Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 399)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q380 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Are there any staffers, by the way, in those bureaux?
Ms Boaden: Yes, there is a mixture. There will
be some local hires and then there will be a lot of staff people.
Think about Alastair Leithead in Kabul. He is on the staff.
Q381 Lord Maxton:
BBC World, of course, is the one area that is not funded by the
licence fee; it is funded commercially through advertising. Does
this make any difference to the way in which you look at news?
Does it change your perspectives at all?
Ms Kevill: No, it does not, in the sense that
I am essentially a publisher of Helen's output, so to that extent
the core values that run through the news on BBC World are absolutely
the core values that Helen and her management team instil in all
journalists that her area runs. My role is in a sense a strategic
one. It is certainly to ensure that there is a separation between
the commercial and the editorial and to ensure that those two
things remain separate and that there is no influence from the
commercial on the editorial, but my role is also to ensure that
we continue to make money as a company and therefore I will make
strategic decisions about what we might want to develop in our
journalism. For example, we have more business on BBC World which
is also something where we know that in commercial terms we are
likely to get more money around it than we would if we were investing
in something else. We do take some strategic decisions like that
but broadly speaking the content is completely separate from any
commercial pressures and comes from Helen's area and it is protected
as Helen was describing.
Q382 Lord Maxton:
I have been asking this question for a long time. I am never quite
sure what audience BBC World is aiming at. Sky News is quite clear.
It sells abroad to where they think British audiences are going
to be on holiday or on business. You do not do that, do you?
Ms Kevill: No. Our aim is not an expat audience.
We have 75 million who watch worldwide. We are much more in line
with the World Service. We are about reaching out to people all
around the world from whatever background or nationality who turn
to us for news which is trustworthy, impartial, accurate, fair,
all those core values that we all stand for here. That is what
we aim to give our audience. It is not aimed at expats. We cover
British news pretty well because we obviously feed off the domestic
output, so we have done quite a lot on the floods recently. We
do cover it where we feel it is a story of significance but it
is not our prime aim to give English news to English people abroad.
Q383 Lord Maxton:
Therefore, if I may, I will switch to Helen Boaden and ask whether
or not you have considered and whether it is possible to sell
BBC News 24 to, if you like, the expat audience or would
you not be allowed to do that?
Ms Boaden: I do not think we are allowed to
do that at the moment because it would be seen as abusing our
competitive position. It has genuinely never come up since I have
been in this job but I imagine it was considered, almost certainly
by Greg Dyke who was very entrepreneurial, and may well have been
turned down. We have to be very careful even with BBC World that
the separation between them and us is very clear.
Q384 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I think you have answered quite a lot of my question but perhaps
you could encapsulate it very quickly. What say does the BBC executive
board have over the content and editorial direction of BBC News
content?
Ms Boaden: As I have said, the Trust is there
and the executive board are below it and the journalism board
is below that, so if there are big issues of policy they will
go to the executive board, but in terms of day-to-day editorial
and editorial direction that is left to the journalism board and
then to my board and teams. If, for example, we were planning
to invest a lot of money in more interactivity, those plans would
be approved by the journalism board, the executive and then, of
course, finally by the Trust. You lay out the strategy and they
have a say in that sense.
Q385 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
Just thinking of some of the wider criticism that has been made
of the BBC because of the fact that they have a guaranteed income
and so on, they spend quite a lot of their time on air advertising
their own programmes, and I am thinking of Panorama, et
cetera. How would you respond to that?
Ms Boaden: There are two things. Having been
a controller of Radio 4, one of the key lessons you learn as a
controller is that the audience often gets very frustrated because
it does not think it gets enough information about where things
are on both radio and television, and it is one of the ironies
that if you consume a lot of, say, Radio 4 or BBC One, you get
jolly frustrated with seeing those trails, but if, like the majority
of people, you dip in and out you still feel you were not told
that this programme you wanted to watch or listen to is on. On
Panorama you may remember that there was a great debate
three years ago about where Panorama should sit in terms
of the schedule, and it was at that point kept at 10.15 pm and
it was decided that we would do a lot of trailing for it to remind
people that it was there. The slot was then switched to Monday
evenings, mid evening, with a new controller who felt it was an
important programme and it was reduced to half an hour but trying
to get a broader spectrum of people interested in the Panorama
subjects, and to remind people of this new slot there was again
a lot of trailing. My own view, and this is a personal view, is
that we have come to a point where people do know it is there
and we can reduce some of that trailing. I think there is a point
where it feels overheated.
Q386 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
But bearing in mind, of course, that the commercial sector would
be saying exactly the same thing about their range of programmes,
do you think there is any justification in the criticisms they
are making that they have to use their valuable time, as it were?
Ms Boaden: It is what you are trying to do.
What we are trying to do is educate the audience about where programmes
might be that they want to watch. We are not doing it to make
money. We are doing it as an information service.
Q387 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
But so are they presumably.
Ms Boaden: Well, no. Clearly it is an information
service but they have to deliver for their shareholders, so those
slots are absolutely critical. What you trail somewhere can make
a difference to the audience numbers in television terms and that
can make a difference to advertisers. There is nothing wrong with
that. It is just a different place to start from.
Q388 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Can I just say on the matter of trails that there were four trails
before News at Ten, I think it was last Thursday, and I
nearly threw a brick through the screen because I want to get
other news, but that is just me being old-fashioned.
Ms Boaden: I will take it back to the head of
marketing.
Q389 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Can we have a look at journalists' independence? The trust, to
which you attach great importance and quite rightly you have to
earn, is principally built upon the independence and integrity
of the journalists you employ. That is absolutely core to that,
I would argue. Do you see any value in finding a way of guaranteeing
that independence to BBC journalists in terms of the contract
you use for them and for editors, say?
Ms Boaden: When BBC people sign a contract with
us they sign up to support our values. I think it would be very
difficult and could end up feeling rather Stalinist if we did
more than that.
Q390 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Could you give us that in writing, just give us a quote from the
contract document? That would help enormously.
Ms Boaden: We can do that, yes. Recently we
imposed a series of what many regard as rather draconian limits
on what people can do for newspapers, just on journalists, because
we felt it was so important that their independence and impartiality
were maintained across the piste. Any news and current affairs
journalist or person as presenter who is associated primarily
with the BBC is very limited in what they can write about and
absolutely has to steer away from expressing a personal view on
an issue of controversy.
Q391 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Andrew Marr does a column.
Ms Boaden: Andrew Marr does a diary column for
The Telegraph, and in fact that is outside our guidelines
and the reason that has gone on is that he was in a contract but
that will come to an end at some point and that gets vetted by
our people, supervised, and we have made it very clear that that
must never stray into areas of controversy.
Q392 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
I have a high regard for Andrew Marr.
Ms Boaden: It is a terrific column.
Q393 Chairman:
Even after you have vetted it?
Ms Boaden: When I say "vetted" I have
slightly given you the wrong impression. I do not see it but we
have somebody who does. Andy is so good and so experienced. He
entirely understands the parameters of this.
Q394 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
So as far as you are concerned, and I take your point about not
wanting to be accused of being Stalinist, do you think that the
words you have in your standard contracts—
Ms Boaden: I cannot remember what they are.
I know we do expect people to live by our standards and people
do take impartiality very seriously. It is one of those things
where you have to keep banging on about it because people can
slip unconsciously into a particular approach to the subject and
that is part of my job and the job of my team. That is one of
the reasons we have my meeting every morning, to say, "Was
that fair? Was that unbiased or biased? Did we, without meaning
to, slip into a certain sort of approach?".
Mr Chapman: The phrase I often use is "diversity
of view". Is the diversity of view that is relevant to this
story being properly reflected at the time? It may not all be
reflected in the same hour because that would be impossible, but
is it being reflected at the time across the output? The World
Service has similar editorial meetings, the nine o'clock meetings.
At the heart of Bush House is the editorial machine and these
are the things that are batted around for about 30 minutes every
morning on angles and participants and why have we not heard from
X and do we get on with Z and what is the core thrust of this
story? It is quite an intellectually rigorous exercise going on
here which is a great tribute to the people who work there.
Ms Kevill: I have come here from a global news
breakfast meeting with senior leaders where we were discussing
the whole impartiality report, what are the implications of that,
how we take that back to our teams and discuss it with them. It
is an ongoing process in daily morning meetings and also in response
to reports like that to get our teams thinking about it. The main
thing is that they are thinking about it and recognising that
impartiality is not a state of being; you have to work at it.
It is a process.
Q395 Lord Maxton:
You talk about impartiality and I know he has now left the employment
or even the freelance employment of BBC Scotland, but Ian Macwhirter
was used by you as both a presenter of programmes and an interviewer
of political programmes and yet wrote anything up to four articles
a week of a highly controversial political nature in newspapers
in Scotland. How was that impartial?
Ms Boaden: I do not think it was and I would
not allow that. It did not happen on my watch and I have no idea
how it happened but I can tell you it would not happen on my watch.
Q396 Chairman:
I think we are jogging back again, are we not, on this one?
Ms Boaden: Seriously, I would not allow that.
Q397 Lord Inglewood:
You said rather nicely in response to an earlier question, "I
tell my people, `You cannot sack the audience'". Of course,
the audience can sack you.
Ms Boaden: It certainly can.
Q398 Lord Inglewood:
I would like to try and look at how over time your audiences may
have changed but, of course, that is complicated by the fact that
you have different channels and different outlets. First of all,
given the way in which there has been in a sense a reduction in
the audience the BBC gets, how does that break down in terms of
the people who get news from you?
Ms Boaden: We need to be careful because what
is happening here is a mixed picture. Audiences to television
news are in decline, as they are to all television, but audiences
to television news are in slightly less decline than in other
genres like drama and entertainment, so we are quite pleased by
that. It is very interesting for me, coming back to news, having
been at Radio 4 for some time, that on BBC One when I left the
news was seen as, "You have got to have it". It is obviously
very important but it does not bring audience into it. Actually,
now the news drives the schedule on occasions, particularly when
you have a big story like the floods. In radio the reach is stable,
which is to say we are not losing large numbers. I think that
is because of the very brilliant decision made by people a long
time ago to have the portfolio of radio stations we have and,
of course, radio is unbelievably convenient. You can have it in
the garden when you are gardening. You can listen in the bath.
It is the perfect mobile medium and I think that has helped it.
The audiences to online are doubling every year but the growth
in online is not making up for the drop in television yet. Those
are the three primary ways people get their news. Within that
there are fantastic differences between how much audiences consume,
so what you might call older, up-market audiences are pretty stable.
The young, as the Bishop has pointed out, are not engaging with
either our television news or others' television news. We have
a whole strategy about interactivity through providing news on
the web, providing news on mobile phones that we hope will both
appeal to all of us but especially to the young because we have
to start where they are, and they are young people for whom their
mobile phone is a lifeline. I had my half sister stay with me
recently. She is in her twenties. Her phone bill was very high
and I suggested that perhaps she would like to give it up and
you would have thought I was destroying her human rights. This
is absolutely fundamental and therefore the mobile phone is incredibly
important. Equally, we have got devices now such as the iPod to
which you can download radio programmes and listen to speech or
music, and vodcasting where you can download little television
programmes or the whole thing. The world is in flux and the job
of BBC News is to make sure that as the flux goes on we have a
stake so that any audience that wants to get to us can find our
news in an easy and accessible way.
Q399 Lord Inglewood:
What you have said is quite interesting in that over a period
it seems that news has gone from being in a number of parts of
your empire, if I can put it that way, a thing that you have to
do, to something that draws the audiences in.
Ms Boaden: In television terms it is very cheering,
I find.
| 
