Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1160
- 1179)
WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2007
Ms Jenny Abramsky, Mr Mark Damazer and Mr Stephen
Mitchell
Q1160 Lord Inglewood:
Do you think that it is the case that the system of format that
the commercial radio stations have actually boxes them in and
stops them developing in the kind of imaginative evolutionary
way that you have described you have led BBC radio stations?
Ms Abramsky: No, I do not. We put out promises
of performance. We are also now having service licences which
are very, very detailed, very detailed indeed, which will talk
about the number of hours of dramas, the number of hours of music
documentaries we will do on Radio 2 and the percentage of new
music. I think the critical thing is, if you believe in programming,
you need to invest in it.
Q1161 Lord Inglewood:
Is that the key factor?
Ms Abramsky: I think that it is.
Q1162 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I would like to come back to the question that was lightly touched
upon by My Lord Chairman which was regarding how the attempt to
rebrand BBC news on radio came and went and whether you could
tell us a little about that, but I would like to add something
into that which relates to the earlier discussion about the way
in which the news is differently presented across the different
networks. I am very interested, perhaps because of my own background,
in the significance of the way in which the news is presented,
that is to say the different voices that you choose when it comes,
actually quite narrowly, to reading the news because it is very
striking—and I want to say that I am an avid Radio 4 and
Radio 3 listener and consequently I notice very much—how,
if you do catch the news on Radio 3, the tone of it is different
and the content is slightly different, but the thing that is very
significant is the difference between the voices that you hear
on the different networks and I wondered if you could talk a little
about that in relation to the branding of the news over the radio
as a whole.
Mr Mitchell: Perhaps I may deal with the vexed
issue of branding and then I will let my colleague, Mr Damazer,
talk about the way that we speak the words. The branding issue
has not actually come and gone, it remains. What we were trying
to do is add clarity and consistency across the portfolio, not
only of radio networks but television networks and, most importantly
for us, adding clarity and consistency of the fact that this is
BBC News which is one of the most authoritative parts of the BBC
brand, whether you are listening to it on the radio on Radio 4
or whether you are listening to it on a pod cast or whether you
are tapping into it online. News is consumed in a whole variety
of ways 24/7, quite often not in the structured network way that
people of my generation—I hesitate to speak of yourselves—are
used to. Therefore, what we were trying to do and what we are
still trying to do is to emphasise the fact that this is the branded
BBC product, one of the most valuable brands that we have, and
that there is a consistency and clarity about that whether you
are listening to 5 Live or whether you are listening to a network
pod cast. Branding is not a strength of mine personally but I
am comfortable with the concept. As to the words that we actually
use on Radio 4, I turn to my colleague, Mark Damazer.
Mr Damazer: I am very happy to confess sin!
We originally went with a form of words which, when listening
in real life, turned out to be too clunky, so the "BBC News
for Radio 4" thing just did not roll off the tongue and the
newsreaders, about whom we are about to speak, let me know that
in a very clear way. They were not absolutely happy with the way
that it sounded—it simply sounded because that is after
all the important thing about radio. I very quickly asked for
and got a change in the wording, but the effect is the same which
is to make sure that the BBC News brand is more closely associated
with BBC News programmes on Radio 4, which causes me no difficulty
at all. It is not a problem at the BBC, it is a fact that because
we are a broad and large organisation, there are many different
sub-brands of the one brand that truly really matters which is
the BBC—everything else sits below that—and you can
make a case for 5% more Radio 4 and 5% more news, but I do not
think that the audience has been dislocated by it and the change
that I authorised, which was to get rid of this rather clunky
phrase, was simply because it sounded unhappy, but we have been
left with the notion that the Today programme, PM and news bulletins
come from BBC news which is, as Steve said, a perfectly authoritative
and good brand and I am absolutely content with that. On your
point about voices, I am sure you are right that each network
regards the voices that its news readers, male and female, as
a crucial component of the overall network sound and that is very
true for Radio 4. If you go back to Peter Jefferson or Brian Perkins
or Peter Donaldson who are still doing shifts with the BBC Radio
4 and news, they are well known voices to the public and they
help define what the station is. It is an art form to find somebody
who sounds authoritative and not intrusive, who can speak it and
sound it and lift it off the page, and a very, very important
part of the job is to establish who these voices should be and
the best of them—Charlotte Green and Harriet Cass are probably
the more famous but Rory Morrison, Chris Alderton and so on and
so forth—are absolutely vital to the network. If you placed
them on another network, I think that they probably would sound
out of place.
Q1163 Chairman:
Something worries about this rebranding. For whose benefit is
it? If I am listening to BBC Radio 4, it does not come as a tremendous
surprise that I am listening to BBC News. The public would by
absolutely amazed if thy were listening Sky News or something
like that on the—
Mr Mitchell: So would I!
Q1164 Chairman:
Who are we benefiting?
Mr Mitchell: In a direct way, these decisions
about how you label things do not have a huge effect on the audience's
response to the programmes but, in the end over a long period
of time, trying to reinforce the fact that BBC news does these
things across many different parts of the BBC will probably help
BBC news to become yet more appreciated and authoritative. When
we undertook the research, we discovered that actually, surprisingly,
not everybody realised that BBC news was a powerhouse division
in its own right. What I think really matters is whether the content
that comes out in these bulletins and programmes is a happy marriage
between what Radio 4 stands for and what BBC news stands for and
I can say that, on a day-to-day basis, that presents no problem
at all.
Q1165 Chairman:
It all sounds suspiciously internal to me rather than external.
Ms Abramsky: In a world where the way in which
people are consuming is changing and in a world where many people
are going and accessing a pod cast, say, of a news bulletin or
a listen again pack, then you are not realising that you are listening
to Radio 4 and it actually gives you an absolute identity of what
you are listening to.
Chairman: I think we will leave you to
sort that out.
Q1166 Bishop of Manchester:
Turning to the matter of editorial control, are you able to tell
us who determines the overall content and direction of BBC radio
news. Mark Damazer referred to it as authoritative a moment ago.
Who makes those authoritative decisions and in what sense does
the BBC management have any role within that?
Mr Mitchell: The key figure in any piece of
BBC journalism is the editor of the programme or the editor in
the newsroom. As we do such a vast array of news across such a
wide variety of platforms, that is the only sensible way. So,
you invest authority in the editor. However, the editors of radio
news, for instance, are part of a team which I lead and editorially
we work as a team together on the core issues: issues of policy,
issues of legality and issues and fairness and impartiality. Those
are the sorts of issues which spread across all our output. We
work on it together. In the end, if there is a difficulty/dilemma/disagreement,
then the referral up would come to me who is the Head of Department
and, if it were a journalistic dilemma, I would, if necessary,
engage with the Director of News, Helen Boaden who I think you
have already met. The chain for journalistic conversation is within
news and the final editorial decision-making process is within
news. That does not mean that I would not talk to colleagues outwith
news about all sorts of issues. Both my colleagues here are of
course very strong and well-trodden journalists but, in essence,
where the fault lies or the buck stops or however you define it,
it is for the editor of the Today programme or the editor of the
5 Live Breakfast programme and then with reference up to myself
and, if necessary, to Helen Boaden.
Q1167 Bishop of Manchester:
So, there is no management involvement at all?
Mr Mitchell: It is an interesting and philosophical
discussion about what we mean by management. I am responsible
for the budgets and the staffing that I described earlier but,
editorially, I regard editorial leadership as part of being a
BBC manager. We have editor managers. I would expect the editor
of the Today programme to deliver a programme which was both on
budget and where the staff were properly managed as well as being
editorially responsible. So, we do not distinguish the two one
from the other, as it were, at that level.
Mr Damazer: May I add one point here. I work
on both sides of the equation. For better or worse—I happen
to think for better—the BBC is a debating chamber of itself.
Rarely a day passes without there being some exchange between
three or four of the people most closely involved about the quality
of a particular programme, not necessarily only the Today programme.
I would hear and if I feel that something has gone better or worse
I would feel it absolutely appropriate to talk to Steve or indeed
the editor of the Today programme or PM, The World at One or whatever
it may be about whether that programme had got something right
or wrong. It is a contribution to an internal debate and, if you
do not have that kind of debate within the organisation, which
is not a top down, "It must be like this" or "You
definitely got it wrong" because most of these things are
shades of grey and complicated judgments without the BBC having
a culture which promotes that kind of internal debate between
its journalists and between its journalists and the Head of Department
and, as and where necessarily or appropriate, myself, we would
all be the poorer for it. The crucial distinction is that when
they come in to decide what to put on air between six o'clock
and nine o'clock, I would not for one moment expect them to pick
up the phone to me and say, "Do you think today Iraq is a
slightly better story than obesity?" or "Shall we give
obesity three minutes or six minutes?" or "Who should
we get into the studio to discuss this?" or "Is sending
out an outside broadcast unit the right way to spend licence payers'
money?" It has never happened in my entire career at the
BBC on any side of the equation that anybody from senior management
makes those kinds of prescriptive instructions before the programme
is transmitted.
Q1168 Bishop of Manchester:
I would like to ask a more specific question now. Can any of you
think of any example where a BBC journalist has been asked to
alter or to omit a story for any reason?
Ms Abramsky: It depends what you mean by "any
reason" because clearly one of the things is that we have
quite rigorous editorial discussions and there will be discussions
where Steve or I or Mark or Helen Boaden would look at a story
and say, "We are not satisfied that you have found out enough"
or "done enough" or "we are questioning this"
et cetera. Therefore, when you use the words "for any reason",
I cannot possibly say—
Q1169 Bishop of Manchester:
Let us move aside from the information not being properly collected
to where maybe there is more of an opinion being included or it
is on a very delicate matter where you feel the sensitivity which
is being raised by a journalist is improper to include in a news
bulletin. Has there been anything like that at all?
Mr Damazer: The only example I can think of
was the case of Peter Mandelson who had been inadvertently "outed"
on Newsnight by Mathew Parris. This goes back now to the best
part of a decade if not more. The BBC, rightly in my view, had
a policy about the rights to a private life for public individuals.
The question was, once this had happened, to what extent should
this be repeated and be considered to be in the public domain
or not? There were long, protracted internal debates of the kind
that I referred to but yet more intense because they involved
a large number of people. To this day, I am not sure whether we
got it right or wrong; I have not thought about it too much recently.
That may be the one example that I can think of where there was
a top-down instruction, if you like, suggesting that the BBC should
cling on to its stated policy of protecting the private life of
public individuals, even at the point at which everybody else
had put this in the public domain in their various different ways.
If I read you correctly and you are asking whether, as a result
of a phone call from an interested party to a senior executive
of the BBC, whether in the news division or elsewhere, I know
of any example in 25 years where a BBC journalist has subsequently
been instructed for no reason other than that the phone call was
made to change their story, promote it or regulate it or treat
it differently, I cannot think of such an example.
Q1170 Chairman:
That is not to say that such attempts are not made. Alastair Campbell—
Mr Mitchell: Frequently. Nor is it to say that
every complaint that is made is not justified and occasionally
it does happen: a complaint is made about an item by an interested
party or perhaps not even by an interested party and we discover,
on inquiry, that we got something wrong and it would be our job
to put it right, but that is based on evidence of whether or not
we got it right or wrong, not just based on the phone call having
been made.
Q1171 Baroness Thornton:
When Andrew Marr spoke to us last week or the week before, he
did say that the one time the BBC stopped him breaking a story
was about Charles Kennedy's drinking because it had been denied,
but he said that that was the only example he had of that. The
question that I want your comment on is really that he resisted
fiercely the idea that the BBC had a left-wing tilt and I know
that you have been exploring your own thinking about your bias
or not. He said that it was more that the BBC had a liberal instinct.
Do you think that that is true? What do you think that means?
How do you deal with issues about bias?
Ms Abramsky: Let me try to answer that. I do
not normally disagree with Andrew but I do disagree with him in
that description. Clearly, everybody who comes to the BBC comes
with their own baggage and their opinions, but what I think we
do do—and, if I remember rightly, Andrew also did say this—is
that we then expect people to leave their political opinions and
their baggage at the door. Much of the debate and the internal
debate that goes on is about impartiality, about fairness and
about accuracy and that is what we expect from our staff. I worked
in news for many, many years before I moved over to radio. I have
had people who were working for me leave and ended up going to
the Director of Communications at the Conservative Party or going
to the Labour Party. On a number of occasions, I was quite startled
to even discover that kind of political leaning because, within
the confines of the BBC, what you expect people to do is to actually
leave that behind. The fierceness of the debates that go on is
about whether we got it right and whether we were impartial. Steve,
you are running news now.
Mr Mitchell: I think that my colleagues have
said more or less everything. The thing some people do not really
understand is the number of people who are involved in any one
piece of journalism, hence the number of people who would be engaged
in the discussions that Jenny and Mark have mentioned. First of
all, every individual starts, whatever their personal political
leanings, with an absolute intensity around impartiality, and
the second thing is how we define that and fairness. That is an
ongoing process but it is our raison d'être. It is why we
do what we do. It is absolutely at the front of everyone's mind.
Q1172 Baroness Thornton:
I listen to the Today programme like probably everybody else in
the room does, but even they are now picking up emails and messages
that are sent to them as they run the programme, and 5 Live does
it too. My view on 5 Live is actually it is too listener driven
in terms of the comment that comes from listeners and the way
that biases some of their programme. How can you deal with that
if you are trying to be impartial? Genuinely, I am interested.
What you do if you get 15 Colonel Blimps all sending the same
email, sort of thing? Do you know what I mean?
Mr Mitchell: This is not scientific in terms
of what we do during a live three-hour programme. I would not
want to pretend that this is a scientific process by which we
ensure impartiality. What we are trying to do is recognise sometimes
expertise. A couple of years ago, we were doing an item around
air traffic control in this country and a number of air traffic
controllers began to join in and we thought, once we had checked
their bona fides, that that was worth bringing to the plate, but
what we were also trying to do was look for the interesting or
challenging view that you had not actually thought about in the
way that you configured an item or guest. It is around making
good but fair radio and about giving a platform for a variety
of views, but we do not do it by stopwatch or by numbers and clearly
the appetite for this is growing even, as you say, on Radio 4
and the sheer numbers that we deal with now are just extraordinary.
What normally happens after a transmission/broadcast is that that
is the moment that you begin to assess it in a more robust and
rigorous way and that may well inform the following day's programme
on that item.
Q1173 Baroness of Scott Needham Market:
I want to ask you about the skills required for radio journalism
and the extent to which they are interchangeable with television
journalism. Following on from that, is part of your response to
the cuts going to be that there will be more sharing across the
two and what sort of challenges might that raise for you?
Mr Mitchell: First of all, I am passionate that
there are different skills required to broadcast for television
as opposed to broadcasting for radio or indeed to write for the
online. I will start by saying that you need the basic journalistic
skills, the basic sense of inquiry, the basic sense of fairness
and impartiality and all of our journalists should have that.
The second thing is that there will be what I might term high-end
craft practitioners who you treasure, whether that is for television
or whether that is for radio. There are also plenty of next generation
journalists coming along who are very adept at moving between
the media and platforms. What we are trying to do is equip as
many people as we feel appropriate or as who have an appetite
for this with the right core skills. What that turns into however
is still that most of our journalists have a preference one way
or the other or have a balance of skills one way or the other
and we would want to keep that, even under pressure of making
savings and efficiencies. Going forward, we will be looking for
opportunities to make more of our journalism across all platforms.
The most recent example might have been the Today programme—its
bread and butter is getting really good interviews and interviewing
guests—securing an interview with President Musharraf, General
Musharraf as he was then, in Pakistan. Jim Naughtie was tasked
to do that for the Today programme. By the time he arrived in
Pakistan, we had hired a local crew. We filmed that interview
and that interview was actually done for a radio audience with
all the imperatives of radio but it was captured for a number
of outlets and we put the whole interview online and made it available
then. The production team behind that started off as a radio production
team but we added someone from our operation in Pakistan to that
team to make the television end of that work. The big mistake
would be to assume that every journalist and every producer can
do everything on every platform. That would be going too far.
What we are trying to do is feel for where the opportunities are
and where the skills might overlap.
Q1174 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
Would there be a danger that, if there was too much of a drive,
you would create a bunch of generalists and there would be the
danger of losing what you describe as high-end craft practitioners?
Mr Mitchell: That would be a risk. However,
Jenny, Mark and I have lived through many years of trying to make
bi-media work in the BBC and I am absolutely confident that we
are aware of the risks and it is about managing those risks.
Q1175 Baroness Scott of Needham Market:
We must not lose a high-end craft practitioner person just because
they did not know how to use a computer.
Mr Mitchell: Absolutely not. I may be at risk
there but none of our craftsmen.
Ms Abramsky: There is no doubt that there was
a period when there was a mantra of bi-media and radio really
did suffer and it suffered because people lost the craft skill
of description We have to be able to paint pictures with words.
In fact, it was one of the things that Steve identified and we
started retraining people about the craft skill of radio and actually
now it is recognised that it is a completely different skill to
be able to paint those pictures, but also to be able to write
for online is different. There will be some people who can do
all three: somebody like Allan Little or Fergal Keane have the
ability to write for television and write for radio. There are
other people who do not. I think that one of the things we learned
is that you make sure that you have the right people doing the
right thing and also you make sure that you do not stop training.
Q1176 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
I know that all three of you are great champions of journalism
and indeed, speaking as someone who was previously a BBC journalist
who actually went to the Lib Dems—something you did not
mention earlier, Jenny—via Channel 4, you obviously are
going to face cuts in journalists and one of the effects of the
licence resettlement is that I believe the BBC is cutting more
than 400 journalists. How does that sit with the fact that you
believe that "the continued funding of our journalism remains
the core of our contract with our licence payers?" As we
are getting to the end, may I roll my next question into this
which is, I understand the argument against duplication but you
also have to retain diversity across the programmes. Picking up
on what My Lord Chairman said the beginning, the Today programme
supplies something very different from other programmes.
Ms Abramsky: I would like to begin and then
hand on to Steve. The actual reprioritisation of money has not
been done in the same way for every single part of the BBC and
in fact the Director General recognised that, in radio, we had
cut 15% over the last three years and, in some areas, 20% of our
staff and that there was actually little room for further efficiencies.
Q1177 Chairman:
Is that news staff or is that everyone?
Ms Abramsky: That is everyone. Therefore, we
were given differential targets and, across radio, we are having
lower efficiency targets than the rest of the BBC. In fact, across
radio excluding news, over five years, we are only going to lose
100 posts and I believe that, over five years, we can do that
without redundancies. In terms of Radio 4 in particular, in recognition
of the need to keep that investment up, we are actually reducing
Radio 4's budgets by a very, very small amount. In terms of news,
we looked at the radio news side and Steve can tell you exactly.
Mr Mitchell: To go back to the question, I would
not say that the efficiencies in savings are not just the reaction
to the licence fee settlement. They are a conscious attempt to
save money internally in order to invest in new business as well.
If I take the radio news overall budget which is a strange thing
because it is to do with internal funding, I think that in 2007/08
we are spending about £41 million on radio journalism and
I think, looking at 2008/09, it will be about £42 million.
Of course, there is an inflation factor which we will have to
take into account. Another way of looking at it would be to look
at the staff headcount. If I take an area which is the Radio 4
sequence programmes, the Today programme and so forth, where the
headcount now is about 92 people, over the next five years, we
anticipate losing around 10 to 12 posts, but we also intend to
recruit five new people to do five new roles within those five
years. Anyone exposed to running a business can see that that
is manageable efficiency.
Q1178 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Of those 92, what percentage are journalists?
Mr Mitchell: All of those would be journalists
and, of the new posts, they will be journalistic. One of the people
we are looking for at the moment, to go back to an earlier question,
is a web editor to work for the Today programme. The Today website
is terribly important to email traffic. That is about reinvestment,
it is not just about cuts.
Q1179 Bishop of Manchester:
When you move to Salford, you are not going to use the network
news team anymore, you are going to have your own, so presumably
that is in addition to the budget, not a saving.
Mr Mitchell: This is 5 Live. The journalism
on 5 Live is partly the core journalism that you hear on the hour
and the half-hour which is produced now from the domestic radio
newsroom in London and partly our programmes, the Breakfast programme
and the Drive programmes, and those are two different arms, as
it were, to 5 Live journalism. We are taking both arms to Salford,
so people who do the core news on the hour and the half-hour will
move to Salford as well. We will take fewer of them because we
intend to use that as one of the potential efficiencies to try
to merge the skills base there around the edges, and the content
in the core newsroom will still be available for people to work
from in Salford because this stuff is available electronically.
So, you take the basic core story, yesterday's British casualties
in Afghanistan, and the collation of that will still be written
in London by a newsroom journalist and available electronically
to the news team in Salford. So, there will not be duplication.
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