Abstract
Praise for this year's winner of the Charles Wheeler Award and a plea for the future of journalism
All of us fortunate enough to have known Charles Wheeler, or even to have watched or listened to him, know how much he gave to our trade. Piercing, eloquent, passionate, he was an observer who knew instinctively how to separate the important from the trivial, and got to the core every time. He was the most natural of broadcasters, and it's in that spirit that I'm delighted that Katya Adler is receiving this award in his name tonight.
Katya is an adornment on that tradition that Charles represented, because she is a correspondent who's never happy just to wrap a story up. She does that every time, and then she takes it on. She points the way forward. In the morass of Brussels, and its outposts from here to the Baltic, that's some task.
Correspondents should have time to talk to people, to immerse themselves. The best foreign correspondents – in the Wheeler mould – are allowed (because they insist) to get the time and space that will let them get to know their patches. Katya is the epitome of this. She not only knows them, all, from the Atlantic to the Baltic, she can pronounce their names.
This is storytelling, which the best journalism always is. Context. Revelation. Narrative. Style – that's it. But at the moment it is quite difficult. None of us has known anything like this. Brexit has produced problems for broadcasters, because people are breaking the rules. It's an important lesson from the US of the problem that Donald Trump has posed. If you simply bulldoze your way through, are unembarrassable, don't worry too much about whether you can back up what you say, even (whisper it) make it up as you go along, or tell straightforward porkies. How should we deal with it? In newspapers, it's easier. On air, there's a problem.
The difficulty is that you're drawn into a bout of mud-wrestling. Particularly at the BBC, this is a problem. Traditionally – and properly – an interviewer would just stay calm, pursue a polite but firm line of questioning, refuse to be put off. But if someone has no interest in the “rules” – the accepted parameters of interviewer and interviewee – it becomes very difficult. If they turn looking foolish or duplicitous into something of an art form (à la Trump) it's difficult to counteract without getting down to their level – at which point an interviewee can legitimately say that we've abandoned the standards that we claim to have set for ourselves. It's a problem, because you're always being tempted to get into the mud and splash around. It's something, in my view, that should always be resisted. That's not what interviewers are for. They should keep their feet clean.
There's an additional problem. Jeremy Corbyn hasn't done a proper sit-down interview with Today on BBC Radio 4 for nearly two years. You can see why his people might think it's a problem. So they just say no. Boris Johnson limited the number of hustings in his leadership contest, and has sabotaged some broadcast invitations. What do we do? The more we criticise them for not doing it, the more they simply rage against the “mainstream media”, a phrase that gets my goat every time.
I suspect that with Boris Johnson we're going to get a different kind of press operation in No 10. We need to be ready. Donald Trump has shown that demagoguery works (at least at first). I'm not necessarily suggesting that he will be re-elected, but we all know that it's a possibility, rather than a likelihood. He's done this by using tactics – Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, the corrupt FBI, the failing CIA (the wonderful Vladimir Putin – there's something wrong there….but let it pass) that most of us, I imagine, would have said a few years ago would disqualify him from election and, if he were to succeed, from surviving.
He may not last the course – it will be the money that does it, if anything – but he has changed the rules. A pay-off to Stormy Daniels, the jailing of close associates – two years into his first term, and he's already in possession of the record for indictments and convictions of administration officials and close colleagues. Yet he has the nerve to go on at his rallies; and we saw Sean Hannity the other night on Fox News railing against Nancy Pelosi because he thought her intent to pursue a proper investigation of Trump's behaviour in office and his finances was tantamount to a promise to lock him up, which Mr Hannity assured his viewers was unAmerican and the kind of thing that happened in banana republics (his words). This in defence of a man who has led tens of thousands in chants of “lock her up” (against Lyin’ Hillary Clinton), with a four-star general leading the cheers. At least he – General Flynn – is heading to jail.
It reminds me of Inauguration Day in January 2017. A friend from The Washington Post said as we walked back up Pennsylvania Avenue that I shouldn't be thinking too much about the Founding Fathers. The script for the Trump administration wouldn't be written by Alexander Hamilton, but by Mario Puzo. The family, the business, that's all.
They change the rules for themselves; and the trouble is that they tempt others to do the same. Fox News and Trump. Johnson and the Telegraph? That relationship would be different from any we've known with any other publication and a prime minister – and goes far beyond the commitment of a paper, in general terms, to one side of politics or the other.
The Crossover of Music and Politics
The reason this is important isn't just for our reputation as broadcasters (or indeed as newspapers). It goes more broadly to what we might call the common culture. I was speaking at an event at the Red House in Aldeburgh, the home of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, about the culture of the moment. That was about music, not surprisingly, and had nothing to do with politics directly. But there are themes that cross over and get tangled up.
We're in a time of tumult. I'm sure that there are political views on Brexit here that come from right across the spectrum. But somehow, divided by a referendum that tried to deny complications in pursuit of a simple answer, we've ended up in something that's less like a dense argument about tariffs and rebates, backstops and protocols than some kind of 17th century religious war. You put on your particular hat and ride into battle. Francois Mitterrand said, wisely, about referendums that the trouble with them was that too many people voted on a question that hadn't been asked. A friend of mine – a former cabinet minister and strongly anti-Brexit – was visiting a village in his old patch, which he knew well, and met an elderly man who was an acquaintance. He asked him why he'd voted for Brexit, and the man said: “The vicar's gay!” QED.
The significance of this is that I think we're living at a time when we're being riven by a fiery political argument that's become a culture war, which is dangerous territory. It's what happened in the US in the 90s with Clinton, and the consequences are with us today. It means that we drift into a culture of contempt, where discourse is dominated by insults directed at the people with whom you disagree. Division is celebrated. Driving a wedge between people is thought to be good politics. And if you doubt that it can work, look who was elected president of the United States. But this all works against what Britten – to go back to the Red House for a moment – called the “strength and freedom” of music. It's antithetical to the inquiring spirit, the generous ear, the intellectual desire to break new ground.
When you get a common culture that tends not to value these things as highly as it should, artists, and people who care about the world of the imagination, have to work harder to be heard. Someone is always threatening to drown them out.
It means, of course, that music and all the arts are more important than ever. Britten, we know, always understood, despite his embedded Englishness and his absorption in his country's history and culture, that he was an outsider. His pacifism, his sexuality, his insistence on pursuing the musical life with unflinching zeal, made him that. He was someone always separate from the throng; you can feel that on the beaches there and in the reed-beds. They are places that nurture solitude.
But the outsider-artist, who stands alone, is also the catalyst in our culture. When it needs inspiration, refreshment, strengthening, the imaginative voice needs to be heard. And how we need to hear it now. I've got a feeling that the truth about how we get out of this mess – which I think is troubling many people (on both sides of the argument) very deeply indeed – has at least as much to do with a recovery of our imagination, our ability to talk to each other, a sense of civility in politics and public discourse, as it does with some deal in Brussels, or even a general election or another referendum.
So being here to celebrate great journalism is to make that assertion: to celebrate a tradition that thrives, but always needs to touch more people, at a deeper level. No one here will doubt that it's the healthiest thing that could happen to us. Better than any withdrawal agreement.
That hope in artistic endeavour is parallel to what we need in journalism. We tend to think of the challenges as being technical. How do papers handle the world of social media, stories that shift and change in a few minutes in a way they never used to? How do broadcasters adapt to the changes in the way their listeners and viewers listen and view? How does the BBC cope with a world in which it's funded by a licence fee that assumes people consume its output on TVs and radio when, increasingly, many of them don't?
But aside from those technical questions, there's a bigger cultural one. How do we keep discourse broad, intelligent and lively in a world where we're driven – partly by social media, but also by politicians who've learned to harness it, to a political dialogue that's increasingly intolerant, crude, anatagonistic and unforgiving? I'm not complaining about fierce argument and invective. I want it. But I am complaining about a blank refusal to accept the plurality of our politics, the right to disagree, the right to be heard, and the necessity of reflecting a free press and free airwaves without trying to undermine them at source, bizarrely as with Trump, in the name of “freedom”.
I've watched – we've all watched – with amazement a kind of proto-libertarianism, which Trump adopts when it suits him, turn into a creeping authoritarianism that simply trashes any convention, any rule, any institution that gets in the way. Who cares, you can hear a voice from the White House saying, what the courts say? Nixon, by comparison, presided over a Sunday school picnic.
To get back to the here and now, Katya's work shows that imagination and determined storytelling is the way to confront a sinking political culture. If they won't raise their own sights, it's up to us to do it for them. And I believe, profoundly, that if that's what we do, we'll have the public on our side. They are who we serve; not the powerful, but the people who need to know.
Did we do a good job with the referendum, and particularly its aftermath? Not always, I'd say. We can do better. To recycle an old phrase – “Yes, we can!”
These are warnings that we need to heed. Politics is getting rougher. We need to hold to old values, old disciplines. Remembering Charles Wheeler tonight is a good way to start.
