The press
Unapologetic
Paul Johnson
Al of us journalists must submit, from time to time, to rebukes from readers. Why, even the delightful Arthur Marshall has just been rapped over the knuckles by the editress of Netball. We may not like it and we may well believe that readers who write in are deluded, but it is always better to let them have their say.
The Sunday Times forgot this admirable precept recently. There has been some very wild reporting, in the press and on TV, about the human consequences of Israel's military actions in the Lebanon. The numbers of killed, wounded and homeless are clearly substantial but have equally clearly been deliberately exaggerated by in- terested Arab sources. For all kinds of prac- tical reasons the truth is hard to get at, and sensible editors have been judicious in their moralising over 'facts' which are in dispute. On 20 June the Sunday Times published a short and intemperate leader, headed 'In- supportable', which began with a memorably inept passage: 'There is only
one thing about the war in Lebanon that is beyond all dispute. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people are on the move, needing urgent help, and Israel is putting politics before their plight.' The first sentence was manifestly untrue, for the number of refugees is a matter of hot debate; the second betrayed the kind of open bias which leader-writers should avoid. The leader was a bad one because, if the charge against Israel was worth making, it needed to be argued and backed with evidence; to print this brief outburst of anger served no purpose except to reveal the existence of strong anti-Israeli emotions among members of the paper's ruling oligarchy.
A response from the Israeli embassy was inevitable; it came; it was not printed on the grounds that (as the paper informed its mystified readers) 'the letter was five times longer than the leading article complained or . But the brevity of the leader was precisely the source of its weakness; and a blunt and unargued falsehood may well need to be refuted at length. If I were to state 'The Sunday Times is bankrupt', it would demand many more than 25 words to show that my assertion is untrue. The Israeli letter was not inordinately long or acrimonious. I would simply have printed it and have done with the matter. In relation to the total number of words it contains, the ST does not give enough space to let- ters. As it is, the Israelis have a justified grievance and one's general confidence in the paper is diminished. Indeed, last Sun- day the ST implicitly conceded the substance of the Israeli complaint by runn- ing an enormously long leader, 'Peace and the Numbers Game', treating in detail the whole argument about the quantity of suf- fering caused by the battle and implying that there is absolutely nothing about it . which is 'beyond all dispute'.
The question, of course, applies all the time to the BBC. It has the same spirit of progressive moralising self-righteousness as the Sunday Times and an even stronger reluctance to come clean when (as often happens) it is in error. In March 1981 one of its more notorious programmes, Nation- wide, criticised the annual advertising awards made by the trade magazine Cam- paign. It said that one of the winners got the prize for an ad which was in breach of the code administered by the Advertising Standards Authority. In fact the ad had been the subject of a complaint to the ASA, which had upheld it; the Authority had sug- gested changes, which had been accepted and incorporated, and the actual ad which won the award had been clean. So Nation= wide was wrong.
This was promptly admitted by Gwilym Roberts, an MP who had been induced by Nationwide to criticise the Authority on in- formation the programme had supplied to him. When he was given the facts he agreed with the Authority's assessment of the item as 'incorrect in substance and damaging in its criticism of the Authority by misrepre- sentation'. But the Authority got no change out of Nationwide or of the BBC as a whole. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the programme simply to admit it was wrong and apologise. Instead it began by shifting its ground, producing an alternative justification . which (when in- vestigated) proved to be just as fallacious as its first assertion. Two months elapsed. Then the matter went to the BBC central secretariat which, after a further five-week delay, produced the original and erroneous Nationwide defence. There were further let- ters, and further shiftiness on the part of the BBC, culminating in a very odd epistle from the BBC Chairman, George 'Brideshead' Howard. This finally conced- ed that not all the Nationwide 'evidence' had 'stood up to close scrutiny'; never- theless, he concluded, 'the programme peo- ple hold that their basic argument was valid'. What he was saying was that, in the last resort, the Nationwide people themselves are the judge both of the facts and of their own behaviour.
Lord McGregor, the head of the ASA, is a former chairman of a Royal Commission on the Press and has had more experience of journalistic evasiveness than Howard has had hot caviare dinners. In the Advertising Standards Authority Annual Report 1981 he tells the story of the BBC's behaviour. 'We had learned,' he concludes, 'that the standards the Corporation demands of others are not ones it accepts as relevant to its own output.' As he points out, 'the worst form of misconduct by journalists is the basing of contentious opinion upon in- accurate and unchecked information'. This is 'more specially the case with a television programme which usurps the role of a public prosecutor and may be tempted to a carelessness in checking material which will promote the controversies that improve its standing in the ratings'. That was why 'our own experience has seemed worthy of ex- amination'. So it is; and I hope it will be deemed worthy of examination by the Hunt Committee which, in the matter of Cable TV, is currently being swamped with in- flated claims about the lofty 'standards' of what is euphemistically termed 'public ser- vice broadcasting'.
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