Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420
- 439)
WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007
Ms Helen Boaden, Mr Nigel Chapman and Ms Sian Kevill
Q420 Chairman:
I hope you will take it back at any rate that it is our view,
and it certainly was the view of the old BBC Charter Committee.
Mr Chapman: And your previous Committee's deliberations
made a specific recommendation. I remember it very well.
Q421 Lord King of Bridgwater:
I thought they had already announced they were going to give you
the money for it, but I cannot keep up with announcement and re-announcements.
You know better than I.
Mr Chapman: No, Lord King, they have not announced
it.
Q422 Chairman:
Can I ask you the question that I asked Helen Boaden—who
do you answer to?
Mr Chapman: I answer to Richard Sambrook, who
is Head of Global News who in turn answers to Mark Byford, so
we are part of the journalism group.
Q423 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You answer through him to Mark Byford?
Mr Chapman: Yes.
Q424 Lord King of Bridgwater:
What about these difficult issues? You are in a very sensitive
position and you are going to be in an even more sensitive position
if you get an Arabic service going with our forces out in harm's
way. You referred obliquely to the stakeholders. What proportion
of your funds come from the Foreign Office grant?
Mr Chapman: Ninety-eight per cent, I think,
comes from it.
Q425 Lord King of Bridgwater:
I just want to get something factual on the record.
Ms Clarke: The amount of money we get from other
sources is absolutely tiny in the context of a £250 million
budget.
Q426 Lord King of Bridgwater:
On these issues you have a steering committee. How does it work?
Mr Chapman: The World Service management board
is responsible for both the managerial and the editorial activities
of the World Service.
Q427 Lord King of Bridgwater:
On which the Foreign Office is represented?
Mr Chapman: No. This is entirely inside the
BBC. My relations with the Foreign Office are conducted through
quarterly liaison meetings with the civil servants and also through
an annual ministerial meeting with the minister responsible for
the World Service, who is now Jim Murphy, the new minister, and
we see them once a year. Obviously, I am in regular contact with
them on a needs basis, if you like.
Q428 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Because the issue the previous Committee discussed was that it
is very important for your reputation in the world that you are
seen to be a totally independent service with its own integrity.
Mr Chapman: Indeed, absolutely.
Q429 Lord King of Bridgwater:
And we are now in a much more dangerous world in which there are
obviously things that can be said on your programmes. We have
seen what happened in a different context with cartoons in a Danish
newspaper and the sorts of repercussions those produced. Are you
satisfied that you are sufficiently in touch with the Foreign
Office, ie, ambassadors and other people, in terms of being sensitive
to the situations that now exist in different territories that
you cover?
Mr Chapman: I am satisfied, and I am also satisfied
on the other side of the equation, if you like, that I am balancing
out editorial independence with those sorts of considerations
you have talked about. Nobody is going to want to trust someone
who has deliberately put our troops or anybody else into harm's
way and that would be a silly thing to do. On the other hand I
have to respect editorial independence. To be fair to the Foreign
office, they also respect it. There has never been a conversation
while I have been Director of the service about editorial content
on the World Service. What there are conversations about, which
are quite legitimate, are where do we want to broadcast to and
how do we want to broadcast, ie, which medium do we want to use—television,
radio, new media and so on? The actual what we broadcast, the
editorial content, is not a subject for discussion.
Q430 Lord King of Bridgwater:
The closures of all those eastern European language channels was
by agreement with the Foreign Office?
Mr Chapman: Absolutely, because under the broadcasting
agreement the minister has to give the green light to that. That
is one of the few things that formally the minister has to sign
off.
Q431 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I was going to ask you a question about the impact of the impartiality
review that was recently published. I think you have covered quite
a lot incidentally through the course of this morning's work,
but is there anything else that you would like to say about how
that would impact on the way that news is gathered and disseminated,
and what is your view of it?
Ms Boaden: I was on the committee that drew
that up and the key thing for me about impartiality is not just
fairness and balance. It is also about getting a breadth of voice.
It is getting beyond this idea that we are all agreed somehow
that these are the parameters of the argument. In the past we
have had occasionally been guilty of, say, on issues of Europe
of assuming that those who wanted to withdraw from the European
Union altogether we did not bother to interview. This is a long
while ago. There are examples in the report that I gave them.
I do not think that would happen now. I think both the shifts
in politics in the real world and the emphasis that I and my team
put on impartiality as a breadth of view has changed that, and
I think the impartiality report is incredibly useful. All my teams
are discussing it with their editors and heads of department to
keep this conversation going because, as Sian said, there is never
a perfect point with impartiality. Impartiality is a process and
it is a process about being open-minded and catching yourself
out at your own unconscious prejudices, so it is an ongoing piece
of work.
Q432 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Can I ask your colleagues who have specific responsibility—and
of course, the BBC has worldwide responsibilities—for disseminating
news to non-UK audiences whether it has any different kinds of
inflexion, the question of impartiality, where you are dealing
with audiences about whom perhaps you know different things or
not as much as you know about your home-grown audience?
Mr Chapman: I think the principles are the same.
I think the execution of the programming has to be sensitive to
audience need. The range of views and the relevance of certain
topics and the accentuation of those things obviously does vary
depending on the audience need. It is not going to be the same
in every part of the world. A listener in Afghanistan is not going
to want the same things from the BBC as, say somebody in the Middle
East although there will still be a core level of commonality,
if you like, in terms of subject matter. What really matters is
the treatment, if you like, of the values and principles behind
the treatment of the story, that they are the same. There is not
a different set of values for covering, say, Afghanistan for Afghan
listeners or viewers as there would be for covering Afghanistan
for people who live in America.
Q433 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
Not a different set of values but there might be a different perception
of what constitutes impartiality within the way in which certain
kinds of news is received in some audiences rather than others.
Is that not possible?
Mr Chapman: That is possible but that should
not undermine the core way we go about it. At the end of the day
you cannot always be sure what listeners get from you and the
filter through which they see and use it. What you have got to
be sure of is that you offer them the range, the accuracy, the
fairness of the views that are relevant to the story. They may
discount them, they may only hear certain things, but often you
get people saying, "I heard X on your airways and that means
the BBC is biased because it gave them a particular opportunity
to comment on something". Actually, that is not logical but
that is often how people think, that by giving a platform to somebody
you are being biased. We have to educate listeners and viewers
that that is not a logical conclusion. It is quite legitimate
from those points of view. You may not agree with them as a listener
or a viewer, you are quite entitled not to agree with them, but
it would be very strange if we did not reflect them because that
would not be covering the full gamut of relevant points of view
on a particular topic.
Ms Kevill: I always think it is a good thing
that there is a lot of commonality. You mentioned the Danish cartoons
and that is the sort of issue that would have been discussed,
not just in the domestic context but also on how those pieces
were playing in an international context because the teams are
sitting together in meetings discussing it, so there is also consistency.
We often have debates around the use of the word "terrorist",
which is an old chestnut, but obviously it is very important to
have a way of using that word which is across all the outputs.
There is a lot of commonality in how we approach these things.
Q434 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
This is a much closer to home and very specific question for Helen.
Out there there is a view amongst people who listen to the Today
programme, which, of course, is highly accessible, that it is
not always conducted on an entirely impartial basis. Is this an
erroneous perception?
Ms Boaden: I never like to contradict perceptions
because it is sort of saying someone has listened wrong, and actually
you have to take very seriously what people say. I think the consistency
of trust in the Today programme, and the audience figures
are very high, suggest that most listeners, even if they find
it occasionally very irritating, do think that overall it is a
highly impartial programme. Clearly, there are very different
ways it engages in debate. The presenters have very different
styles and what we know from our audience research is that by
and large most audiences like that range and that is what protects
our impartiality. On any specifics we always take it incredibly
seriously if someone says, "That particular thing was biased",
and sometimes we say, "Yes, we got it wrong". We are
absolutely not claiming here that we are at a state of perfection.
Sometimes even the mood of the presenter can give the wrong inflexion
to a subject.
Q435 Chairman:
You will have seen the comments in the From Seesaw to Wagon
Wheel from Janet Daley who said of the BBC that there was
not a systematic political conspiracy to impose party-political
bias but there was a kind of corporate conformity—"the
uncritical acceptance of smug consensual received opinion accompanied
by journalistic credulousness". Is that fair comment?
Ms Boaden: No. We bring Janet in quite often
to talk to our journalists because Janet has got a great mind
and she is a lovely woman and she challenges us in a very particular
sort of way. What she is getting at is what can happen in any
organisation, and this is what I talked about earlier, that without
anyone really intending it to be the case everyone starts thinking
the same thing, and that is the job of people like me and my team
and my editors, to challenge ourselves and our teams to get beyond
that, which is why these ongoing conversations are so editorially
critical, the meetings I am talking about and all of that.
Q436 Chairman:
The meetings are important as long as there is challenge.
Ms Boaden: But that is the point of them. As
Nigel said, they are pretty rigorous. When I came back to News
from having done Radio 4 for nearly five years what struck me
was the seriousness with which people take this job. The rest
of the BBC obviously sees people in News as overly serious. I
think it is a real badge of honour because they do take that responsibility
very seriously.
Q437 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Just as you mentioned the Today programme, do you have
any figures on the irritation that John Humphrys often causes,
where he asks perfectly reasonable questions, not always in a
reasonable tone of voice, and then does not wait for the answer
before moving on to the next question? Is that not measured?
Ms Boaden: No, we do not measure that.
Q438 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
Is it just me?
Ms Boaden: I can tell that John is an incredibly
good journalist who is incredible self-critical and he is the
first person when he feels he has overdone that to know about
it and to try and correct it, but (a) he is not unique if he ever
does that and (b) an awful lot of listeners listen because they
think John Humphrys is the bee's knees. He is unbelievably important
to that programme.
Q439 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale:
I am not contesting that. I am on about, if you ask a question
normally, when I was a lad and working as a journalist, you waited
for the answer.
Ms Boaden: Yes. He is not perfect. None of my
presenters is perfect.
| 
