Examination of Witnesses (Questions 325
- 339)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q325 Chairman: You
are very welcome. You know, I think, that the Communications Committee
have launched an inquiry into Media Ownership and the News. What
we are looking at is essentially the impact of the concentration
of media ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion, but
we are also looking at a whole range of associated points—how
and why have the agendas of news providers changed, how has the
process of news gathering changed. It is with that in mind that
we would like to open our questioning today. We have got very
full biographies of you all, most of which doubtless you will
deny, but we know exactly who you are so I will not ask you to
introduce yourselves. We were going to meet previously but we
were very glad that Alan Johnston was released. Perhaps I could
turn to events which are not quite so happy for the BBC and the
reputation of the BBC. Do you think you have suffered a blow because
of what has been happening with these radio phone-in shows?
Ms Boaden: Radio and television, yes, I do think
we have suffered a blow. I think the way we are trying to deal
with it should mitigate that blow, but undoubtedly a lot of our
staunchest supporters—and I talk about family and friends
here—are shocked and disappointed. They expected more from
the BBC and for whatever reason they feel let down. That is the
kind of thing you have to build up over a period of time to renew
the trust. Up to now our trust ratings have been higher than anybody
else's and it will be interesting to see in the long term, depending
on how we respond to this current crisis, whether that trust is
restored, but I do not think we can dodge the fact that people
feel let down.
Q326 Chairman:
What do you think the causes were? What do you believe the root
problems were?
Ms Boaden: I think they are probably multi-faceted.
As you know, we are doing an investigation into each one of the
specifics and I am not going to pre-judge those because clearly
disciplinary action may be involved and it would be very unfair
on an individual to talk about those things. However, somewhere
in some parts of the BBC "the show must go on" became
the cultural norm at any cost. It is very interesting to read
the Ofcom report on the Blue Peter phone-in fiasco, which
I did, because I wanted to see if there were lessons for News
in it, and actually I think there are. Although this was entirely
about the phone-in programme and a relatively young researcher,
what surprised me was that when she did her strategy, using a
child as the winner who was not a real child because the phone
lines had gone down, this was her planned contingency. This was
not something sparked off; this was a little girl thinking, "If
it all goes wrong this is what I will do", and I think the
lesson there is that if you manage any kind of team you have to
make enough space for junior people to be able to ask awkward,
difficult questions or rather simple and naïve questions,
and if they are not coming forward you have to think through all
the things that could go wrong so that someone does not find themselves
in that position. You have to create a culture where people can
say, "If it goes wrong what do I do?", not, "If
it goes wrong I will just do this thing that is not actually truthful".
It was very revealing, and I said to my team, "This is the
lesson we have to take from the Blue Peter incident, that
we have to create a managerial culture where boundaries and values
are perfectly clear but where there is enough scope for rather
inexperienced people to be able to ask questions about process
and procedure if things go wrong".
Q327 Chairman:
In our inquiry we are dealing with the provision of news. We do
not want to go into all the detail of the phone-in competitions
unless it is relevant, but just let me ask a question on journalism.
We all heard this morning that the Managing Director of GMTV has
resigned following an investigation by BBC's Panorama.
It is a bit ironic, is it not, that similar things were happening
in the BBC?
Ms Boaden: If you saw that Panorama programme,
we were very tough on Blue Peter, very, very tough. It
was one of the case studies and I was extremely happy with that
programme because we did not spare anybody. In fact, there was
some debate in other parts of the BBC that perhaps we had been
over-harsh on Blue Peter. I do not think we were harsh
at all on them. I think we dealt with them fairly in the way that
we dealt with each of these cases, so in terms of a piece of journalism
at that point the only case we knew of was the Blue Peter
case and it absolutely had a central part in Panorama.
Q328 Chairman:
You have half answered my question, but what would be the process
if Panorama came to you and said, "We have got wide
suspicions that the BBC is cutting corners in this particular
area"? Would you say, "Fine. You go in and investigate
it"?
Ms Boaden: You would have to put it in terms
of public interest, "Is this a minor infringement or is this
something absolutely scandalous?". If you remember, we did
throughout the Hutton experience report on ourselves very freely
and fairly and with great discomfort to parts of BBC management.
The John Ware Panorama and the way the BBC handled the
Hutton investigation was extremely uncomfortable for some members
of senior management at that time, so I think that is proof that
we are capable of examining our own failures with the same scrutiny
and rigour that we would examine anybody else's.
Q329 Chairman:
So if evidence was picked up by Panorama or any other BBC
investigative programme that something was going wrong in the
BBC, you would expect them to investigate it?
Ms Boaden: I would expect them to investigate
it. Clearly I would have to decide then if I were, as it were,
editorial director or manager, because you have to have clear
lines. What happened during the Hutton experience, when that Panorama
was going on, was that the managerial structure was kept entirely
separate from the editorial processes. That is what you have to
do if you are examining yourself, but yes, clearly, if there was
a scandal within the BBC that it was in the public interest to
reveal and our people got it first, I think it would be obligatory
on us to at least investigate and see if there was a programme
in it.
Mr Chapman: Can I just make a point about transparency
and culture, which is what you are driving at, I think, is that
we have to make sure that our producers and our editors understand
that in live television and radio, and we do thousands of hours
of live television and radio, things do go wrong and there is
no loss of face to say to audiences, "Right: we need to change
what we are going to do now. That particular facet of the programme
in which we were going to bring you in in five minutes we are
going to have to delay or postpone until next week", because
that sense of transparency is the right thing to do and it is
also in a culture where audiences increasingly understand how
media works and they are often the creators of content themselves,
so they do understand this in a way that I think perhaps audiences
did not before, and if you can bring that about then that temptation
to cut corners, to keep the show on at any cost, will be watered
down. I think Helen is right: that is the tension that we have
discovered in the last few weeks.
Q330 Chairman:
The point I am really getting at is that we had the Editor of
The Times here last week and we asked him about the newspaper's
policy on reporting BSkyB, a part of the News Corps company, and
I think his reply was basically that he would that as he would
regard any other company, and I think what I am asking you is,
if you found or suspected that there was something going wrong
in the BBC World Service, and Nigel Chapman is sitting next to
you, you would feel no compunction in ordering an investigation
into that?
Ms Boaden: Yes, I would have no compunction
if it was in the public interest to do that. If anyone saw the
way we reported last week's horrible time for the BBC, the six
cases coming out and Mark Thompson, we led the Ten O'Clock
News on it and we were open, tough and challenging of the
BBC.
Q331 Chairman:
But that is after it has happened, that is after it has been revealed,
is it not? What I am wondering is whether you would do the investigative
bit and reveal.
Ms Boaden: Yes, I think we would. The down side
of it being our company is that people can get very insular and
start to think that something in the BBC is more important than
it actually is to the rest of the world. We are very self-centred
often in large organisations. But if we did find prima facie
evidence that something scandalous was going on and it was in
the public interest for Panorama to investigate in the
BBC, yes, of course. That is why we get the money.
Q332 Chairman:
It has very little to do with our focus but in fact the World
Service has been one of the companies, has it not, with your World
Service programme White Label?
Mr Chapman: Yes, that is right.
Q333 Chairman:
How did that come about? What happened?
Mr Chapman: Put very simply, White Label
was a half-hour programme that went out every week which looked
at new record releases from the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
It was a pretty simple format, to be honest, and it has now been
discontinued. It stopped broadcasting in 2006 but it was obviously
caught as part of the trawl and the trawl ran from 2005 up until
the present day. This show asked its listeners to send in short
reviews of records they had heard from the previous week and then
normally the show would talk about one of them; they would effectively
read them out. On occasion they either had too few sensible reviews
to read out or they had reviews coming from the same sort of people,
like a sort of club, and they wanted to widen the group, so I
am very sorry to say, to our great dismay when we discovered it,
that not very often but on more than one occasion the producers
made up the review and ascribed it to a fictitious name, which
is clearly deceiving the audience and clearly wrong and clearly
damaging. When I heard about it at the end of last week I was
really shocked because it is just inexcusable.
Q334 Chairman:
And this was not an outside company? This was actually being done
inside the BBC?
Mr Chapman: This was being done by the BBC Audio
and Music team, who make many programmes for the World Service.
Obviously, the news programmes are made by BBC News but they make
quite a lot of factual programmes, they make music programmes,
they make—
Q335 Chairman:
Is it a bureaucratic operation?
Mr Chapman: It is a BBC operation, yes. It is
quite wrong and it is an example of people getting into a mindset,
getting into a sort of format in their head which is, "We
need a review this week of this particular record and we are going
to have it by hell or high water. If we do not get it legitimately
occasionally we have to make it up". To be honest, this programme
was on the fringes of the World Service; it was not its core activity,
but that does not excuse it in any way, it does not excuse it
one iota. It just brings home to me that every output of the World
Service has to live up to the highest standards and any less than
that is completely unacceptable. I do not know what the damage
is going to be in terms of the brand over time. The trust reputation
of the World Service around the world is very high. I hope people
will see it as an aberration, not a trend or a pattern, and we
will move on, but the staff are very dismayed about it.
Q336 Chairman:
When did you yourself discover it?
Mr Chapman: I first got an inkling of it about
ten days ago, and obviously it was confirmed in its details two
days before Mark Byford and the Director General went to the Trust
and talked about the six incidents. The trawl deadline was coming
and, to be fair to staff who worked on it, they confessed. We
would not have found out otherwise but one of them came forward
and said he had something he wanted to share with his senior management
about something which had been going on in the past, and obviously
we then talked to other members of staff—it is a small team,
three or four. They confirmed it had been going on and then we
felt, because there was a competitive element there because the
good review winner got a CD, so it fitted with the criteria of
the other findings, and therefore it was entirely proper and appropriate
to come clean about it.
Q337 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
You have been remarkably candid, honest and transparent in your
responses so far. One of the things that people are asking about
is the assertion by the Director General that all BBC staff are
now going to be trained in ethics and independence. If we think
back to a time when I was with the BBC not too long ago, under
the previous Director General, there was the creation of the BBC
values and one BBC culture, which have been referred to, and that
the foundation value of the BBC was trust. What has happened to
that?
Ms Boaden: What, people misunderstanding trust?
I think it is very important to remember that most people in the
BBC behave honourably and transparently and most people are incredibly
upset and ashamed and angry about what has happened. It was very
interesting. I went round the newsroom on the day of Mark going
to the Trust and there was a real sense of sadness in the room
because people knew the BBC brand, as it were, had been let down
and these examples had let down people's connection to the BBC,
so my instinct is that fundamentally BBC staff have a very strong
commitment to maintaining that trust and now it has been damaged.
Repairing it, as much as you could ever repair damaged trust,
is a tough thing to do.
Q338 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
But that was very much a cultural drive that the previous Director
General, Greg Dyke, put in place and some would say that that
drive has been somewhat abandoned in the course of the last couple
of years. Are there any links between the absence of eternal ethics
training over the last period of years and these seven incidents
which have come out?
Ms Boaden: We have to remember that we had no
ethics training until Greg Dyke started it. It was sort of in
the DNA of the organisation. We did not even articulate our values
until the Making It Happen programme. It was the first time we
had said, "We have got these values and we are going to put
them down on a piece of paper", which is what we did, and
everyone said, "That is a bit obvious", but until you
articulate them it is not obvious and you do not know what you
all share. I think there have been a lot of other things going
on. You have to remember the transition from Greg Dyke to Mark
Thompson was unexpected. We then went through a very powerful
value-for-money process which absorbed a lot of time. I do not
think commitment to the values disappeared in any way, shape or
form, but I think self-awareness and talk about them probably
did diminish, except, of course, in journalism, where, because
of the Hutton situation, we went through a great deal of training
about honesty, ethics and transparency. Every single person in
BBC journalism went on a compulsory course, which was a fantastic
course, called Stories, Sources and Scoops, where a real-life
scenario was played to a mixed group of people, I did it too,
and through different stages they had to work out what judgments
they might have made and people came to very different judgments.
The point was to get people to think, and you cannot dip people
into honesty, ethics and integrity. You have to do it like you
do with doctors. You have to go into scenarios, you have to get
them to think about their judgments, you have to get them to be
open-minded about other people's information and experience so
that they will make a journey, as it were, and that is what the
new course will be. At the moment it is not everybody in the BBC;
it is everybody involved in content, and it is going to be quite
a challenge to develop, we were talking about it yesterday, because
finding scenarios that work for people in journalism, real scenarios
because they have to be credible, and also for people who work
in comedy is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, so it is a
tough call.
Q339 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Should you not also include people who are involved in the interpretation
of content, such as the recent instances to do with the Queen?
Ms Boaden: Yes, I do. Eventually I suspect we
may apply it to everybody but we are starting with people directly
involved with content, which includes commissioning and also includes,
as far as we can, the independent sector. Ethics training is always
interesting and challenging and many professions do it as standard,
and in journalism we do it as pretty standard, but clearly we
need to expand that.
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