Entertaining paragraphs from the 31-page Peter Johnston review of what went wrong with "Gaza: How to survive a war zone"
"While the complementary experience of the two BBC Commissioning Editors meant there was a rationale for involving both individuals, there was sometimes a lack of clarity about the
allocation of oversight over particular aspects of the production and compliance. This issue was exacerbated by resourcing pressures on the BBC Commissioning Team, which limited the BBC’s ability to be as proactive and curious in its oversight of the Programme as it otherwise might have been."
"In response to queries raised internally about whether particular background checks had been made, the tendency was for the BBC to ask the Production Company whether checks had been undertaken, as opposed to the BBC asking what precise checks had been done and reviewing and checking the results of those checks.
The key emails - never really answered. Mr Johnston doesn't give the roles of the recipients of these emails.
On 12 January 2025, from an Editorial Policy advisor: “Has due diligence been done on
those featured to ensure eg the lead boy doesn't have links in any way to [Hamas] - I'm
sure it has but critics may raise something and I want to make sure we're completely sure.”
On 15 January 2025, from a member of the BBC Commissioning Team: “[Narrator] /
Background, family social media?”
The internal failure....a point Mr Johnston makes more than once.
"Those signing the Compliance Form should not have signed it without conducting a
final comprehensive and critical review of all the notes, questions and feedback provided on
the Programme to ensure that everything had been addressed adequately."
The idea that it is the filmmakers, Hoyo, who are mostly at fault, with the BBC carrying a minor part of the blame, is ridiculous. Only an internal BBC report could come to such a cockeyed conclusion.
ReplyDeleteIf you commission a programme and the programme falls short, blame is not shifted from you, the commissioner, to the provider. The commissioner must both oversee the programme as it is made AND is the final and sole arbiter of whether the programme meets the necessary standards, which are set by the commissioner not the provider.
If an editor tells a reporter to go out and cover a story, he or she must ask the right questions about how the reporter intends to cover it. And check the story once it's written, asking more questions, before publishing it. If the published story is found to contain basic errors, of course the reporter is at fault, but that does not subtract from the fault of the editor, because the editor has missed those errors and must bear all the responsibility for the publication of a substandard story.
Peter Johnston would have us believe the BBC shared the production of the documentary with Hoyo Films, but that was not the Corporation's role. It was the overseer, as it is with all commissioned programmes, and should therefore be held 100 percent responsible for all the film's failings.
Thank goodness the structure of BBC regulation and governance was changed in 2017 to improve accountability! They changed the old setup, in which the BBC Trust oversaw the DG and his officers, and now Tim Davie sits on the Board alongside news chief Deborah Turness and two other senior execs.
ReplyDeleteThey have an Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee. This sounds right up their street; who sits on that? DG Tim Davie; News CEO Deborah Turness; Chair Samir Shah; senior independent non-exec director Caroline Thomson and non-exec Member for England Sir Robbie Gibb.
So does that mean the improved accountability derives from
a) the top executives upon whose desks one might reasonably expect the buck for serious News editorial failures to stop, and
b) a bloke who's been the subject of allegations of conflict of interest over Israel/Gaza because of his ties to the Jewish Chronicle - and whom 400 signatories to an open letter (including 111 BBC journalists) urged to step down, citing "concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine" (but he hasn't) getting to mark their own homework?
Nooo, because back in 2017 Ofcom was brought into the regulatory picture too. And now they're launching an investigation, presumably including investigating the BBC's own investigation.
Suggestion for Ofcom chief Dame Melanie Dawes: also investigate what on earth is the point of the BBC Board now? Among the very people whose job it was to oversee and uphold editorial standards are those ultimately responsible for those standards being repeatedly called into question. The rolling of assistant heads won't do.