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Off the cutt remark sent the bbc reeling { January 31 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15-2004Jan30.html?nav=hptoc_chttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15-2004Jan30.html?nav=hptoc_c
Off-the-Cuff Remark Sent The BBC Reeling
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page C01
LONDON, Jan. 30 -- At the heart of the conflict that led to the British Broadcasting Corp.'s extraordinary public humiliation this week are 20 words ad-libbed on its flagship radio news program at 6:07 a.m. by a bleary-eyed reporter speaking from home after an all-nighter.
Citing an unnamed official, Andrew Gilligan alleged in the May 29 broadcast of the "Today" program that Prime Minister Tony Blair's office had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier with a claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. He then added these unscripted remarks:
"Actually the government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in."
The donnybrook that ensued between the British government and the BBC eventually led Gilligan's purported source to commit suicide and triggered a judicial inquiry that has now condemned the BBC's journalism as sloppy and negligent. But while the BBC's defenders are questioning retired judge Brian Hutton's blanket vindication of the government, some are also asking how one of the world's most respected news organizations could have allowed a journalist whose work had already come under question to make such a sweeping accusation based on one unnamed source -- and then compounded the error by failing to take a closer look at his report after Blair's heated denials.
The affair has left the BBC in turmoil. Gilligan announced his resignation Friday evening, apologizing again for his mistakes and aiming a parting shot at Hutton: "But the BBC collectively has been the victim of a grave injustice. If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right."
Earlier in the day, Greg Dyke, who resigned Thursday as BBC director general and editor in chief, said Hutton's conclusions had been one-sided. In his first broadcast interview since his resignation, Dyke told "Today" that he and his staff were "all very surprised by the nature of the report. It's remarkable how he's given the benefit of judgment to virtually everyone in the government and to no one in the BBC."
But Dyke also conceded he and other senior managers had failed to properly scrutinize Gilligan's reporting and had allowed themselves to get sucked into a war of words with Blair's chief aide, Alastair Campbell, without first checking to make sure they were right.
"My mistake was to get involved in that game that [Campbell] was playing," Dyke acknowledged. "What I should have done was say 'No, let's stop, let's do our own inquiry.' Instead I felt the attack on our journalism as such required a quick public reply."
Gilligan and his editors have yet to discuss in detail their response to the many allegations in Hutton's report. But an examination of their testimony, written submissions to the inquiry, internal BBC documents and the findings of a BBC-TV "Panorama" documentary last week provides an anatomy of a journalistic blunder that has done immense damage to the state-funded organization's reputation and morale.
Throughout the run-up to the Iraq war and its aftermath, Blair, Campbell and several senior cabinet members complained repeatedly that the BBC was siding with antiwar critics. Campbell fired off 12 written complaints to Richard Sambrook, head of BBC News. Several of them focused specifically on Gilligan's reports. They formed part of a larger campaign that Campbell, an ex-Fleet Street tabloid journalist who became Blair's ultimate spin doctor and alter ego, waged against a hostile press.
Gilligan, 35, had a reputation among fellow BBC journalists as a nocturnal loner who dug up scoops -- many of them denied by government officials -- from anonymous sources in Britain's notoriously tight-lipped defense and intelligence circles. He never was a comfortable fit in the buttoned-down Beeb. According to "Panorama," Sambrook had warned Gilligan before the report on the dossier about his loose use of language in stories, saying, "If he didn't take care, this was going to undermine him." Gilligan has denied this allegation.
Gilligan had met with David Kelly, a senior weapons expert working at the Ministry of Defense, on May 22. Gilligan testified to the inquiry that he spent the ensuing week trying to confirm, with limited success, Kelly's allegations about the intelligence dossier.
Within minutes of the 6:07 a.m. broadcast, an official from the prime minister's press office phoned to deny the report and allege that the BBC had not sought a response from the government before airing it. When Gilligan came on the air again at 7:32 a.m., he had toned down some of his language but still said the 45-minute claim had been left out of an earlier draft of the dossier because "the government knew that the claim was questionable." That weekend, in a newspaper column for the Mail on Sunday, Gilligan wrote that his source had specifically named Campbell as the person responsible for embellishing the dossier.
Blair and Campbell went ballistic, heatedly contending that every word in the dossier, which was published in September 2002, had been approved by the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee. They argued that the BBC report had effectively accused the prime minister of lying to the British public and knowingly taking Britain into an unpopular war under false pretences -- a resigning offense.
The first response of Gilligan's editors was to dismiss the complaints as politics as usual. "It's all drivel," Kevin Marsh, editor of "Today," told colleagues. He said of Campbell, "The man's flapping in the wind."
Marsh had reasons to believe in the story's essential accuracy. A BBC staff member has confirmed that Richard Dearlove, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, had played down the threat posed by Iraq's potential access to weapons of mass destruction in April, in a lunch with Marsh and "Today" anchor John Humphrys. The day before Gilligan's report, Marsh had met with former cabinet member Clare Short, an opponent of the war, who complained that Campbell had manipulated intelligence to justify the case for war.
Campbell fired off a battery of letters to Sambrook, questioning Gilligan's report. He also testified before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, pledging to keep hammering at the BBC until it apologized and confessed it had sanctioned "dishonest reporting." He made an emotional appearance on Channel Four News on June 27, during which he demanded that the corporation "admit for once they have got it wrong."
It was only then, BBC officials have acknowledged, that Sambrook and other editors went back and examined Gilligan's notes of his original interview. When they did, they learned the notes did not explicitly support either of Gilligan's main claims: that the government probably knew the 45-minute figure was wrong and that it was not in the original draft of the dossier because intelligence officials believed it was mistaken.
Soon after, Marsh sent an e-mail to a BBC executive saying, "I hope my worst fears are not realized." He added: "This was a good piece of investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting. Our biggest millstone is a loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of [Gilligan's] phraseology." Dyke and Sambrook have said they did not see this e-mail and only later became aware of Marsh's misgivings.
Instead, the BBC hunkered down. Chairman Gavyn Davies, who resigned Wednesday after Hutton's report was issued, called a special session of the Board of Governors and enlisted the members' support. "I remain firmly of the view that it is absolutely critical for the BBC to emerge from this row without being seen to buckle in the face of government pressure," he wrote to them in an e-mail. "This, it seems to me, is really a moment for the governors to stand up and be counted."
The board issued a defiant statement defending the BBC's journalism, sticking to that line even after Kelly came forward and testified to a parliamentary committee on July 14 that he had not made some of the remarks Gilligan had reported. Three days later, Kelly was found dead, apparently driven to suicide by the pressure he felt from the government and the media.
In his resignation statement Friday, Gilligan pointed out that several assertions in the May 29 broadcast have been vindicated: that the 45-minute claim was based on just one source, that it was inserted into the dossier very late in the drafting process and that members of the intelligence community were uneasy with parts of the dossier. Ultimately, no weapons of mass destruction have been located and the government eventually conceded that the 45-minute claim referred only to battlefield munitions, not to strategic weapons that could have posed a threat to Britain.
Still, Gilligan conceded: "We deserved criticism. Some of my story was wrong, as I admitted at the inquiry, and I again apologize for it."
Hutton's probe concluded that the 45-minute claim was a genuine piece of intelligence, vetted by the intelligence committee, and was inserted late in the process because it had surfaced only in late August. Hutton made clear he had little use for much of the rest of Gilligan's testimony. "I have considerable doubt as to how reliable Mr. Gilligan's evidence is as regards what Dr. Kelly said to him," the report concludes.
"Panorama's" conclusion was that the corporation and its senior executives had "bet the farm on a shaky foundation."
Mark Byford, acting director general and the new guy in charge of the Beeb, sounded shell-shocked as he examined the damage Gilligan, Campbell and Hutton had collectively wreaked on the world's largest broadcast news organization.
"It's been a very, very difficult week," Byford told a radio interviewer. "That is an understatement."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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