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To BBC or not to BBC:

Independent journalism suffers an identity crisis

By Nicholas Fraser

It was a miserable dark London day when Lord Hutton finally delivered his report dealing with the death of the government’s scientific adviser, Dr. David Kelly, who killed himself after leaking information to the BBC. Dressed in undertaker’s gray, speaking with the half-suppressed brogue of his native Ulster, Judge Hutton cast a chill over the Ikea-bright courtroom. Most people had expected that the judge would be more or less evenhanded in his allocation of blame, but Hutton exonerated the government. Minute by minute the judge unpacked his findings against the BBC. The original radio story, the work of Andrew Gilligan, a BBC investigative reporter, the judge concluded, was sloppily researched and poorly phrased. Gilligan had analyzed the content of a dossier used by the Blair government to persuade the British public that a war against Iraq was necessary. The now infamous government claim that weapons of mass destruction could be used by the Iraqis within forty-five minutes of an order being given, Gilligan reported, was inserted late in the drafting of the document with the knowledge that it was probably false. He further alleged that the government had “sexed up” the dossier against the express wishes of those working in intelligence. Hutton dismissed all these allegations—”unfounded” was the word he used—making it clear that he didn’t believe the reporter’s account of his meeting with Dr. Kelly. He found the BBC guilty of poor editorial controls and of complacency when it came to responding to complaints. All he could find to say against the Blair government in 328 dense pages was that poor Dr. Kelly should have been notified when the decision was made to allow journalists to guess his identity, rewarding them when they gave the right answer.

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SEE ALSO: British Broadcasting Corporation; Kelly, David; Death and burial; Freedom of the press; Government and the press; Public broadcasting; Blair, Tony; Views on BBC

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