A personal reflection on the sad erosion of Britain’s ethical standard-bearer as the climate crisis deepens

by SternWriter

The good old days

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, in more innocent times when the climate crisis was less critical and climate action less urgent, the BBC hired me to mentor some Eastern European journalists.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the climate crisis was rising up the news agenda but was still a bit-part player, partly because it seemed like our governments were not only aware of the problem, but were taking it seriously, and had the matter in hand.

Plus, Post-Cold War geopolitics was still a hot topic. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the consequences of ‘The End of History’ were still seen as largely benevolent, a source of hope rather than despair.

The Cold War victors were still funding projects to welcome Eastern Bloc countries into democracy’s warm embrace. One such project was a scheme to educate journalists from the other side of the former Iron Curtain on ‘BBC News Values’.

The idea was that communist regime broadcasters had been trained to purvey state propaganda, but with a bit of help, the same people and infrastructure could transition to a responsible, ‘Western-democracy style’ Fourth Estate. ‘Auntie’ BBC was doing her bit to coach Russian, Polish, Hungarian etc. hacks to play the critical role of Speaking Truth To Power, and Holding Power To Account.

The Beeb was too subtle to be so crude as to hand their mentees a tablet of stone inscribed with Independence, Impartiality, Trust, Accountability, Respect etc., but there was an understated British messianic quality to our shared mission to provide former Communist states with a bulwark against future tyranny.

Trainees spent a couple of weeks in London, seeing News & Current Affairs in action before being mentored, with access to BBC resources, to make a news feature on a topic of their choice.

These 5-minute news features functioned both real-world case studies, and a going-home present for participants to pass on to their values-starved audiences at home. The training scheme’s homework doubled up as a taste of what ‘proper’ journalism looked and sounded like for mentee and audiences back home alike.

I was hired as one of the mentors. My own experience of direct BBC employment was limited to a few weeks’ night shift as a BBC World producer, but I was reckoned to have good enough qualifications. I was British, so had grown up listening to ‘Auntie’, and had just returned from a decade working for US networks in the Far East.

At that time – maybe now too – my American employers ABC News, CNBC, NBC and CNN were considered to exemplify ethical standards that were ‘close enough’ to BBC Values to justify me passing them on to ex-Communist reporters.

My last job before returning to the UK, CNN Beijing Bureau producer/reporter, may have helped too. After working as a journalist in an regime where the state media very much fulfilled their constitutional role as the ‘mouth and tongue of the Party’, I was particularly interested in experiencing at first hand how this transition from Party Megaphone to Truth Warrior might work in practice. Maybe I could one day claim a minor role in facilitating it.

I had various memorable mentees from Eastern Bloc countries. Among them were two delightful journalists from former Soviet republics.

I imagined Communist journalism to be quite male-dominated, so was surprised to be assigned two women. My preconception could have been wrong, it could have been blind chance, or maybe whoever selected the trainees thought female journalists might be more amenable to BBC Values. I still have no idea.

One – let’s call her Maia – was a glamorous Georgian woman in her 40s. Her formative early career had been under Communism, but she’d made a successful transition to the new era, and now hosted a weekly current affairs show with ratings most BBC journalists would kill for.

The other – let’s call her Yulia – was a younger Ukrainian news reporter and producer. She’d entered the journalistic profession around the end of the Communist era, so presumably lacked some of the institutional intertia of older colleagues like Maia.

Maia and Yulia were, thrillingly, just what I imagined Eastern European journalists to be: droll, cynical, world-weary. They were also impressively well-informed, excellent company, and we all got on very well.

I have no idea what lasting impact our fortnight together in London may have had on them, but I certainly learned a lot from them. Here I now am, decades later, in a very different world, recalling the impact my time with them had on me.

When the time came for Maia, Yulia and I to discuss what they wanted their news feature to be about. We went through the newspapers, took a look at the news rundowns, and they decided on the same topic – the BBC Charter, which was then coming up for renewal.

Pooling their resources to edit their own versions for their own audiences seemed practical and efficient. Given the ‘BBC Values’ purpose of their training, and the topicality of the event, it was bang on topic too. My job was to guide and facilitate, not instruct, so I:

• outlined the typical nature of the public debate that surfaced every few years when the BBC Charter came up for renewal.
• explained the unusual origins of the BBC, it’s unusual constitutional status as a publicly-funded, yet independent broadcaster.
• briefed them on how an institution established by ‘Royal Charter’ was designed to challenge the establishment.
• summarised the unusual sensitivities and nuances of the BBC’s periodic ‘Charter Renewal’, including the tensions implicit in the irresistible-ish force of UK party politics confronting the immovable-ish object of BBC Values.
• sketched out the difference between the same Charter Renewal tensions that have come up over the best part of a century, and those of this specific renewal at this point in British and global history.

Background mentoring done, we moved on to practical matters.

I helped Maia and Yulia compile a list of archive clips, but as I began to suggest potential interviewees, my mentees told me not to bother.

‘No need to waste time on that’, Maia said’. ‘The BBC is the state broadcaster so they’ll all just parrot the same party line anyway. We may as well just record you repeating what you just said’.

‘Ah, that might be your own experience’, I gently explained, ‘but, you see, the BBC isn’t a state broadcaster. Its Royal Charter status makes it a unique entity, independent of the government’.

They smiled at each other conspiratorially, and then at me. ‘But Robert, like you taught us’, said Yulia, ”Follow the Money’, right?’.

‘It’s not actually funded by the government, but by a licence fee paid by every TV owner’.

‘But who is it that controls the licence fee cost, how the BBC collects it, and what they spend it on?’.

‘That’s all fixed in the Charter’, I said, a bit less gently, but still patiently, ‘to make sure the government of the day can’t influence its news values, ethics and principles’.

‘But how long does this Charter last, and who decides its new terms?’, they persisted. They appeared to be amused at my increasingly indignant tone, addressing me with the gentle compassion of a mother finally telling her child the truth about Santa.

‘The Charter is renewed every decade or so’, I explained, ‘after negotiation with the government’.

Maia and Yulia nodded with lips pursed and eyebrows raised, with the air of parents hearing their son insist there’s really no need for them to stay home for his 18th birthday party.

This wasn’t going well.

‘Believe me, I understand your scepticism. I’ve heard exactly the same thing from Chinese journalists for the past few years. The notion of BBC Values operating in the real world must seem impossible in practice, let alone unlikely in theory, to you. I get it. This is precisely what this training course is all about’, I said, firmly now.

(A hint of a Churchillian cadence may even have started creeping in at this point). ‘The BBC is not a ‘mouth and tongue of the Party’ state loudhailer, but a sparkling, fragile diamond in Britain’s democratic crown’.

They leaned forward, concern starting to furrow their brows. Maybe I was getting through to them.

With a sideways glance, Maia whispered to me ‘We understand why you have to say this. We too have family and pensions.’

‘But I’m not even a BBC employee!’, I said, exasperated now. ‘I’m an independent journalist hired in for this training’.

I was getting nowhere. Our mutual patronising seemed doomed to stalemate. I didn’t want to risk damaging our hitherto-splendid rapport, critical though the issue was to the scheme, and personal though it was starting to feel.

So I quietly played my ace. While Maia and Yulia discussed something else, I pulled over their list of clips to retrieve from BBC archives and added one item.

A couple of days later I poked my head into their edit suite.

Maia and Yulia had just seen the clip I’d ordered, from Jeremy Paxman’s 2003 grilling of Tony Blair.

This took place just after the PM had returned from his pre-Gulf War meeting with President Bush. The two Eastern European journalists had just watched the electric moment when Paxman asks the PM ‘did you and the President pray together?’.

They were playing it on a loop, still slack-jawed at the effrontery of the question, relishing the momentary, but palpable, alarm of the Prime Minister. Even silver-tongued, smooth operator Tony Blair was visibly wrong-footed by this left-field, gut-punch question.

‘You were right, and we were wrong.’, gushed Maia and Yulia, ‘Now we understand what makes the BBC unique.’

Blowing smoke from my imaginary pistol, I went off to invoice the BBC.

My work there was done.

The bad new days

That was only 15 years ago, but this story now seems to be from a distant, innocent, Golden Age of Nice Problems To Have.

I now cringe, and increasingly fume, as I see the BBC’s standards slipping. Over the years I’ve often thought of, and cited my edit suite coup-de-theatre, but the moral of my anecdote has shifted over the decades.

What started as a humblebrag, became a Pyrrhic victory, and these days it more an admission of embarrassment at my own naivity.

I still instinctively think of the BBC as the broadcasting’s ethical gold standard. In many aspects of its reporting, it still is, but even this is much patchier and more inconsistent than I remember.

I don’t recall, for example, distinguishing so much between good and bad individual reporters in the past. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe my exposure to the insider of the news sausage factory has heightened my sensitivity. Maybe I’m just getting grumpy in my middle age, and forgetting how tarnished my imaginary Golden Age was.

Or maybe the layers of editorial checks and balances that served a quality control have been stripped away by 24-hour news urgency and budget cuts, exposing individual weaknesses.

What started at occasional mild tutting at the screen or radio, has over the past few years become regular angry shouting at the BBC News app on my mobile phone or laptop screen.

These betrayals of what I understood to be BBC Values are increasingly common:

• An interviewee or panellist from a noble-sounding British think-tank is introduced without explaining it’s secretly funded by right-wing American billionaires.
• A top science story is yet again reported by a Political correspondent, not a Science/Technology/Health correspondent. During Covid, for example, this uncritically reinforced the UK government’s choice to politicise the pandemic, rather than make it an evidence-based, public-health response. Instead of citing the kind of response described in this article about another tea-drinking island nation’s Covid policy, it was presented as a regular Westminster ding-dong, implying matters of fact are actually matters of opinion.
• Rent-a-gob shock merchants are invited on air to promote their latest dangerous fabrications, rather than being forced to account for their last ones.
• Climate deniers are given equal air time to climate scientists, as if atmospheric physics were a matter of opinion, and hard climate data were a handy debating point.

It’s this last issue that’s the most insidious. Just as the climate crisis underpins all other news stories (as I listen to news bulletins now, I mentally check whether they’d make the news if fossil fuels were not somehow involved), when it comes to BBC Values, their climate reporting is a matter of institutional decline, not the quality of individual journalists.

This is not snarky whataboutery. I’m not relating the creeping erosion of values these examples betray with ‘traditional’ issues, like the criminalisation of journalism, foreign bot farms polluting our politics, courageous Russian journalists being murdered or imprisoned by the state, China’s fawning official coverage of Xi’s regime, or how we’ve allowed ultra-libertarian Silicon Valley Overlords to control news’ agenda, spin and reach.

I’ll leave such nuance-free judgements to the Internet, which does them so well. What concerns me is how the BBC is steadily abrogating its role as ethical standard-bearer when it comes to reporting on the climate crisis.

Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe I was deluded that it was ever any different.

But I’d love to meet Maia and Yulia again, and reflect on our conversations fifteen years ago.

It would be like adults reminiscing fondly about teenage innocence.

I don’t recall myself or these two Eastern-bloc journalists ever mentioning the climate crisis or global heating during our fortnight together, yet it was already an issue then, emissions have risen since then, and are still rising.

At the turn of the millennium, the climate still seemed like a future problem.

Today, there’s hardly a single topical news item that’s unrelated to fossil fuels, political crises driven by fossil fuel resources, climate disasters, climate refugees, or culture wars confected by populists funded by Big Oil to distract or deflect attention from the climate crisis. ‘BBC Values’ have never been more important, but seem to be failing just when we need them most.

Funding for teaching ‘BBC Values’ to Eastern Bloc journalists is long gone. The very notion of the kind of journalistic high ground the BBC promoted and exemplified is now tarnished and fragile.

It’s not all the BBC’s fault. The Beeb has been subject to the same forces as the rest of society: seismic shifts from the Internet, social media, the rise of our Silicon Valley Overlords, and the insidious incursion of ‘fake news’, both real and imagined, into new and old media.

‘Auntie’ is no more immune to their pressures than the rest of us, but we’re entitled to hope that when it comes to resisting them, ‘BBC Values’, its history, unique ‘Charter’ independence, global reach, trusted brand, and institutional memory might arm her better than most.

On the most critical, pressing, urgent, pervasive story of all, the climate crisis, BBC coverage has fallen far below the standards I claimed for them a quarter of a century ago.

• Climate issues are low on the news agenda, and falling.
• Climate deniers and Big Oil shills are still not just given air time, but allowed a free rein, unchalleged on their paymasters (so much for ‘Follow The Money’).
• Politically inconvenient but proven drivers of emission reduction, like using government regulation to reduce demand, are still skirted, ignored, or dismissed as ‘unrealistic’.
• Environment reporters appear more like children’s TV presenters, obliged to deliver The Hope Bit lest they traumatise their audience.
• Climate documentary presenters devote entire programmes to talking up fantasy magic-bullet ‘solutions’ peddled by Big Oil, like carbon capture, electric planes, biofuel or mini-nuclear reactors or ‘offsetting’.
• Climate reporting still focuses on individual behavioural change, apparently unaware this is precisely the strategy Big Oil has been pursuing since BP created the world’s first ‘carbon calculator’ (which measured your footprint, not theirs) in 2004, modelled on Big Tobacco’s stalling tactics over cigarettes causing cancer.

I suppose Broadcasting House newsrooms must still test their coverage against the ‘BBC Values’ I once lectured ex-Communist journalists Maia and Yulia about.

If so, they are only be following the letter, not the spirit of these values. If the BBC still considers its coverage to be consistent with its ethical standards, maybe the Values need to be re-written to be fit for purpose as the world drowns, burns and shrivels.

The good news is that even in the toxic, tribal maelstrom of social media, the BBC still retains enough credibility and trust to restore its reputation.

Just not much time.