This week, twenty years ago, one Alastair Campbell was tearing into BBC News senior management about Today reporter Andrew Gilligan's claims, apparently from the 'inside', that the Government's dossier supporting action against Iraq had been 'sexed-up'.
Former BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum was part of the team the BBC assembled to rebut and rebuff Campbell, and is telling his version of events in his blog - Part 1 and Part 2 already make very good reading, offering insights I've not read before.
"At seven minutes past six in the morning ... Andrew Gilligan [was] mumbling and umming his way through a broadcast like he was still half asleep"
ReplyDeleteProbably was, as he was doing it from home down an ISDN line, and probably still in his jimjams.
The reason Andrew Gilligan practically always broadcast from home via ISDN - a very unusual practice at the time - was because the Today programme's former editor Rod Liddle, who hired Gilligan, wanted him to be as free as possible from the normal editorial oversight that would be exercised on reporters before they broadcast. Not only did he stay at home, he would dial in only a minute or two before his scheduled slot, so that there was literally no time to check what he was about to say.
ReplyDeleteI often worked in the Today studio at that time, and Gilligan's modus operandi was common knowledge. The senior journalists in charge of the programme on a daily basis were frustrated at this, but couldn't do anything about it because this was the way their boss wanted it. Liddle knew they would exercise caution, and he was trying, in effect, to throw BBC caution to the winds.
When Kevin Marsh took over from Liddle as Today editor in November 2002, he should have ended Gilligan's 'special relationship' with the programme. It would have saved the BBC a whole lot of trouble.
Liddle has since said that the whole Gilligan 'misreporting' issue is a red herring; the central fact being that the Blair government misled the country about Saddam's alleged WMDs and therefore the case for war. I'd dispute that: if you're trying to investigate government wrongdoing, you don't do that by using reporters who can't stand up their stories at that time they're broadcast, and whose investigations tend to end up in the courts costing their employers lots of money after climbdowns.
And you don't deliberately circumvent your own organisation's editorial procedures. If you don't believe in them, you should go and work somewhere else. At the end of the day, who paid the price for government dishonesty over Iraq? Not the government. Therefore, the Gilligan affair is no red herring; it gave that government the chance to wriggle free and declare itself the victim. Great work, everyone.