Broadcasting
The IRA's best friend .
Paul Johnson
I applaud the IBA's decision to cut IRA propaganda sequences out of a World in Action film made by the left-wing television company, Granada. I wish the IBA had been firmer in the past. Television has many deaths to answer for in Ulster. Recent media coverage has transformed the morale of the IRA, served as its chief recruiting officer, and so led to the killing of soldiers, policemen and bystanders. There was something contemptible in the way the media allowed itself to be bear-led by the IRA in the circus laid on for the Sands suicide-funeral. Of course the security authorities should never have permitted this media event in the first place. It was as carefully and openly prepared, right down to the viewing stands, as the royal wedding. But that does not excuse press and TV. People who are forever whining about the freedom of the press cravenly submitted to IRA 'ground rules'. TV crews allowed the killers to tell them where and where not to film. Two photographers tamely handed over their cameras for censorship by men who would not hesitate to machine-gun a three-year-old child or kneecap their own mothers. How would these ghouls have covered Auschwitz? Done a deal with Himmler for permission to film inside the ovens? Irish violence is a great corrupter. It corrupts the media. The media in return corrupt Ireland's children. An American TV crew was seen to set up half-a-dozen youngsters in a filmable semi-circle against a background of barricades and burning cars. They were told when to sing Republican songs by a sound engineer. Another American was heard to say to a child: 'Can you do that again? I didn't get you throwing that rock.' Gerry Fitt, the Catholic MP, claims that a foreign TV crew encouraged the stoning of a milk float which led to the death of the milkman and his 14-year-old son. A French journalist was seen inciting kids to hurl petrol-bombs at the police. There are reports that media people have even paid children to engage in violence.
, The BBC's Director-General, Ian Trethowan, did not deal with these aspects when he defended the BBC's massive and sensationalised Ulster coverage in The Times last Thursday. He admitted viewers disliked the coverage but insisted the Sands business was 'a major international event which had to be reported to the British public'. Only a network which gets its cash from a compulsory licence fee would have the impudence to insist on filling its screens with stuff it knows its viewers hate. Trethowan compared the IRA to Carson. That is a good illustration of the BBC's sense of values. Carson did not engage in wholesale murder. He did not break the law. His object was not to overthrow the state but to preserve it. A closer comparison can be madebetween the IRA and Sutcliffe, though the IRA is in the wholesale department of the murdertrade and Sutcliffe merely a small retailer. Would it have been 'denial of access to the air' (Trethowan's expression) for the BBC to refuse to make a secret rendezvous with the Ripper, in order to allow him to tell us why he killed women and keep us abreast of his future plans? Would this not be 'to show to the British public the kind of person capable of such an atrocity'? That was the phrase Trethowan's Northern Ireland Controller, James Hawthorne, used in defending the BBC interviews with terrorists, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph last week. The fact is that scarcely a day goes by without the BBC giving prominence to a pro-IRA viewpoint. Whenever IRA morale is sagging, and the police are getting on top, the IRA use the Corporation as a lifesupport system, usually in the form of a terrorist interview. As Alex Schmid and Janny de Graff showed in their Leiden University study, 'terrorism not only thrives but also largely depends upon publicity'. The BBC has been the best friend the IRA ever had.
The truth is the BBC, as at present constituted and led, has no positive commitment to legality. It sees itself as a kind of independent observer, morally neutral as between those seeking to enforce the law and those doing their best to destroy it. Its attitude was unconsciously revealed to me recently by a young BBC official, who told me, a propos of the Brixton riots, in which nearly 200 policemen were hurt, how outraged he'd been to hear that Dulwich College had allowed the police to set up an emergency dressing station in their grounds. 'They shouldn't have taken sides!' he fumed.
That young man is much more likely to have a say in what actually goes out on the air than Trethowan. The Supine Worm of Portland Place may turn timidiy from time to time but we all know that the BBC is effectively out of control. It is the young cowboys who set the pace. The senior officials scramble in their wake, sweeping up the broken pieces and desperately composing excuses. Trethowan's article in The Times does not represent BBC policy because there is, in effect, no BBC policy. The BBC wants all the advantages of being a state body, all the prestige (especially in its overseas dealings) of being the British Broadcasting Corporation, and most of all the financial benefits of being the sole recipient of a poll tax imposed by the state. But it acknowledges no obligations to the state, no duties to Britain. If there is one place where patriotism is a dirty word it is in Broadcasting House. Power (and money) without responsibility: the BBC wants the harlot's role. And it is a self-righteous, sanctimonious and humbugging harlot, too, a sort of contemporary Madame de Main tenon, The BBC's lofty neutrality towards its ordinary British paymasters ought to be considered now the Corporation has its begging-bowl out again. It wants the licence fee increased to £50 in November, and has actually created a special new department, the `TV Licence Campaign Unit', to deluge with propaganda those it thinks may influence the Government. The decision lies in the first place with William Whitelaw, who presumably has some small occupational bias in favour of the law and those who uphold it. But then one has to remember that it was Whitelaw, when Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who conceded the IRA political status. They didn't even have to commit suicide when the old jelly was in charge.
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