We don't get much better news than this, Nadine!
Heads may roll over Hutton, BBC admits
Matt Wells, media correspondent
Tuesday December 30, 2003
The Guardian
Senior BBC executives may be forced to resign when the Hutton inquiry reports, a corporation director admitted in an unusually candid radio interview last night.
Caroline Thomson, the BBC's director of policy and legal affairs, said the Today programme report that led to Lord Hutton's judicial investigation fell short of the "truth and accuracy" that are the "gold standard of the BBC". She said the concessions made by the BBC during the inquiry had been "spectacular".
Her comments were noticeably less bullish than an interview given by the director general, Greg Dyke, last week, when he all but ruled out high-level resignations.
Ms Thomson conceded that the BBC's regulatory structure, in which the organisation's editorial impartiality is upheld by its board of governors, was "out of kilter with modern fashions of regulation".
Over the past few weeks, the BBC has been preparing the ground for the Hutton report by making a number of changes to structures and editorial procedures in response to the expected criticism. Mr Dyke has appointed a deputy to oversee the complaints and compliance procedures, and the corporation is shortly due to announce tighter controls over the breaking of controversial stories.
Ms Thomson, speaking on Radio 4's PM programme, said Andrew Gilligan's original Today story, in which he reported concerns about the September 2002 dossier that made the case for war on Iraq, was not up to scratch. "Truth and accuracy are the gold standard ... but you don't always achieve it and we rather spectacularly had to admit that we hadn't got the entire details of the Hutton story, the Gilligan story right."
Gilligan reported claims that Downing Street had "sexed up" the dossier, prompting an incendiary row with Alastair Campbell, then director of communications at No 10. A government weapons expert, David Kelly, was revealed as Gilligan's source; he later apparently committed suicide, leading to the inquiry by Lord Hutton.
Ms Thomson said the inquiry's fall-out would not prevent the BBC from breaking stories. There was a "proper tradition of investigative reporting" in the BBC, which would continue.
She indicated that the fate of executives depended on the strength of criticism in Lord Hutton's report, due for publication next month. "The BBC will see what Hutton says and then decide what is the appropriate course of action to take on it," Ms Thomson said.
Pressed by interviewer Eddie Mair on whether the BBC would consider resignations, she said: "It does not rule them in or out."
Ms Thomson said she "completely accepted" that the governors had two competing roles in upholding the BBC's independence from government, and ensuring complaints were properly investigated. But she said: "The governors behaved very well in balancing out their two roles when we had the Hutton story. What they did was, they asked the tough questions in private and defended in public - which is what they are required to do in the way they are currently set up."
There are concerns that this process is opaque. Jocelyn Hay, chairman of Voice of the Listener and Viewer pressure group, expressed a hope that the process of renewing the BBC's royal charter would result in an improved set-up. "We hope that governance and decision making will be more transparent," she told PM.
guardian.co.uk |
