Dyke:
When he took over as director-general four years ago, Greg Dyke was determined to shed the dowdy image of “Auntie,” as the British refer to the Beeb with a mixture of affection and disdain. The BBC would get more scoops. The BBC would be edgier. Dyke was a good motivator, supportive of his charges and popular with much of the staff.
But some say the desire to make the BBC edgier left its credibility open to cuts that bleed. Some longtime fans of the BBC, like Jeffrey Dvorkin, the ombudsman for National Public Radio, saw Hutton’s findings not just as an indictment of sloppy reporting and lax editorial oversight in an isolated if sensational case. Dvorkin said the report had called into question the BBC’s drive to find “the largest possible audience,” a mission he says has in practice been at odds with its job as a public broadcaster.
The key point is not that the Beeb may be left-leaning, or that it cultivates a disdain of politicians, but that there turned out to be a contradiction at the heart of Greg Dyke’s vision: you can’t have a public broadcaster with a world-wide reputation for honesty and integrity adopting the tactics of the tabloids:
Gilligan, formerly a reporter at the Sunday Telegraph, was among a group of BBC reporters hired several years ago specifically to bring in more “exclusives,” which are a vehicle for self-promotion in print journalism. Obsessed with sex and scandal, Sunday newspapers in Britain regularly print “exclusives” that are not true — such as the front-page claim made in 1996 that an aide to Senator George Mitchell, then trying to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, was having an affair with a convicted IRA bomber. Unless there is a legal challenge, few incorrect stories are corrected in print. And few, meanwhile, are believed beyond the circle of readers whose politics or prejudices the stories appeal to.
But it is precisely because people expect what they hear on the BBC to be true that Gilligan’s report was taken so seriously, and why the Hutton inquiry was so important.
And why it was quite right for Greg Dyke to resign, but unfortunate that he did so with such ill grace.
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