This is not a post-BBC ex-employee rant. I had two decades of opportunity that could not be bettered. But it is an exhalation. A deep breath out. All the things that wisely could not be said then, can be said more easily now.
Things that for many decades were givens – the checks and balances on the executive, the role of the judiciary or the civil service, a media free from interference or vilification – now appear vulnerable.
Things that once would have shocked us now seem commonplace. The ministerial code violated with impunity. The unlawful attempt to prorogue parliament for five weeks; the blink-and-you-miss-it moment the governing party’s Twitter account changed its name to “factcheckUK” – in the middle of an election campaign, to coat party propaganda in a format that sounded objective. Or the admission by the then Northern Ireland secretary that he would be prepared to break international law.
The long-term effect of those trends I will leave to others. Today I want to look at where we come in. Journalists. Broadcasters. Specifically, the impact that populist rhetoric is having on the way we do our job as journalists.
I remember, to my shame, interviewing the Trump acolyte Sebastian Gorka on Newsnight in the early days of the Trump victory. Gorka would use up most of the interview time by screaming abuse at the BBC. He didn’t have any problem with the BBC. He quite liked the BBC. He was always happy to say yes to the interview. But he used our time on air – and that of many of my colleagues – as an effective conduit to sell a key populist message: that the mainstream media could be dismissed as “fake”. Once you understand how this works, it seems so obvious. You kick down belief in a trusted source of news, you make the audience doubt what they are seeing and you step into the breach; a shameless play for power and dominance.
As a journalist, I was mortified. I would spend half our allotted interview time trying to defend our objectivity and the rest bending over backwards to reconcile his strangled version of the truth, just to prove his criticism of me wrong. (In so doing, ironically, I lost the very objectivity I was seeking to defend.)
This was when Donald Trump was already finding his feet as president. But our mistakes started long before that. Let me take you this time to early 2016. The UK is beginning to debate the big questions around Britain’s potential exit from the EU. It is complicated stuff: we are trying to offer our viewers both sides of a fiendishly difficult debate. And that intention was right. But we still got it wrong. We fell into what we might call “the Patrick Minford paradigm”. In other words, it might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. But by the time we went on air, we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.
I would later learn the ungainly name for this myopic style of journalism: “both sideism”, which talks to the way it reaches a superficial balance while obscuring a deeper truth.
I remember the time we were granted an interview with Robert De Niro from New York. It was the height of Covid: New York had been decimated by the disease, makeshift morgues and a ghostly city abandoned by anyone with the means to leave. It was a sobering but equally an exciting time to have an interview with one of the world’s bestloved actors. And I wanted to know what it felt like for the archetypal New Yorker to see the city and its people so bereft.
As we began the interview, however, it was clear that De Niro had other things on his mind than New York. He wanted to rage about President Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. He accused him of not caring how many died. It was – for context – three weeks after Trump had given the infamous “bleach” press conference where he was seen to be suggesting the use of disinfectant to fight Covid inside the body.
De Niro told me: “It’s scary because everyone is sort of nonplussed and stunned at what this guy Trump is doing … You’ve got a lunatic saying things that people are trying to dance around – it’s appalling.”
In my ear, my editor is urging me, as is his editorial job, to put the other side. But I am resisting it because – quite frankly – what is the other side? Do I say: “Nonsense, bleach might work – we just won’t know until we’ve tried!” Or do I pretend he didn’t mention disinfectant when it’s there on tape? Or do I say: “You’re only saying that because you’re a liberal lefty luvvie Democrat”? Which doesn’t seem to capture the gravitas of this moment when he’s talking about the horrendous death toll America is witnessing.
As an attempt at pushback, I begin: “Trump’s fanbase would take issue with that.”
The reason I’m recounting this is not for the exchange, but for what happens next. I am terrified that by putting out the interview as it stands we will be seen as biased. De Niro is a world-famous actor, and a New Yorker, and has chosen our programme, Newsnight, as the place to land his thoughts quite carefully. So why do I feel unable to let him say it without trying to find an equally world-famous actor who that same night is miraculously going to tell us the opposite?
It speaks again to how forcefully even imagined populist accusations of bias work on the journalist’s brain. To the point where we censor our own interviews to avoid the backlash.
The coda to this story is that the De Niro interview did go out. And the sky didn’t fall down. And the news lines were picked up around the world. But it’s curious now to look back on our reactions because of what happened two weeks later.
The now-infamous Dominic Cummings Newsnight introduction got way more attention than in truth it ever deserved. It stated bluntly and baldly that he had broken the rules. And it asked why the government – Boris Johnson – was standing by him. The introduction set out, as is often the case, the rest of the show. We had Conservative MPs explaining the PM’s loyalty, we had pollsters explaining the public horror on this issue, we had defenders, we had critics and we had a detailed analysis of which rules had been broken and when. In other words, the introduction was a precis of what viewers could expect of the whole show. And on the night itself, the programme passed off with a few pleasant texts from BBC editors and frankly little else.
It was only the next morning that the wheels fell off. A phone call of complaint was made from Downing Street to the BBC News management. This, for context, is not unusual. It wasn’t unusual in the Blair days – far from it – in the Brown days, in the Cameron days. What I’m saying is, it’s normal for government spin doctors to vocalise their displeasure to journalists.
What was not foreseen was the speed with which the BBC sought to pacify the complainant. Within hours, a very public apology was made, the programme was accused of a failure of impartiality, the recording disappeared from iPlayer, and there were paparazzi outside my front door.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to pretend our intro was the Gettysburg address. When I hear it now I think it was rather long-winded, wordy and sounded a bit piqued. But I don’t think: “Wow, what a shocking breach of impartiality because we called out the actions of one of the chief architects of the Covid laws.”
We show our impartiality when we report without fear or favour. When we are not scared to hold power to account, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so. When we understand that if we’ve covered rule-breaking by a Scottish chief medical officer or an English government scientist then journalistic rigour should be applied to those who make policy within No 10. The one person – ironically – who understood this was Dominic Cummings himself. Who texted me that very evening to offer his wry support.
So, back to the speed of response. Why had the BBC immediately and publicly sought to confirm the government spokesman’s opinion? Without any kind of due process? It makes no sense for an organisation that is admirably, famously rigorous about procedure – unless it was perhaps sending a message of reassurance directly to the government itself?
Put this in the context of the BBC board, where another active agent of the Conservative party – former Downing Street spin doctor, and former adviser to BBC rival GB News [Sir Robbie Gibb] – now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality. According to the Financial Times, he’s attempted to block the appointments of journalists he considers damaging to government relations, provoking Labour’s deputy leader (among others) to call it “Tory cronyism at the heart of the BBC”.
We – journalists, management teams, organisations – are primed to back down, even apologise, to prove how journalistically fair we are being. That can be exploited by those crying “bias”. If it suits those in power to shut us up – or down – they can. Critically, it’s lose-lose for the audience.
This summer, we’ve watched the havoc at Dover customs meet with a wall of silence around Brexit. Those who promised to get Brexit done can’t mention it – because it clearly isn’t. Their insistence on “third nation” status has meant passport checks and horrendous waiting times. Labour avoids talking about Brexit because it’s decided – rightly or wrongly – to distance itself from remainer tags. And large sections of both the BBC and government-supporting newspapers appear to go into an automatic crouch position whenever the Brexit issue looms large.
Many broadcasters fear discussing the obvious economic cause of major change in this country in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still, as above: unpatriotic. And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are pushing the public further away.
Emily Maitlis is a former Newsnight presenter. The News Agents, her daily Global Radio podcast with the BBC’s former North America editor, Jon Sopel, launches on Tuesday
Taken from the MacTaggart Lecture, given by Emily Maitlis at the Edinburgh TV Festival 2022, which is available on YouTube, and also on The News Agents podcast
