Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q340 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick:
Who do you feel now has the ownership of this responsibility?
Is it the BBC Trust, which is going to be undertaking an objective
review of what has happened, or is it the BBC management who have
the editorial responsibility? Where do the ownership and values
lie?
Ms Boaden: In a sense the ownership of the BBC
rests with the Trust under the new organisation in that they represent
the licence fee payer and therefore they are the scrutineers of
all our values, but it is absolutely an obligation on BBC management
to fulfil what we have said we will fulfil and probably more.
A lot of that is not just about training; it is also about the
right sorts of conversation. It is actually about this thing I
was talking to you about, the young Blue Peter researcher
feeling confident that she can ask a difficult question but also
knowing that under no circumstances does she fake something, even
if we fall off air. That is the thing that really is the cultural
problem, that somehow you go to that extent to keep the programme
going. That is barmy. Nigel's example I think is a classic. Why
did they not just say, "We have not had any reviews this
week so we have asked the producer to do the review", or,
"We have asked a colleague", or, "The presenter
is going to do a review". This feeling that they have got
to stick to a particular format is silly.
Q341 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You are Director of News.
Ms Boaden: I am.
Q342 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Whom do you report to on the board?
Ms Boaden: I report to Mark Byford who is the
Director of BBC Journalism and the Deputy Director General.
Q343 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You have told the Committee, very fairly, the chairmanship you
have. A problem arises which may be either negligence or indiscipline
or incompetence, which in any other business might be dealt with
reasonably by the management in some way, but you have the other
competition about whether it is a newsworthy story. In deciding
on these recent stories, for instance, did you consult Mark Byford
before you decided what order of priority you gave them on the
news?
Ms Boaden: No, absolutely not. I did not interfere
in any way. I trust my editors to understand news judgments and
it would have been wholly inappropriate for me to start interfering
on a story about—
Q344 Lord King of Bridgwater:
So you had a story that involved serious failings by some of the
employees of the BBC and you did not report it to your senior
management?
Ms Boaden: No, no. With respect, it was senior
management who revealed the serious failings.
Q345 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Which you were not aware of?
Ms Boaden: I was not aware of, as with Nigel,
until they were revealed. The point is, they were revealed by
senior management to us at roughly the same sort of time as they
were revealed to the press.
Q346 Lord King of Bridgwater:
But the BBC is a priceless national asset, as we know, as is trust
in the BBC as the public sector broadcaster and the image of our
country in many ways around the world.
Ms Boaden: I completely agree.
Q347 Lord King of Bridgwater:
And you take it on yourself to run a story that may be extremely
damaging to the reputation of the BBC without consulting your
immediate boss or the Director General?
Ms Boaden: As long as they know about what has
gone wrong, which of course they did because they were the people
who gave the newsroom the information. It would be extremely damaging
to the BBC if senior management interfered in our editorial processes.
Q348 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Have they ever said to you, "You should not have run that"?
Ms Boaden: No, never, absolutely never. I have
been doing this job for three years and however uncomfortable
it has been for senior management—and during the charter
renewal period there were programmes on Panorama, for example,
the investigation into David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa
Jowell, which was not, you could argue, a very easy programme—not
a whisper or a word was ever said to me about it. That independence
is sacrosanct.
Q349 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
My question is not entirely unrelated to Lord King's but perhaps
takes it a bit wider. I gather from the answers you have just
given that judging whether or not a matter is in the public interest
is an editorial judgment.
Ms Boaden: Yes.
Q350 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
What I was going to ask you before finding out that that is the
precise situation is how do you make those judgments because the
public interest can be audience ratings?
Ms Boaden: Yes, it can be, but for us it has
to be a bit more than that. We could do the most scurrilous journalism
and we would get lots of people watching or listening but that
is not our job. Public interest for all of us in this room is
quite a complex thing. It is about sometimes making judgments
that lots of people do not see are necessarily in the public interest
at all because they conflate public interest with being interested
in it. There are stories we do in news, for example, on China
or on India, where an awful lot of the public out there do not
automatically think, "This is very interesting", but
clearly it is in the broad public interest to educate and inform
people about all sorts of stories that have a big impact. The
thing you have to remember about the BBC is that we need to understand
a lot about our audiences. We need to understand their patterns,
their moods, what they watch, what stories they are interested
in, and then we need to use that but never be led by it. We must
never be led simply by what the audience tells us because we get
the licence fee to go the extra mile. We have a thing called "the
Pulse", which is an overnight survey for television at the
moment. It is an online panel of 15,000 consumers who tell us
what stories they find interesting, what they would like to know
about, and it is absolutely fascinating but you cannot let your
news judgments be dictated by that because otherwise you are a
market-led organisation, in which case you give back the licence
fee. You have to be making judgments based on your values.
Q351 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I just want to follow up one point that I think you mentioned,
that as far as training was concerned you would bring in the independent
sector as far as you could, because clearly the charter review
and all the rest of it has been encouraging the BBC to involve
more independent contributors, so how is that dealt with?
Ms Boaden: It is not my specialism, I must say,
because we do not deal very much with independents, but we will
be liaising closely with PACT, the television independent organisation,
and radio does not have an equivalent but we will be talking to
the radio independents and working through with them what they
think is the best way to get this training to their people. It
is expensive training so some of them will be worried about the
cost and the time. The other thing is that the television industry
is incredibly fluid, particularly in genres like drama and comedy
and entertainment. When I was a reporter I worked for an independent
for a brief spell. I was a presenter and what really struck me
was that halfway through the production schedule all these young
researchers were on the phone trying to find more work, they were
not focusing, so this fluidity is something that if we want these
very important values and ethics to be embedded we have to start
dealing with it, and it is not easy and we cannot force the independent
sector to do it but my sense is that they will be very open to
this.
Q352 Lord Maxton:
Your own area has not been totally free of this.
Ms Boaden: No.
Q353 Lord Maxton:
Even just last week you had to apologise to the First Minister
in Scotland, Alex Salmond—
Ms Boaden: Quite right too.
Q354 Lord Maxton:
—about Jeremy Paxman, not an inexperienced researcher, for
the misinterpretation of facts. You also, however, in the same
way when the running order of the Queen documentary was misinterpreted,
did that on a story with Gordon Brown.
Ms Boaden: We did, a Newsnight film.
Q355 Lord Maxton:
Can I ask whether you actually apologised to the Prime Minister
for that?
Ms Boaden: I have not apologised to the Prime
Minister because the complaint did not come from the Prime Minister.
The complaint came from the Treasury and we have apologised to
the Treasury.
Q356 Lord Maxton:
You have?
Ms Boaden: Yes.
Q357 Bishop of Manchester:
Just to go back to the public interest point, could you explain
how it is in the public interest to show on the news bulletins
some of the footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein and also
the coverage of the July 7 bomb attacks? The BBC has apologised
for using some of the harrowing footage of an injured man being
taken into the Royal London Hospital. Interestingly, that particular
item on the news was covered by other broadcasting companies but
they were not accused of using that wrongly. Ofcom actually accused
the BBC of using those pictures generically, saying the accompanying
commentary did not reflect the seriousness of the situation. It
just seems odd to me that if you really do take seriously the
concept of public interest in the news items like that should
somehow get through the net.
Ms Boaden: I think they are two very different
items, with respect. The latter was clearly an error and it was
an error that we should not have made. For those that do not know,
there was somebody in the background of a shot who was, I think,
very near death and it was used. It should not have been used
and we apologised for it. The pictures of Saddam Hussein I do
not think we should apologise for. We thought very long and hard
about it. It was a historic moment. We did not, of course, show
the hanging or the body after the hanging. We gave many warnings.
We used Jon Simpson, one of our most experienced people, to set
up the piece. We were aware that it was over the Christmas holidays
so we needed to be extra careful because News 24 might
be on when children were in the room when normally they would
never have seen News 24, and what was interesting about
the Saddam Hussein story was that when the audio came, because
do you remember initially it was just silent shots, which showed
the rather ghastly shouting at him that took place, that changed
our understanding of that event? It became a very different thing
and I think it was entirely in the public interest and if the
BBC had censored those shots we would have been very severely
and rightly criticised.
Q358 Bishop of Manchester:
But how then did July 7 get through that rather rigorous screening?
Ms Boaden: People make mistakes. You of all
people should know that people make mistakes. I think it was an
error of judgment. The sin may not be great but we did apologise
for it.
Q359 Bishop of Manchester:
And the excuse given was that the contents of the tape had not
been checked thoroughly, which I think is one that is used quite
often.
Ms Boaden: I think you need to remember what
was going on on 7 July. This was a catastrophic, extraordinary
event. We sent people out. We did not even know what people were
going into. We had to get the chemical suits out for people because
we did not know if chemical bombs had gone off. Quite a lot of
our people we could not even locate because, of course, the phones
went down, and in that kind of intense pressure it is never an
excuse because a news organisation should always aim for 100%
perfection, but I would argue that that particularly, deeply regrettable
as it was, was understandable within that context.
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