
is that? How closely do you work with them, if you do work with
them? Is it a one-way relationship where they need you or is it
more symbiotic than that?
Ms Doucet: My feeling is that
by covering more and more humanitarian disasters we need each
other. We need them for information of what is happening on the
ground and we need them to give their assessment of the importance
of the disaster. In my position as presenter I need to talk to
someone and my colleagues need to do stories, so we need them.
They need us because they also have to put their message out and
they want the world to know about this disaster. They need to
raise money so they need a voice; they need someone to convey
their message, and that is why, as I mentioned earlier, it is
in everyone's interests that we understand each other better.
We have to understand how they work; they have to understand how
we work. It is very imperfect and I know they sometimes call us
parasites and cynics and we call them the same things, but what
we are also seeing, and I notice it in the BBC where we have a
developing world correspondent and we have people who are more
specialised in these things who spend time with the agencies getting
to know them better, a better understanding of how they work or
do not work. It is a process. We are both part of the same problem,
if you like.
Mr Munk: I would pretty much agree
with that. I would say that we have a good relationship with most
agencies in this country and I think they provide us with very
valuable information. It is not information that we just take
and we bung into the newspaper; it is something which we would
use as a foundation or as a start of a process. We then look at
what they are saying and if we think what they are saying is valid
and it is not being reported then we will go after it and see
what we get out of it in terms of a story, ie, is there
a story to be told there! You now have agencies working a bit
like the media anyway. Many of the people who work for them are
former media workers, former press workers and journalists, and
they do tend to know what newspapers would want and they do provide
you with a certain amount of information which is easily understandable
for some journalists, especially on complex subjects, and they
can point you in the right direction. At the end of the day, however,
you have to take that information and put it through your own
processes, and I am sure that the BBC would do the same.
Ms Doucet: Can I just mention
one point because it is part of the question. We should bear in
mind when we are looking at this in the year 2006 that technology
has transformed the way humanitarian disasters come into our living
rooms and be conscious that we can now take a satellite dish right
into the heart of the disaster, which means people will know what
is or what is not happening. Similarly with the Internet the BBC
now has call-in programmes where we bring a satellite to an area
and we get people who have been affected by the disaster to come
and talk to us and to talk to other people around the world, so
it is not just us covering the stories, people will tell their
own stories through cyberspace, through satellite technology.
I think this is transforming. It puts greater pressure on aid
agencies to also be on the spot; it puts pressure on journalists
to try to get as close as possible to what is happening. This
is the background to the kind of discussion we are having today.
Q23 Mr Singh: Is the relationship
in any sense critical in that we all assume that what aid agencies
are doing is good but is it necessarily good? Are they overlapping
and wasting money or wasting resources?
Ms Doucet: We do not assume it
is good. We assume that they have a job to do and part of our
job is to see how well they are doing the job they are doing.
If they stand up and say, "Oh yes, we brought all the blankets",
and we go and see the blankets are not there, we have to report
that. That is our job.
Chairman: Joan Ruddock?
Q24 Joan Ruddock: I was going to
ask you that very point really because I think David said, "We
want to tell the story straight," and Lyse said, "We
like to get it right." I was really going to ask you, not
everything goes right. You sound very much as though you are reporting
the facts and that is all there is to it, but there are judgments
to be made about how the various humanitarian actors have performed,
what have they done that is right, what have they done that is
wrong and you can be a serious force for their accountability
if you report in that way. I wonder whether you think you have
that responsibility and whether in all that is going on you ever
have the real time to ask yourselves those questions?
Mr Munk: We do not have much time,
but I think you are right and it was something which was raised
at the time of the tsunami. I think Kofi Annan said, "Look,
all these donations, all this money has been promised, billions
of it, but how much of this will ever get through?" whether
it be through agencies or whether it be through governments or
whether it be through the UN. It is obviously an interesting idea
to track that to see what has happened to it. It is a process
which we followed. I think in the tsunami, especially in Indonesia,
those promises were far better observed. I think you are absolutely
right, on the one hand, if you use agencies you cannot be uncritical
of them, otherwise you fall into the same trap of somebody is
telling you a story and you are just bunging it into the newspaper.
If there is criticism to be made I think we should be there criticising
them. I think there was an example a few weeks ago where something
had happened in Indonesia with Oxfam and Oxfam had a local staff
problem with donations. I am not quite sure what the story was
but they put out a press release saying, "We have seen a
problem here and we are going to sort it out," which I think
they did, but I think that is something which should be reported
as well.
Q25 Joan Ruddock: It is not just
the one agency that maybe does something wrong and has a problem.
There is also the big question of 300 agencies in one place, does
that make sense? Is this an issue? It is not a story that has
been told in the media.
Ms Doucet: In the tsunami there
were cases where agencies were rushing to help, wanting to be
there and in some cases wanting to be seen to be there. Journalists
cannot be everywhere so they have to report on what is around
them, what they have access to, what they hear about, and sometimes
these are just cameos. It might be just one agency but it may
be reflective of a broader story which if the journalist had time
and could stay there they could see this agency was not doing
what it said it was doing but also how many are in that same situation.
Does this tell the story of what is happening across the territory
or is it just an isolated incident? These are questions that the
journalists have to ask. Of course, there is a difference between
the news of the day, which is observational, then there is the
news of the week, and then are the documentaries and then there
is going back, as David said, and they have been there for two
weeks in Congo gathering material and they will have more considered
pieces than when just arriving and seeing what is in front of
them.
Q26 Joan Ruddock: Have either of
you got an example of where you got it wrong?
Mr Munk: We get it wrong every
day, I am sure.
Q27 Joan Ruddock: But an example
where you know you can say, "We got that wrong. That was
not like we said it was"?
Mr Munk: I cannot think of something
off the top of my head. There was a story which I think was wrong
generally. The perception of Niger was slightly different from
the reality and I think the famine/disaster in Niger was perhaps
more of a political story than it was an environmental story.
I am not sure that everybody picked up on the nuance of that.
I am sure there must be plenty of occasions where newspapers and
the media have got things wrong, they have misread the situation
but not, I do not think, to the extent it has fundamentally changed
the story and changed what has actually happened on the ground.
Ms Doucet: The first draft of
history goes through a lots of drafts before it gets to the encyclopaedic
truth.
Q28 Chairman: Can I thank you very
much. You can see that when you get journalists and politicians
together the time-frame expands! Thank you for sharing with us
how you do it. The reality of this report is that we have to get
our information from you and from the aid agencies. We will be
visiting Pakistan, interestingly enough, and we had a discussion
about what we should do and where we should go. Whether we have
done the right thing is for others to call, but hopefully we will
be able to see something in the way of follow-up. I think what
you have said to us will at least help us out on the right kind
of questions to inform our report. We really appreciate you both
coming here and being so frank and responding to Quentin's challenge,
which really was addressed to people who are not—
Ms Doucet: All the points were
very valid and I think it is very good to have this exchange.
We all are actors in these situations working together and the
better we understand how we do what we do rather than just having
slanging matches, the better we will all be able to do our work.
In some ways we are doing very similar work but so long as we
understand what each of our roles is then we can all get on and
do them, as bad as some of them are!
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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