Who's lying? (II)

The BBC’s Director, Editorial Policy & Standards, David Jordan, wrote to El Grauniad to object to Peter Oborne's tale-telling: 

Letter to @guardian from BBC editorial policy director 👇 pic.twitter.com/XVTq07wW9r

— BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) November 22, 2019

The kiss of death

I may have inadvertantly blighted the career of David Jordan, the BBC’s Director, Editorial Policy & Standards, by praising him here recently. 

But that's as nothing compared to what's recently befallen poor Laura K. She's received the blessing of the lad the pro-EU #FBPE mob especially love to hate - young Darren Grimes: 

I've never come across a more impartial, kind and courteous journalist than the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg. Who knows her politics? I haven't a clue. That's how it is and how it should be. The boos directed at her at this manifesto launch are chilling.

That won't go down well with the mob. 

Darren was, of course, talking about the Labour election launch, where (as you'll know) this happened:

Becky Long-Bailey: We have got some time for questions. I'll take them in rounds of three. And I don't need to tell this well-behaved audience, let the people who are putting the questions forward the full opportunity (sic) to have their questions heard, and please give Jeremy the opportunity to respond in full. And you'll get a gold star at the end of the day. 
Jeremy Corbyn: If you don't get a gold star you'll get a grim-faced badge.
Becky Long-Bailey: You'll get my angry face. You don't want that. 
Jeremy Corbyn: Ooooh!!
Becky Long-Bailey: So first up, we've got the BBC. Laura Kuenssberg. 

Boos from parts of the audience.

Jeremy Corbyn: No, no, no, no, sorry...
Becky Long-Bailey: No, no, no, no.
Jeremy Corbyn: Sorry. We don't do that. All journalists will be heard with respect. 

The bulk of the audience cheers and applauds.

The BBC bubble is boiling

The open revolt at the BBC over the Naga Munchetty affair continues. Thursday saw open meetings with BBC staff calling for (1) a formal apology for Naga, (2) more black and ethnic minority people to be included in the Executive Complaints Unit and (3) a review of the role of David Jordan, the BBC's head of editorial standards. 

On the latter point, writing in the Sunday Times, Jeremy Clarkson says that throwing David Jordan under the bridge would be a crime, as he's the main "fair cop" at the BBC - one of the few there who never loses sight of the fact that diversity of opinion really matters. 

I don't know the man myself but I've heard the same from leading campaigners against BBC bias. Mr Jordan is, in their experience, the sore thumb that stands out from the rest of the BBC's senior management in genuinely listening to criticism from 'people like us' and, occasionally, acting on it. 

So if the BBC bubble succeeds in getting rid of him then that would be yet another retrograde step for the licence-fee-paying public.

He who casts the first stone, etc.

Transcript, Newswatch 31 August 2018: David Jordan interview re Sir Cliff Richard case

David Jordan

SAMIRA AHMED: No one from the BBC was available to speak to us about this before I am pleased to say we are now joined by David Jordan, the corporation's director of editorial policy and standards. Thank you for coming on Newswatch. Do you accept as many viewers say that the BBC has fallen below the standard expected of it? 

DAVID JORDAN: We are very clear we regret some aspects of the way in which we covered the Cliff Richard story at the beginning. We made clear that we think that the use of a helicopter was inappropriate in the circumstances and that there were some other things about the way in which we covered it, the proportionality of it and so on, which we, with the benefit of hindsight, now regret. So yes, there are certain things about the way in which we did the story which we regret. But we have never conceded the principle, and that's why we got involved in the court case when Sir Cliff took a case against us. We have never conceded the principal, nor wish to concede the principle, that we should not have reported the matter at all. 

SAMIRA AHMED: The editorial misjudgement is the one we want to talk about. You mentioned the helicopter going up, which was defended at the time. Leading bulletins with it and going live, those were areas, too? 

DAVID JORDAN: Well, those were all the areas which the judge criticised in his judgment...

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) And do you agree? 

DAVID JORDAN: ...and which the BBC has conceded that, with the benefit of hindsight, we might have done differently, if we did the story today...

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) Entering it for an award, despite all the criticism? 

DAVID JORDAN: Yes, well, the BBC has said that was a misjudgement. 

SAMIRA AHMED: Sir Cliff offered to settle this without going to court and the police of course did settle. It has cost the licence fee payer £2 million so far. Would you like to say sorry? 

DAVID JORDAN: Well, it's not true that Sir Cliff offered to settle it. We offered to settle with Sir Cliff on a number of occasions, but what Sir Cliff's lawyers wanted was not a settlement but a surrender. They wanted us to concede the principle, as well as to acknowledge that the way in which we had done things was not appropriate. So it isn't true to say that Sir Cliff offered to settle. I'm afraid he didn't, otherwise we could have prevented us having to go through all of the ensuing case. 

SAMIRA AHMED: Well, can you talk about this point of principle then? Because if it's a big point of principle that your journalistic freedom is threatened, why are you not appealing? 

DAVID JORDAN: Well, we've made it clear we considered appealing very carefully. The problem is that legal advice that we were given is that the prospects of success in a legal case were very small. So the judgment we had to make was whether it was worth going forward with a small likelihood of being successful, or not to go ahead at all. Given the costs of litigation in this country, which are very considerable, and given the extra pain that would have been caused to Sir Cliff and all for the unlikely to result in the outcome that we wanted, which was to contest the principle involved in this case, we decided it would be better not to do so. 

SAMIRA AHMED: You see, given that he was not arrested at the time and wasn't subsequently charged and no one had ever covered a case like this, sending up a helicopter before, people are asking why did the BBC claim there was a public interest defence to this? 

DAVID JORDAN: Well, this took place in 2014 in the context of a number of sexual abuse cases involving high-profile people in the entertainment industry, and it was the case that in some of those cases where people were named it resulted in other allegations coming forward and other victims presenting themselves and thereby making the case against them considerably stronger. And we have had something similar happen in the United States recently with the naming of Harvey Weinstein, the accusation he is a sexual abuser, bringing forward a lot of other cases of a similar sort. So that is where a considerable part of the public interest lies. There also is a public interest in the public knowing about police investigations and the media's ability to scrutinise those public investigations and scrutinise the work of the police. And there is a public interest and the public's right to know things that are going on in our society and that is always the presumption from which we start. 

SAMIRA AHMED: You're the head of BBC editorial policy and standards. You heard the court evidence, BBC journalist joking in e-mails about Jailhouse Rock, "congratulations and jubilations". Is that acceptable by BBC editorial standards?

DAVID JORDAN: Well, we've made it clear  that, it is not an editorial standards matter as such, but we made it clear that was not appropriate. However, you know, let's be clear, who of us have not issued at some point in our lives an e-mail which, if read out in a court room, or plastered all over the national press, would not look slightly awry? 

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) Hmm. This is BBC editors about a serious allegation.

DAVID JORDAN: It was people who are covering a story and they were celebrating the fact that they had covered the story - and they did it in an inappropriate way, in a wrong way, but, you know, he who casts the first stone, etc. 

SAMIRA AHMED: Jonathan Munro came on Newswatch after the story ran and defended it and defended the helicopter and, you know, it's very interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, but the BBC is supposed to have editorial standards and judgement and what viewers are really concerned about is the BBC didn't seem to have them at the time of the Cliff Richard case. 

DAVID JORDAN: No, I think some misjudgements were made. They were made in good faith at the time. They were made within the context of the law that applied at the time and nobody was trying to do something wrong. It was at that time completely standard practice to name a person who was the subject of a police investigation. This case has altered case law on this question. In a way... 

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) Well, Mr Justice Mann denies that.

DAVID JORDAN: Well, I'm afraid that means he hasn't read his own judgment. 

I'm afraid his judgment... 

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) You're telling me he was wrong?

DAVID JORDAN: I'm afraid his judgment says this, and it introduces a huge chasm of uncertainty into whether or not you can name a suspect in these circumstances. He does say if the police name them you can do so, but he introduces...and he does say if it is manifestly in the public interest you can do so, but then he says that it wasn't in the public interest in this case. which involved a sexual abuse case...

SAMIRA AHMED: (interrupting) So you take it case-by-case. You have made that clear, that is a legal issue about whether the balance between the public interest and the right to privacy, and that's a case-by-case basis says the judge. Can you tell me why no one at the BBC has resigned over this Cliff Richard case? 

DAVID JORDAN: Well, it's not always the right thing to do, to sack people or make people resign, when something goes wrong. Obviously, it's very important that we learn the lessons - and we have done and are doing - and we will do things differently in the future. But. as I said, the people who made the decisions about how this story was going to be covered did so in good faith, they did so within the context of the law as it existed at that time, and it's not always appropriate to sack people and get people to resign for doing their job in the way that they thought was proper at the time. 

SAMIRA AHMED: David Jordan, thank you. 

DAVID JORDAN: Thank you. 

Nice try

David Jordan

Two very senior voices from within the BBC bubble - David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy and standards, and Ric Bailey, the BBC's chief political adviser - have penned a rare and important joint piece for a somewhat out-of-the-way pro-public-broadcasting media site called journalism.co.uk headlined Impartiality and the BBC – 'broad balance' in a two-horse race. It concerns the BBC's coverage of the EU referendum.

It's a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. And it's refreshing to read: 

We are never keen on the argument that being attacked by both sides shows you must be getting it right. It’s quite possible to be wrong in two different ways, so we always take such criticisms seriously. In any case, few issues only have two sides, so teetering in the middle of the proverbial see-saw is seldom the right place.  

That said, after reading the piece through, what will you find to be its main message? 

(Shall I save you the trouble?) 

Well, get the smelling salts ready folks. Its message can be summed up like this: We think we got it about right. 

(OK, you can put the smelling salts away now. False alarm!). 

Yes, alas, despite all its welcome hand-wringing, it ends up being wholly and depressingly complacent, always giving the BBC the benefit of the doubt and painting the corporation in the most favourable colours. 

Typically, David and Ric dismiss 'stopwatch' monitoring of BBC coverage and place their trust in the BBC's good judgement. 

Ric Bailey

For them it's all down to the judgements of individual BBC editors to measure the 'balance equations' within their particular programmes.

That, of course, doesn't answer the question of how those individual editors are to police their own editorial decisions. 

Nor does it answer the question of how the BBC's coverage overall can be judged. 

To be blunt, I trust stopwatches more than I trust BBC editors. I don't see why we should take on trust the BBC's claims that their editors - people like Ian Katz - are unbiased. I used my stopwatches on Newsnight during the referendum and found it was far from even-handed. 

It's also characteristic of such pieces that our two brave BBC bigwigs give examples of what went right (eg. an interview with Douglas Carswell) but don't give examples of what went wrong.

Plus they place complete trust in their own reality-checking process - something that continues to ring alarm bells with me. The BBC sitting in statistical judgement on hot topics of political controversy, and doing so under the banner of impartiality, is a much more questionable proposition than our two BBC high-ups seem to realise. 

So, nice try guys but it really isn't washing.

Why the BBC doesn't monitor itself for bias

One of the less-reported things about the European Scrutiny Committee's encounter with the three top BBC bosses was that it discussed something close to our hearts: monitoring bias. 

What I took away from it was that after the Wilson Report into the BBC's (pro-) EU coverage, the BBC had pledged to put some form of monitoring into place but that, having tried doing so, has now abandoned monitoring again and won't be re-introducing it in the run-up to the EU referendum.

Sir Bill Cash, repeatedly citing News-watch's close monitoring of the BBC's EU coverage, argued that the BBC ought to be carrying out such monitoring and making its finding publicly available for people to check. He wants a Hansard-style logging system, comparable to News-watch's extensive archive of transcriptions, and, given its huge budget and sheer size, wanted to know why the BBC isn't doing so?  

The most concise statement of the BBC's position came from David Jordan, the BBC's head of editorial policy and standards:

I think we gave up the monitoring that the chairman is talking about at the time because we found it to be actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all in even deciding and defining whether we were impartial. 

And I think in the context of other appearances and elections we've discovered the same thing. For example, if you're covering an election how do you define somebody who's on a particular party but it opposing something that party is doing at the time they were appearing on the radio? Are they, as it were, in that party's column or are they in another column that tells you what they were doing? It becomes very, very confusing and doesn't necessarily sum up the nuances and differences that exist in election campaigns in our experience. 

So that was the reason I think why we gave it up. 

It was also very, very expensive and time-consuming too. 

And we thought that allowing editors to be essentially responsible for impartiality in their output and having an overall view which we get through a series of meetings and discussions which take place in the BBC, were a better way to ensure we achieved impartiality that through simple number-counting.

I have to say I laughed when he said that such monitoring had proved to be "actually very unhelpful and not helpful at all". Cynically, I thought, "I bet it wasn't - especially if it came up with the 'wrong' results" (a bit like the Balen report?)

I didn't buy his example either. For me, it's hardly rocket science to, say, note in one column that Kate Hoey is a Labour Party representative and in another column to note that she's anti-EU. I can't see why that would be "very, very confusing". 

Also, I don't buy the it's "very, very expensive and time-consuming too" argument either. If a small number of people at News-watch can monitor and transcribe every EU-related interview on major BBC programmes over many, many years then surely an organisation of the size and resources of the BBC can run something similar for its major news bulletins and flagship programmes too. It's not that difficult. I work full-time and still managed to monitor every political interview on all the BBC's main current affairs programmes for nine months (in 2009-10) - and at no expense whatsoever! 

Also, if you simply rely on editorial judgement - on both the small and large scales (in individual programmes and at senior editorial meetings) - then many individual biases could result and multiply. In an organisation containing so many like-minded people as the BBC, those biases would doubtless head in the same direction and become self-reinforcing. Therefore, they probably won't be spotted as biases at all - merely sensible, impartial BBC thinking. Who then would be able to point out that it isn't being impartial after all?

Given that many people think that this kind of groupthink the problem and that, as a result, the BBC are blind to their own biases, asking us to trust the judgements of BBC editors en masse isn't likely to reassure us....

....which is where what David Jordan derisively calls "number-crunching" comes in. 

If over a year of, say, Newsnight there are 60 editions that deal with the UK-EU relationship in some way. Say 55 of those editions featured a pro-Stay guest but only 35 featured a pro-Leave guest, then number-crunching surely would surely raise a serious question about the programme's impartiality? 

If, say, 9 of those pro-Leave guests came from UKIP and the other 26 came from the Conservatives but no pro-Leave Labour or Green guests appeared then that would also surely indicate a serious bias?

Is it really beyond the ability of programme editors to count and record such figures - and to then make them publicly available?

If their figures show exceptional impartiality (45 pro-Stay, 45 pro-Leave guests), then they will surely win more people over, wouldn't they? 

What would they have to lose?


Update: The full transcript of the committee meeting is now available (h/t David Keighley).

Scrutiny

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent days. Sue's away and I've been otherwise engaged. (Some of the perils of blogging!)

One of the big BBC-related stories of the past week has been the appearance of Lord Hall, James Harding and David Jordan at parliament's European Scrutiny Committee discussing the BBC's policies in the light of the upcoming EU referendum.

Two parts of the discussion have dominated the media's reporting of it:

The first was that "all BBC journalists" will be sent for "mandatory training" so that they become "as well-informed as possible of the issues around the workings of the institutions of the EU and its relationship to the UK". 

(So that's John Humphrys, James Naughtie, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, Katya Adler, Jeremy Bowen, etc?)

The second concerned the meeting's most heated moment - when Jacob Rees-Mogg confronted David Jordan (director of editorial policy and standards) over EU funding for the BBC - the reporting about which has been somewhat confusing (to my mind).

Mr Jordan began by replying that the BBC "doesn't take money from the EU" and that the organisation that does take money from the EU (£35 million), Media Action, is "owned by the BBC" but "independent". 

On being pushed further (over a FoI request by The Spectator into EU funding for the BBC), however, things got murker and Mr Jordan and Mr Rees-Mogg began to fall out:

David Jordan: There are two things you were referring to - the question that you asked last time, which was in relation to Media Action, so I answered...

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Well, I wasn't actually. Last time I was asking about EU funds broadly, not Media Action.   

David Jordan: Well, it's that £35 million figure which you quoted which relates to the Media Action... 

Jacob Rees-Mogg: But you replied about Media Action when I was asking about all EU funding....

Having watched their earlier exchange again, Mr Rees-Mogg is correct. He didn't ask about Media Action or "quote" that £35 million figure earlier. Here's how their discussion started:

Jacob Rees-Mogg: I just want to go back to a question we came to the last time you came to the committee, on the money that the BBC receives from the EU, which I know isn't huge in your overall budget but which is still some tens of millions. One of the standard contractual terms when the EU hands out money is that those receiving money won't say or do anything damaging to the interests of the EU. Does the BBC agree to those standard contractual terms and will they take money from the EU between now and the referendum? 

David Jordan: The BBC as a public service broadcaster doesn't take money from the EU. The organisation to which you're referring that take money from the EU is an organisation called Media Action and that's an independent part of the BBC with independent trustees........

The committee's chairman, however, only added to the confusion here by wrongly ascribing that "quote" about the £35 million to Mr Rees-Mogg himself shortly after, so maybe Mr Jordan's apparent confusion on that point is more understandable:

William Cash: Why do you need to receive the £30 million I think that Jacob referred to...?

The disagreements continued, however, and David Jordan, in answer to pushing on that Spectator FoI request, said that independent companies who make programmes for the BBC also receive some EU funding and that the EU also funds some other things, such as translating programmes made in English into other EU languages (as seemed to have been the case with the highly controversial pro-EU mockumentary The Great European Disaster Movie). 

Jacob Rees-Mogg was not happy:

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Look, you are now giving me a really different answer from the one you gave before. I never mentioned Media Action. I only mentioned EU funding. You gave an answer about overseas aid and now you're saying the BBC does receive money to help with some of its programming and does receive money to translate some of its programming and you are therefore signed up to the contractual agreements from the EU that require you not to damage its interests. Why didn't you give the full answer the first time.

David Jordan: I gave a very full answer about Media Action and now I'm giving a very full answer about how other funds are occasionally available for other programmes to make use of... 

Jacob Rees-Mogg:...which you denied in response to my first question. 

William Cash then told them to calm down and moved the discussion on - which is unfortunate, I think, as many issues were still left dangling in the air over the EU money that isn't spent on Media Action. Mr Rees-Mogg still seemed unclear about that. I'm certainly unclear about it. 

And does the BBC sign up to that contractual agreement with the EU when it accepts the funding for innocuous-sounding tasks like translations and those other aspects of programming (whatever they may be exactly), apparently always involving independent companies? 

And what if those independent companies only produce pro-EU programmes for the BBC (like The Great European Disaster Movie?) How would that free the BBC from charges of pro-EU bias? Does their independence' and the apparent fact that the EU money they get goes on things like translations really get the BBC off the hook here?

Such questions need a lot more scrutiny.