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2018 has been a troubling year for those who support public service broadcasting and the national broadcaster’s remit to inform, not just to entertain.
First off, a declaration of personal interest. I’ve worked on and off for the BBC, mainly as a dramatist, for 34 years, and the mother of my two children was a senior news executive for most of that time.
The observations below aren’t comprehensive, and they only concern BBC News and Current Affairs domestic coverage, not its other output or its well-regarded overseas reporting.
The criticisms aren’t directed at individual BBC journalists either, but the higher echelons of BBC management and editorial policy.
How the BBC Failed to Investigate the Brexit Scandals
There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that BBC News and Current Affairs was preparing to rescue its reputation after a torrid time during the EU Referendum.
Its coverage in 2016 was widely panned by senior insiders, including John Simpson and Justin Webb, for the lack of checking of factual claims made during Brexit debates and the putting of too much weight on ‘balancing’ opinions rather than a more objective test of accuracy and truth.
But, behind the scenes, s
For nearly two months in early 2018, BBC One’s flagship documentary programme,
The first was the testimony of Chris Wylie, a former employee of the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. Founded by Alexander Nix, Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon in 2013, this now defunct data-based electioneering firm would deploy military-grade propaganda tools and weaponise the hacked information of 170 million Facebook users, both in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK and in the US presidential election of Donald Trump in the same year.
In preparation for the programme, Wylie was interviewed at length by the BBC, and so was a second whistle-blower, Shahmir Sanni, a co-founder of the campaign group BeLeave.
Sanni produced evidence that BeLeave was not, in reality, a separate organisation from the Vote Leave campaign and proved that the official group, fronted by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, had therefore broken its spending limits by £625,000. This connected back to Cambridge Analytica because all that money was funneled – along with most of Vote Leave’s entire election spending – to a formerly obscure Canadian company called AIQ. Originally named SCL Canada, AIQ was an offshoot of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL.
Burley seemed to equate the official findings of an independent watchdog to one side of a ‘debate’ with the Vote Leave campaign.
But then, quite suddenly, Panorama withdrew from producing the planned programmes exploring the stories of both Wylie and Sanni, Cambridge Analytica and
Why this was the case is in need of further inquiry, but it was clearly not for lack of reliable evidence.
When Chris Wylie’s revelations were finally published by Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer in March along with the New York Times, Cambridge Analytica became a global story, with important new
Meanwhile, Sanni’s revelations forced the elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission, to re-open its investigations into Vote Leave. It found multiple examples of law-breaking and the matter has been referred to the Metropolitan Police.
So, why was Panorama so reluctant to expose any of this?
How the BBC Covered the Scandals when they Broke
It is sad, but not surprising, that BBC management wavered at the political risk of breaking these scandals first.
It has always been cautious in this regard, and – because it is so trusted – tends to deploy its weight and authority in comprehensive follow-ups. But even this was lacking with these stories.
More disturbingly, the BBC actively tried to defuse their impact.
The broadcaster’s coverage was not only minimal by most estimates, but often favoured giving a platform to the subjects of the allegations over the allegations themselves. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke over the weekend of March 18, for instance, its Newsnight programme led the next day with Alexander Nix’s pre-recorded interview denying the allegations. There was a report on the Observer’s findings, but it was secondary to the rebuttal.
More egregiously, when the Vote Leave law-breaking was exposed the following week, its campaign manager Dominic Cummings’ ‘prebuttal’ was highlighted by the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg before the Observer had even gone to print. (Cummings had received a request for comment with the standard couple of days in order to reply, but used the interim to shape the information battlefield in advance).
Things didn’t improve. Two months later, when Sanni’s claims were investigated by the Electoral Commission, the Vote Leave chief executive was interviewed by Kuenssberg well before the findings were made public – another ‘prebuttal’ that gave Matthew Elliott a virtually uninterrupted platform to get his retaliation in first: “They haven’t followed due process.”
When the Electoral Commission’s findings of electoral wrongdoing were leaked, BBC News subtly – perhaps unconsciously – echoed the Vote Leave attempt to minimise the law-breaking aspect. A headline on a piece Kuenssberg authored read: Watchdog expected to find Vote Leave broke rules
This was supported by the senior editor of the BBC’s live political programmes, Rob Burley, who seemed to equate the official findings of an independent watchdog to one side of a ‘debate’ with the Vote Leave campaign.
“The whole discussion here about Vote Leave/Electoral Commission and [Matthew] Elliot is disputed. The respective sides say different things about and it’s not resolved,” he tweeted.
Burley already had