WHY THE BBC GOT IT WRONG WITH ITS NEW EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

 

I was baptised a Catholic and the last time I was in Venice I attended a Catholic church service. I do not necessarily believe in the church’s views on abortion.

I have gone to Black Lives Matters events and have used the hashtag #BLM on some of my tweets. I do not necessarily believe in defunding the police.

Both things are key to forming my racial identity and religious belief, and are intrinsic parts of my identity and even recognised and protected in British law. They are qualitatively and quantitatively different from how I voted in the Brexit referendum and whether I think Boris Johnson is doing a good job as Prime Minister.

I mention this because the BBC seems to have misunderstood this fundamental point in the new editorial guidelines it announced on Thursday and the subsequent furore over whether journalists can attend Pride events, Black Lives Matter marches, or “controversial” political demonstrations.

First a little context:

The new BBC guidelines are really in response to two things:

1. Social media use in a post-Brexit / "Culture war” world.

2. The BBC recently getting it dramatically and publicly wrong on two big editorial issues; the N-word, and Naga Munchetty talking about Donald Trump.

Now, the two most prominent voices who told them they had got it wrong, and were proved right, on Naga and N-word were Afua Hirsch and me. We are both very approachable people and have done work for the BBC subsequently. It is a shame that the BBC did not consult with either of us before they published the new guidelines because if they had both of us could have told them that they have misunderstood a fundamental philosophical point.

The concept of "protected characteristics".

The Equality Act of 2010 outlines 9 protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation

The new BBC guidelines are an attempt to improve the public’s perception of the corporation’s impartiality and objectivity, especially when it comes to its journalism.

The guidelines set out whether its journalists can publicly tweet about Brexit or attend an anti-war rally (for example) and how that might affect perceptions of journalistic impartiality, and for the most part I agree with them, and they clarify some important points in the new media landscape and the role social media plays.

However what they fail to do is recognise the importance of diversity and the principle of protected characteristics as set out in law.

A gay person attending a Pride event can effectively be part of their identity (irrespective of how “controversial” some of the floats or speakers may or may not be), and is therefore fundamentally different from someone attending a Brexit rally or Animal Rights march however strongly they may feel about these issues. Sexuality is a protected characteristic - political beliefs are not.

Once you frame the debate in terms of “protected characteristics” it becomes quite straightforward and simple. Religion is a protected characteristic. It is very different for me, as a Catholic, to go to church where the bishop may tell me abortion is wrong versus me going to a non-religious anti-abortion or pro-life rally.

Similarly Black Lives Matter rallies are part of my identity as a black British man.

In many ways the BBC guidelines were not really broken before and intelligent managers interpreted them along the lines I have outlined above. They might not have intellectually articulated the distinction between public comments and events that are part of a person's protected characteristics versus ones that aren't, but they kind of knew it instinctively.

For most people who have to grapple with the role their protected characteristics play in their daily lives and at work this comes almost naturally. The problem is some BBC managers in positions of editorial control have not been acting intelligently over some of these matters, and far too few of them come from backgrounds where their protected characteristics can be a negotiation with the majority society.

Now we have a thoroughly modern term for all of this; “diversity and inclusion”.

That is why we say diversity and inclusion needs to be baked into a company's policies at the very start. You cannot just roll out (editorial) policies that are fit for heterosexual able-bodied white men and then think they can apply to all people universally.

The flaws in the new guidelines are actually symptomatic of a far wider issue at the corporation and that is the lack of diversity and inclusion at the very top of the organisation, and among the people who decide on its editorial policies and direction.

BBC, with the greatest of respect, you have made a mistake with your new editorial guidelines and how you are interpreting them. If you want to revise them again my door is still open, happy to talk any time. But, for a long-term solution diversity and inclusion at the top of the organisation needs to change.



UPDATE 16.07.2021

I have received comments asking me: If we take attending #Black Lives Matter as being part of black people's protected characteristics does that mean only black BBC journalists have the right to attend #BLM events?

Extending the religious argument I made at the start of the piece that I have the right to attend church as a Christian, it is similarly recognised that I should be allowed to attend Mosque or Synagogue - even if I am not Muslim or Jewish - it is basic human right. And so similarly, BBC journalists of every race should be able to attend Black Lives Matter events.

However, I think the argument has moved on since I wrote the blog piece nine months ago. With the England football team taking the knee before matches at the EUROs it is now broadly recognised that taking the knee, and other symbols associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, are simply symbols of anti-racism and are not advocating any specific Party political cause. Once this is accepted, attending Black Lives Matter events or taking the knee falls under the basic rights set out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights under Article 2 which states; "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race" and Article 7 "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law."

Or to put it more simply: If it is good enough for the England football team, I think it is good enough for the BBC's journalists.

Reporting Racism: Will The BBC Be Up To The Task Of Reporting On The US Election Results?

 

As the US presidential election draws close we are possibly entering the most contentious racially sensitive time in political reporting. The question is: Is the BBC up to the task and has it learnt from its previous mistakes when reporting racism? 

A year ago the BBC admitted it made a mistake. 

The BBC director general at the time, Tony Hall, unilaterally reversed the decision to partially uphold a complaint against Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty for supposedly breaching BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality. 

Munchety had commented on a tweet by President Donald Trump telling four female politicians of colour to "go back" to "places from which they came", saying in her experience “every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism.”

Tony Hall not only over-ruled the findings of the BBC’s executive complaints unit (ECU), and the conclusion of the BBC’s own editorial policy unit, but he also over-ruled an open email by the BBC’s executive committee supporting the ECU's decision . 

Everybody at the highest level of the BBC had come to the wrong conclusion with regards to an editorial decision around racism and it took people like myself and other independent figures to air our concerns publicly for the director general to reverse that decision.

I raise this not to chastise the BBC for making a mistake. All organisations, big and small, make mistakes and to have the humility to recognise a mistake is important. I raise the episode because I fear the BBC has not learnt from the mistake and could repeat it again.

Learning From Our Mistakes

The media regulator, Ofcom, looked at the BBC’s original decision and the decision of the director general to over-rule the decision. They expressed “‘serious concerns around the transparency of the BBC’s complaints process”.

In short, the concerns was the BBC had only reversed its decision due to political expediency facing a backlash by almost every major Black and Asian media figure in the television industry and over 40 MPs.

This concern is exemplified by the fact that the BBC publicly went out of its way - before Tony Hall reversed the decision - to explain why an open letter penned by myself, Afua Hirsch and others, and signed by major industry figures including Sir Lenny Henry, was wrong. But after the decision was over-ruled the BBC did not publicly explain the editorial reasoning for its new position. This was an example of the corporation's lack of transparency. 

This goes to the root of why editorial decisions, and governance around journalism organisations is different from governance around other types of organisations. 

Editorial decisions, and the guiding principles that form them, are the DNA of a news organisation. A director general over-ruling an editorial decision is not like a CEO simply overruling a marketing strategy at a soft drinks company of whether to roll out a new flavour. 

Over-ruling an editorial decision brings into question the guiding values that a news organisation operates under and how its journalists do their jobs. No one, not even the director general, should be able to over-rule an editorial decision without explaining the theoretical underpinnings of their decision - this is precisely why the BBC has codified its editorial principles in a set of guidelines. 

Why is this important?

The BBC's  editorial guidelines enable its journalists and content creators to know how to make difficult editorial decisions. Importantly the BBC’s editorial guidelines are publicly available so members of the public can judge the BBC’s editorial decisions against them. 

Coming to the wrong decision over Naga Munchetty means either the BBC’s editorial guidelines were wrong or they were interpreted incorrectly. 

Naga Munchetty has personally stated that she think "lessons have been learned" from the experience but a year on the BBC has neither rewritten its guidelines nor issued public guidance on how its guidelines should be interpreted differently when it comes to issues of racism and impartiality. Which means a journalist joining the corporation today will be none the wiser how the rules governing their journalism is different today than it was before the Naga Munchetty episode.

There is clearly a B.N. (“Before-Naga-Munchetty-Decision”) interpretation of what constitutes impartiality when it comes to racism, and A.N. (After-Naga-Munchetty-Decision). At best  BBC executive producers and journalists are having to figure that out for themselves, at worst they are being told secretly what it means, which goes against the entire principle of transparency when it comes to the BBC’s editorial guidelines. 

How To Make Great Journalism 

The US presidential election is now just days away and irrespective of the outcome it is highly likely that the issue of race will play an important role in any reporting around the results. How BBC journalists will be able to report on it and what they can and cannot say will be heavily determined on how they interpret the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

The fear is not that BBC journalists breach the corporation’s editorial guideline, but in many ways the exact opposite. That not knowing how the BBC has changed its editorial position post A.N. they play it safe. The journalists will fear to challenge and call out racism and racist actions when they see them and they will effectively not hold power to account.

BBC’s editorial guidelines give the corporation's journalists confidence in how far to push boundaries and how to interpret difficult concepts like objectivity and impartiality.

In failing to explain WHY it got its editorial decision around Naga Munchetty wrong I believe it has made the work of many of its journalists in the coming weeks and months in reporting the presidential election a lot harder.  

UPDATE: A day after publishing this blog post the BBC published new editorial guidelines. Although they did not mention Naga Munchetty by name in any of the supporting material that accompanied its release it is clear to most observers that it sought to address some of the issues raised by the Naga Munchetty affair and impartiality when reporting racism. 

Unfortunately by not directly addressing the Naga Munchetty issue they have still not clearly explained how their editorial position has changed and it seems that far from clarifying the issue they have simply reinforced their original  position and raised more issues, as journalists now appear to be banned from attending Gay Pride events without prior consent of their managers. 

Why We Need To Know The Diversity Of The Individual Programmes We Watch

This week the BBC’s new Director General, Tim Davie, weighed-in on one of the most contentious issues in UK media diversity, although I am not sure he realised it 

The issue at hand is how should the industry report its media diversity statistics?

So what did Davie say and why is this so controversial (and why should I care)?

All will be revealed...

Speaking at an Ofcom sponsored event the Director General trumpeted the BBC’s renewed energy to address underrepresentation and diversity of the people who make the BBC’s programmes. "Now, if you’re making a production for the BBC, we expect a diverse production crew. We all looked at some of those (crew) wrap shots. You just look at it and you go, that is not acceptable. So, you just intervene. You have to intervene. And that is where we can act." 

The pictures he was referring to are well known throughout the industry and their “infamy” are almost exclusively due to the hard work of former Royal Television Society CEO Simon Albury.

Simon Albury regularly collects and posts end of production photographs (wrap shots) where the entire crew of a production comes together to document their time as a team working together. What the pictures invariably reveal is the lack of ethnic diversity and people with visible disabilities working on productions. Albury posts these pictures on social media under the hashtag #DiversityFail.

So what is the controversy that Davie has (possibly) inadvertently walked into? He has seen pictures evidencing the lack of diversity behind the camera and is acting to address the problem. That does not seem too controversial, that just seems like responsible leadership. 

However, the pictures are controversial because they show what diversity looks like on actual programme productions - in the industry jargon this is called “programme level” data - and it is because of seeing “programme level” diversity that the Director General says he was moved to act - not because of broader industry wide data.

At this point I can almost hear half the people reading this blog post who work in UK TV diversity shouting “Yes! That is what I am talking about!!”, while the other half (if they are still reading) have all let out a collective groan.

Whether to publish granular programme level data or to publish data in broad industry wide categories is a highly polarised debate in the UK television industry and it is mainly down to a reporting mechanism called “Project Diamond” overseen by the Creative Diversity Network (CDN).

Without getting into all the statistical weeds CDN collects data on who is working on TV productions and then publishes that data (there are issues around the robustness of the data it collects and you can read about that in a previous post) but a big controversy is how it should publish that data. On one side all the UK entertainment trade unions say they should publish programme level data while on the other side CDN and the British broadcasters, who financially support CDN, say that they either cannot and/or should not publish programme level data and instead should publish broad industry wide data looking at more general trends.

The controversy and arguments has become so entrenched that the unions now advise their members not to fill out the Diamond diversity reporting forms.

So, who is right, the trade unions or CDN?

Despite working in media diversity it is a question I have so far avoided answering.

But it now seems that Tim Davie has answered the question for me. If we want real change we need some degree of programme level data. It is the visual representation of programme level data that has moved him to action.

I am still going to sidestep whether CDN and Diamond should be the method by which this programme level data is collected and published. But what Tim Davie has proved is there is now no question of the merits of policy makers and media executives being able to see programme level data and for that to be in the public domain. General industry wide level data even if it is broken down into sub-categories and genres  doesn’t seem to have the same impact. 

One last point, I have a lot of respect and admiration for Simon Albury and the work he does, but our industry cannot rely on one man posting wrap pictures on his social media account to improve media representation.