Blame Game
So, Lord Hutton reported.
I think most people are quite surprised; not about what he said, but rather about what he didn’t say. There’s no doubt that while the BBC was never going to come out of this smelling of roses, there’s no way that the government and the MoD should have done either.
I find all that rather uninteresting though. I think the wider issues for the BBC and broadcasting in general are far more important. I only really came to any conclusions about this whilst watching Michael Howard responding to the Hutton Report in the House of Commons.
It seems to me that the basic problem the Government had was that there was an opinion that broadcasters in general (and the BBC in particular) were anti-government and anti-war, and were following a deliberately confrontational line. Personally, I think that’s a very strong way of putting it, but in general the point is a valid one.
So why have broadcasters become so deeply cynical and attacking towards the government? At the risk of repeating an oft-heard mantra - it’s all the Tories’ fault.
It’s undeniable that the terminal decline of the Conservative Party over the last decade has resulted in a political vacuum. The country has lacked strong, credible opposition to the policies of the Blair government, and the result has been that media organisations like the BBC have effectively filled that void, and become the official opposition.
I realised that whilst watching Michael Howard scrabbling for cover in the Commons. Poor guy, he’d been lining Blair up for weeks over Hutton, and then the judge pulled the rug out from under him. But the fact remains that the government was fundamentally angry with the BBC over many issues other than the Gilligan story, mainly because of the role the BBC had been forced to assume as effectively being the Official Opposition.
My worry is that now the BBC has been neutered by Hutton, that vacuum will again exist. And the possibility of the lack of a credible opposition to the Government is far more dangerous and threatening than the prospect of leaving the BBC in the position it had assumed before Lord Hutton reported.