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THE GUARDIAN
Monday, 8 October 1990
This week the Lords debates a government amendment on impartiality in broadcasting. John Pilger argues that it must be opposed.
A code for charlatans
THIS WEEK an important series of debates and films about censorship begins at the National Film Theatre. I hope the discussions about television are not too late to galvanise real opposition to one of the most blatant, audacious attempts to impose direct state censorship on our most popular medium.
The Arts Minister, David Mellor, has described a proposed amendment to clause six of the Broadcasting Bill due to be published this week as "British and sensible". Mellor is a lawyer; he will understand that the corruption of language is the starting point. Indeed, there is something exquisitely specious about the conduct of this affair. Censorship is never mentioned. The code words are "impartiality" and "balance"; words sacred in the lexicon of British broadcasting, resonant with fair play and moderation: words long abused. Now these words are to provide a gloss of respectability to an amended Bill that is a political censor's mandate and dream.
Until recently, lobbyists within the industry believed they had secured from David Mellor "safeguards" to protect quality programming from commercial domination as ITV was "de-regulated". (An Orwellian term meaning "restricted".) Mellor was duly ordained "civilised"; and the lobbyists did not watch their backs, or the House of Lords.
In July, the Home Office Minister in the Lords, Earl Ferrers, announced, in effect, that the Government wanted a "code of impartiality" which would legally require the television companies to "balance" programmes deemed "one-sided". Moreover, the amendment would "include the ways in which impartiality could be achieved within a specific context . . ."
The point about the amendment is that it has nothing to do with truth and fairness. Charlatans and child abusers, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, all will have the legal right to airtime should they be the objects of "one-sided" journalistic scrutiny. But control is the real aim. The amended Bill will tame and, where possible, prevent the type of current affairs and documentary programmes that have exposed the secret pressures and corruption of establishment interest, the lies and duplicity of government ministers and officials.
Thames TV's Death on the Rock exemplified such a programme. Unable to lie its way to political safety, the Government tried unsuccessfully to smear both the producers of Death on the Rock and the former Tory minister whose inquiry vindicated them. The amendment is designed to stop such programmes being made.
All this has clearly come from Thatcher herself, who, the record is clear, has done more than any modern British leader to use the law to limit basic freedoms, notably freedom and diversity of expression. She achieved this distinction (the Official Secrets Act, the Interception of Communications Act, the Contempt of Court Act, the Criminal Justice Act, etc) while protecting and honouring those who have done most to damage and devalue modern journalism.
It is hardly surprising that a government majority in the Lords saw off a very different kind of amendment to the Broadcasting Bill. This would have forced Rupert Murdoch to have relinquished control of Sky Television in 1992. The amendment would have brought him into line with proposed rules that prevent any national newspaper owner from taking more than a 20 per cent stake in Sky's rival, BSB, and in any new domestic satellite broadcasting service.
A skilful political game has been played. Thatcher's stalking horse in the Lords has been Woodrow Wyatt, whose brief career on BBC's Panorama was marked by his obsequious interviews with government ministers. Mostly, he is remembered for his red-baiting in the electricians union. His prejudices are now published in Murdoch's News of the World and the Times.
Wyatt's refrain has been that broadcasting in Britain is a quivering red plot: "left-wing bias" he calls it. In the Lords, he tabled an amendment to the Broadcasting Bill that would "define impartiality" which he had agreed with Thatcher in a meeting at Downing Street. During the debate, he was supported by Lord Chalfont, another old Thatcher pal and her appointment as deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. In this capacity, Chalfont was meant to be representing the interests of independent television in Parliament. His backing for Wyatt was an outrageous example of double interest. When Earl Ferrers picked up the scent and replied that the Government would table its own amendment, Wyatt and his backers withdrew theirs.
At last month's Royal Television Society dinner David Mellor went out of his way to describe the Wyatt proposal as "unworkable". For this he received appreciative applause from television's liberal establishment. However, the publication last week of the amendment shows that Mellor's speech was massage and wholly misleading.
The amendment gives Thatcher and Wyatt virtually what they want and is to be rushed through Parliament. The serious purpose of this haste is to intimidate broadcasters in time for the next election.
Such obsession with political control stems mainly from a significant shift in how the establishment and the public regard the media. In many eyes television has replaced the press as a "fourth estate" in Britain. This alarms those who believe television is there to present them, their ideology and their manipulations in the best possible light.
In contrast, much of the public now looks to television current affairs, documentaries and drama documentaries to probe the secrets of an increasingly unaccountable state. Every survey shows public approval of television current affairs, and offers not the slightest justification for new restrictions. Television's successes have been notable. The Guildford Four might not be free now had Yorkshire Television's First Tuesday not mounted its original investigation. For more than a quarter of a century Granada's World in Action has exposed injustices, great and small, and made the sort of enemies of whom serious journalists ought to be proud. Not surprisingly, the series has borne the brunt of the Thatcher/Wyatt/Chalfont wrath. This has come lately from the "Media Monitoring Unit". Last March the MMU was exposed by the Independent on Sunday as little more than a propaganda shop front following a series of well-publicised, fatuous attacks on Radio 4's Today programme for its "anti-government bias".
The MMU's founder was Lord Chalfont, the man who will help police "impartiality" in broadcasting at the new Independent Television Commission. For more than 18 months after his appointment as IBA deputy chairman, Chalfont was a consultant for a security firm which has since been offering to help ITV companies win back their franchises. Like Wyatt, Chalfont's career illustrates the partisanship at which this amendment is said to be aimed. A former intelligence officer, he has links with the extreme right, especially in South Africa.
(Continued overleaf)
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