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Article Excerpt
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 Ikeabright 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.
Blair likes to address Parliament as if composing a new tableau to be hung adjacent to the pseudo-medieval artworks that decorate the Mother of Parliaments: KING TONY ADDRESSES THE UNRULY BARONS OF THE REALM. His speech following Lord Hutton's judgment was more impassioned, harsher in tone, and it was wholly devoid of charm. Blair wanted his enemies at the BBC to go, and both its chairman, Gavyn Davies, and its director general, Greg Dyke, resigned in the days that followed. But he made the appeal as an injured individual, not as a powerful politician who had just taken his country into an unpopular war. Righteous, a telltale quaver entering his voice, he sounded like the barrister in Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, defending a fourteen-year-old boy from the charge of having stolen a postal order. Had any British prime minister spoken more of the need to communicate? Had any politician anywhere in the world prided himself more on the quality of his media performances? Surely not, yet here he was, more than ready to pursue his own private cause against the prestige of the BBC. But Blair also believed that it had been wrong for the BBC to broadcast this story. The Prime Minister would have been happier if the BBC had censored itself.
Few reporters in Britain can remain immune to the existence of the BBC, and I am no exception. Blair's onslaught made me think about many things, not least of them the strange death of censorship. In the old days, before anyone affected to believe that all information should be free, and easily accessible, censors were very important people, it was they, by determining what could or couldn't be said, who established some sort of accepted standard for information. Acquaintance with interdicted texts gave them a cosmopolitan outlook, and I can recall many discussions about free speech with censors, mostly in the old countries of the Eastern bloc. But the BBC, too, had its own censors. When I first went to work at the BBC, sometime in the 1970s, I visited a tweeded individual in a remote office out of 1984. I was eager to make many provocative shows for the BBC and told him so. My mentor gave me a slim booklet with a green cover. Here I was informed, genteelly and in civil-servant prose, that in the BBC one should be impartial and fair-minded, always tell the truth, and he careful to submit one's expenses on time and in triplicate. Faced with doubt about the wisdom of revealing a fact, one must consult with one's superiors. "Never say you want to make programs at the BBC," my mentor intoned. "Just say you want to work for the BBC." When I was able to reassure him that I had never belonged to a Communist organization, he nodded, as if to say, "Good chap." For many years I struggled with these injunctions. What, I asked myself, does "impartiality" mean? Is it always appropriate, even when confronted with the vilest specimens of mankind, to be "fair" in the style of a cricket umpire? Each book written by a BBC man or woman contains something of the BBC, and I noticed that most of 1984--Room 101, the disgusting canteen food, the cleaning ladies, Newspeak--was Orwell's tribute to a place where he was censored but which he nonetheless loved. It would be too much to say that I learned to love censors, but, unlike Winston Smith, I survived.
Times have changed, and the red chairs on which censors sat are gathering dust. Except among the bearded ulema, the religious police of Saudi Arabia, or perhaps somewhere within the dynastic collectivism of North Korea, overt censorship is out of fashion these days. No head of state, whatever the condition of the local dungeons, will fail to express a belief in open government, and no well-meaning celebrity will miss the opportunity to attend this year's Amnesty International awards. But Blair's intervention told me that the belief in free expression is no more rooted in reality than it was when Voltaire pestered Frederick the Great about being enlightened. Everybody loves freedom of speech so long as it can happen elsewhere. Governments, like individuals, have become, to use an Anglo-American expression usually applied to those opposing the construction of adjacent unsightly buildings, "Nimbyists"--they believe in free expression when their own back yards are not affected. Where their interests are threatened, they will go to some lengths to defend themselves. The same goes for the private corporations which have in part taken the place of governments, and which now own newspapers and TV stations. For the ultimate Nimby, nothing exists outside one's own right to say what one wants and to be protected from those who say bad things. This was the attitude taken by Courtney Love a few years ago, when she presented a Torch of Liberty ACLU award to Milos Forman, director of a film about the pornographer Larry Flynt (in which she had starred as Flynt's wife), while attempting to deter journalists who wished to write about herself or her dead husband, Kurt Cobain. At heart Tony and Courtney are Nimbies.
But I notice, too, that the end of censorship...
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