**…The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty.
If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting….
…The details are these: Gilligan, an investigative reporter for the BBC, last May interviewed Dr. Kelly about the preparation of a document outlining Iraq’s WMD capabilities produced by the British government in September 2002, as the Iraq debate was reaching its climax.
Gilligan subsequently reported that a senior British official closely involved in the drafting of the WMD document had told him the intelligence services were unhappy at the way Downing Street had exploited their intelligence for political purposes. Most explosively, this official is said to have told the reporter that Blair’s official spokesman had insisted on inserting–against the wishes of the intelligence services–a finding that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
We now know, however, thanks to Lord Hutton’s inquiry, that (a) Kelly did not tell Gilligan the government deliberately conveyed false information about Iraq; (b) the intelligence service chiefs had themselves inserted the 45-minute claim, not Downing Street; © Kelly, though a genuine expert on Iraq’s weapons, had no connection with the compiling of the WMD document; and (d) Kelly, far from being an opponent of the war, as was commonly inferred, was actually a fervent supporter of getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
None of that, sadly, was known at the time Gilligan aired his explosive report on May 29. Within a matter of days, this misrepresented allegation from an unreliable witness had metamorphosed into the conventional wisdom about the prime minister.
Tony Blair’s reputation fell swiftly from that of co-liberator of the Iraqi people to liar and lackey of George Bush who could not persuade his country or his party to go to war against Iraq on honest grounds and so had resorted instead to a wicked distortion. Tens of thousands of British troops had been sent into battle on a falsehood.
As Blair himself told the Hutton inquiry last August, the report amounted to an “extraordinarily serious allegation which, if it were true, would mean we had behaved in the most disgraceful way and I would have to resign as prime minister.”
Blair’s approval rating plummeted. When Dr. Kelly committed suicide on July 17, the public verdict seemed to be that a man who had been valiantly trying to expose government wrongdoing and had been unmasked for his efforts had taken his own life.
The BBC, meanwhile, despite some qualms about the story, stood by it. Without bothering to check in detail with the reporter on his source, and without demanding to see his notes, the BBC launched a vigorous defense of the allegations. Even as the Hutton inquiry began its work, the fighting went on. The BBC insisted its story was right, and the government’s problems mounted. Only last month, as Hutton’s report sparked the crisis, did the BBC apologize for its errors. Probably too late to repair the damage to Blair….
…THE KELLY STORY was not an isolated incident. It was merely the most infamous example of a left-liberal bias that refracts all news coverage through the prism of the BBC’s own distinctive worldview.
The BBC’s coverage of the Iraq war itself marked a new low point in the history of the self-loathing British prestige-media’s capacity to side with the nation’s enemies.
Its Middle East coverage is notoriously one-sided. Its pro-Palestinian bias is so marked that recently the London bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post refused to take part in any more BBC news programs because he believed the corporation was actually fomenting anti-Semitism. If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.
Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man’s highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on.
This will be familiar to consumers of news in much of the United States. Liberal media bias is by now, fortunately, increasingly widely recognized. But the difference is that BBC bias is so much more powerful and much more pernicious because the BBC is still seen by viewers and listeners, in Britain and around the world, as objective. And when the BBC conveys its slanted views of the world, there is very little means of checking and correcting it.
I worked at the BBC for six years. I never saw a BBC journalist actively promote his own political agenda. Almost all were honest, hardworking men and women dedicated to reporting the truth as they saw it. The problem was that it was the truth as they saw it….
…The great virtue of Lord Hutton’s devastating indictment is that it represented for the first time an independent verdict. The editorial failings it criticized, the tendentious reporting it identified, the massive bureaucracy it exposed, and the troubling strategic vision that underlay it all demand a radical change at the BBC, if the organization’s reputation is to be restored….
Gerard Baker is an associate editor at the Financial Times.**