Abstract
“If we're not prepared to look at ourselves honestly, how can we be trusted to look at anything else in our reporting?”
Those words from Carrie Gracie, to the select committee hearing on equal pay at the BBC, were in some ways the most wounding of the many accusations hurled at the BBC in recent weeks because they went to the heart of the BBC's claim to its audiences that it can be trusted to tell the truth.
So if the BBC is going to recover from this, where does it go from here? First, and most obviously, it is going to have to sort out the pay issue: equal pay in particular, but also the broader issue of its whole pay policy. How is it decided how much people should be paid and who does it? Equal pay for work of equal value is an important moral principle as well as a legal requirement. It can be more complicated in practice. Being the BBC's North America Editor is not the same job as being China Editor. Both are very important. You need an open and transparent system for determining whether or not they are of equal value or whether one is of greater value than the other. Such a system does not appear to exist at present. Overall, for all pay, there need to be clear rules and pay scales but enough flexibility to avoid a return to the over-bureaucratic and rigid systems of the past. A start on the BBC's part would be to acknowledge that the current system is a real mess.
This was a crisis the BBC should have seen coming. From the moment it started to look at the figures prior to the publication of its top pay rates last summer, it should have been apparent that there was a big gender discrepancy. There might be all sorts of historical reasons for the differences but the unmistakable end result was that often women were paid less than their male colleagues. The subsequent queue of more than 200 employees waiting to have their pay reassessed should have set even louder alarm bells ringing. Where were HR in all this? Where was the strategic overview? Where was the voice insisting the issue be addressed, and swiftly? To make things worse, then there was the fat-footed PR response to Carrie Gracie's resounding resignation. The BBC stayed silent for too long and by the time it came out to make its case, it was too late.
As if the pay question wasn't enough, there are a number of other very big issues looming for the Corporation. There are a further £80million of cuts to be made to the news budget. The easy savings were made long ago. Most of the hard ones were tackled in the last round. This time entire programmes or services will have to go. Dropping programmes brings vociferous public protests. Ask 6 Music or the Asian Network. Rather than working through a programme of cuts, there will have to be a clever and radical reinvention of BBC News and what it does across all its networks and platforms. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, what does the BBC have to do, rather than what it wants to do? What should the evening provision of BBC news be? Should breaking/continuous news be online and mobile only? If it still makes sense to have TV news channels, does it make sense to have two - the News Channel and BBC World - one of which can't be seen in the UK, the other only in the UK?
The BBC has a looming dilemma with its global role. It has very successfully grown its global audience to 372 million with an ambitious target of 500 million by 2020. But there must have been pause for thought when Sky, which already financially out-muscles the BBC three to one, announced that it was selling up to Disney because it was too small to compete. If the BBC is going to compete globally, then what is its market position going to be? If it is to be as a relatively niche broadcaster, are its very strong selling points of quality programming and trusted news going to be enough to cut through? Does it need more and bigger partners?
Finally, the issue of impartiality in a fake news world. The BBC's commitment to deliver impartial news has never been more important than it is now and has never been more difficult to deliver. At a time when more and more information is being pushed at us by partisan sources - some of it arguable, much palpably false - the need for reliable news that doesn't have a pre-ordained agenda is growing. As the US is discovering, news that plays to the prejudices of one half of the country alienates the other. A polarised media leads to a divided country.
For there to be the reasoned debate essential in a democracy, there needs to be a baseline of an impartial presentation of all the relevant facts so citizens can make informed choices. Yet, as the BBC discovered during the Brexit referendum, that line is getting harder to walk. There are limitations to the “on the one hand, on the other hand” traditional type of balanced coverage which has been the norm up to now in elections and campaigns.
It is no longer enough to just blandly and blindly present two competing versions of events in a hands-off manner, especially when the politicians appear increasingly willing to play fast and loose with the truth. There needs to be much greater context and analysis; the “facts” themselves need to be scrutinised and where necessary challenged (“alternative facts” are lies); claims and counter-claims need to be called into question. It is only by meeting these new challenges robustly that the BBC is going to be seen as impartial in the future and thereby retain the trust of its audiences.
Ah, that word trust again.
The writer is a journalist, broadcaster and media consultant. He was a producer, editor and senior executive at the BBC