CBA General Conference - 2004
NEWS AND SPEECHES
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Conference of Commonwealth Broadcasting Association
Donald McDonald AO, Chairman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
I am going to repeat a reference that I’ve used at one of these conferences once before and its one about Henry Purcell, that wondrously great English composer who managed to survive the black death, managed to survive the great fire of London and yet died of the common cold in his thirties. My fear, and I hope it’s a distant fear perhaps even as distant as Purcell’s death, is that public broadcasting may have just got its first common cold. Barry Langridge has said he has appreciated people’s interest in the BBC. For some of us our interest is self-interest. The BBC was the great model, the great template of public broadcasting; and its circumstances have continued to be the precedent for public broadcasting in so many parts of the world. And what misfortunes might befall the BBC in the future or what changes in the relationship between the BBC and the British Government that might occur will be examined very closely by other Governments in other parts of the world in a way that would be unlikely to be of advantage to public broadcasting in those places.
I’m going to be courageous enough to talk about Hutton, as a generalised description of that whole circumstance. Courageous in a sense in that for me there is a great risk that I will sound like a smart-alec if there are inferred to be criticisms of the BBC. Some of them just won’t be inferred, some will be expressed but I do so only by way of trying to teach myself a lesson and to teach my fellow Board members of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation a lesson of how we might make sure we don’t get ourselves into a similar situation. So I speak as a highly interested but slightly detached observer.
It seems to me that the BBC had editorial guidelines that were right for the circumstances so there was no problem with editorial guidelines, but I suspect there was a problem with the complaints handling procedures, or perhaps the commitment to follow complaints handling procedures. In particular, there seemed to be a cavalier attitude to the Government’s complaints.
This can happen if you’re bombarded with complaints by a Government or by an individual for that matter; it’s terrible to think, oh here we go again. We have in Australia a correspondent who lives not in Sydney but in another city, who writes to me as Chairman at least three times a week; hand-written letters but they’re perfectly neat, you can read them with great ease and he’s making specific complaints about programs on the ABC - both radio and television. Now there’s a huge temptation to say Oh dear Mr so and so, for goodness sake get a life…if you hate it all that much then stop listening or stop watching…
But I urge our people to treat every one of this gentleman’s complaints as though it was a brand new complaint or as though he was a brand new complainant.
For one reason and one very good reason: he once took a complaint beyond us, as he was entitled, to the Australian Broadcasting Authority which is chaired by Professor Flint who is with us today and whom we’ll hear from tomorrow. His complaint was upheld, as it should have been, and we had to begin our 7 o’clock television bulletin one night with an apology and a correction. So out of all those complaints he landed a knockout blow.
Exactly the same thing can happen in respect of complaints from a Government, however vexatious they might appear to be. That’s a lesson we have to keep reminding ourselves. At exactly the same time when Alistair Campbell was berating the BBC on various levels, we received 68 written complaints from our then Minister for Communications for our handling of our coverage of the Iraq war in respect of one particular radio program.
Each one of those 68 complaints had to be treated equally seriously however irritated some of us might have been.
There’s a grave risk for slightly self-important organisations like ours to have inappropriate reactions to criticism. I think there’s a very dicey area where you defend your independence as Greg Dyke vigorously did and as we have had to do on occasions, but you can confuse defending your independence with a notion that you are somehow immune from criticism. We are guilty of that from time to time and perhaps that was the case in the Hutton circumstance.
It is also possible that there can be an untimely and inappropriate involvement from the Board of Governors in situations like this. There are mistaken notions as to what are the responsibilities of the Board of Governors.
The complaint about Gilligan’s program was absolutely a matter for editorial management and editorial management alone: and I mean editorial management right up to the editor in chief, being the Director General. It was entirely a matter for editorial management at the very time the Board of Governors involved themselves in the situation where they made a decision clearly on the advice of their senior management but when they could not possibly have had enough information to make the sort of decision that they made, motivated probably for all the right reasons, but with really most unfortunate outcomes. There is the issue too of where the Board stands in relation to its management. This is one of the most critical relationships of all.
I’m going to quote Patricia Hodgson’s rather useful sentence on this, she wrote recently that…..The Board of Governors defended management before they sought to hold them to account. It’s so clear it doesn’t need any elaboration from me, they defended management before they brought to them to account.
In the ABC’s Editorial Guidelines journalists are urged to be sceptical. Well I think journalists and senior management should expect the Boards might be more sceptical than they’ve been in the past.
All of this could be a good thing for the BBC and I’m sure it’ll come through it and by example it will therefore be a good thing for the ABC and for other public broadcasters like us.
Let me make a comment about my counterpart, Gavyn Davies, who I found a most delightful man to deal with and whom I shall be sorry not to be working with in that collegiate relationship that I’ve been fortunate in having now with three BBC Chairmen. He resigned graciously, believing his resignation to be in the best interests of the BBC.
But I actually think the resignations occurred in the wrong order and quite seriously in the wrong order. I believe the Board of Governors should have called the Director General and the Director of News and Current Affairs to account. I can’t believe - and I wasn’t in the room obviously when the Board of Governors met - that in making that fateful decision in early July they were doing other than acting on the advice of the Director General and, inferentially, also of the Director of News and Current Affairs. Those executives should have been held to account for the wrong advice they had given to the Board and they should have gone first. As it happens only one them, the Director General, has gone so far.
Now the Chairman may well have thought at some later moment that it would be best for the BBC’s relations in dealing with the Government, particularly in the Charter review, that there should be a new Chairman. Good governance would have been better served by the right order of resignations. The process of finding a new Director General might also have been better served.
Let me just have one last word because I’m almost exactly on my time Chairman and it is a word of advice to Governments who might look at the Hutton report and see a way of getting at public broadcasters.
My word of advice is that old adage: be careful what you wish for because you may just get it, because if democracies like ours lose their public broadcasters or diminish them as the hugely effective elements they are within the body politic then future Governments will be entirely at the mercy of commercial media over whom they will have not one word of statutory suasion.
Thank you