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(Continued from overleaf)
Factual programmes are expensive, especially investigations that require time and patience. Under the new Bill, how many companies will now risk controversy if it means having to make two or more "balancing" programmes? What happened to Ken Loach's Questions of Leadership in 1983, to be shown this week at the NFT, is perhaps a glimpse of the future. Loach's four films demonstrated how the trade union leadership often collaborated with government against the interests of millions of working people. After months of circuitous delay and decisions taken in secret, the IBA decided that each of the four films would need "balancing" and that another longer programme would be made to "balance" what had already been balanced. Loach argued that, because his films provided a view of trade unions rarely seen on television, they themselves were the balance. By the time his emasculated work was shown, it was out of date.
In 1983 David Munro and I made the Truth Game, which sought to decode the language of nuclear inevitability and to illuminate the history of nuclear weapons as an exercise in keeping information not from an enemy but from the people the weapons were meant to "defend". The IBA decided that the Truth Game could not be shown until a "balancing programme" was made. Central Television approached several "pro-bomb" names but they refused. Finally, Max Hastings agreed to make a separate programme but not to do as the IBA wanted: to rebut our film virtually frame by frame. The Truth Game was made when television reflected the bellicose establishment view of the "Russian threat"; this was a time when Washington was considering the possibility of a "limited nuclear war". Thus, like Questions of Leadership, our film provided modest correction to an overriding imbalance in the coverage of the nuclear arms race. Under the amendment, it almost certainly would not have been made.
That Britain already has television censorship ought to be enough to alert us to the extreme nature of the demands of Wyatt and co. Since 1970 more than 50 television programmes on Ireland have been banned, doctored or delayed mostly by "prior restraint", a nod-and-wink system instituted by Lord Reith, founder of the BBC. In 1937 Reith boasted that he had "fixed up a contract between Broadcasting House and the Home Office", and had "made it clear that we must be told ahead of things that might cause trouble". When in 1988 Home Secretary Douglas Hurd decided to make criminals of television and radio journalists who interviewed members of certain Irish organisations, including those elected to Parliament, he first informed the BBC. Since then not a single broadcasting organisation has challenged this ban in court, even though, as Lord Scarman has pointed out, it could be tested all the way to the European Court.
The effectiveness of the present system often relies on its subtlety. "Impartiality" serves to buttress what was known in the 1960s as the "consensus view", which pretends that Britain is one nation with one perspective on events and with everyone sharing roughly the same power over their lives. This is untrue, of course, and "consensus view" is a euphemism for the authorised wisdom of established authority. Thus, "impartiality" is a principle to be suspended when the established order is threatened.
During the Falklands war the minutes of the BBC's Weekly Review Board noted that the reporting of the war was to be shaped to suit "the emotional sensibilities of the public", that the weight of BBC coverage would be concerned with government statements of policy, and that impartiality was felt to be "an unnecessary irritation". There are honourable exceptions, of course, but has anything really changed? Night after night, only a soundtrack of establishment war drums is missing from much of the television news about the Gulf.
Anti-Bill lobbyists have argued that much of British television is among the best in the world. But this reputation derives, in great part, from those very "dissenting" programmes that are the amendment's target and which follow a rich British tradition that owes nothing to bogus "balance". The first documentary-makers, among them John Grierson, Denis Mitchell, Norman Swallow and Richard Cawston, presented people and places as they saw them; and their work was moving and often brilliant. For them, the issue was not so much "personal bias" as illuminating those areas in society which had long remained in shadow. They dared to put cameras and microphones in front of ordinary people and allow them to talk.
What they revealed was another Britain. John Grierson, for example, was the first to give people the opportunity to tell of what it was like to live with rats, damp and cold. Wyatt, Chalfont and co would certainly have wanted to "balance" him. Indeed, surely Cobbett, Swift and Dickens would have been seen off, along with great journalists such as Ed Murrow and James Cameron.
The Thatcher government is not "misguided", as some have suggested, for it understands the usefulness of media more than any since the war. That is why it has elevated Murdochism and the language of advertising and public relations above free journalism. Almost all its actions since 1979 have been in the name of a doctrine of "a free market and a strong state", of expanding "consumer choice" while restricting political choice. The result is a debt-laden, "two-thirds society" progressively shorn of countervailing power. And, of course, the "choice" is as phoney as "balance" for it excludes the unprofitable and the politically unpalatable. This obnoxious assault on freedom has got this far because Thatcher and her pals have encountered only polite and confused opposition. Politeness should end now. If the public do not defend the public's right to know, who will?
The NFT season includes John Pilger's The Truth Game and Ken Loach's Which Side Are You On?; Ireland: the Silent Voices; Mother Ireland; MI5's Official Secrets; and Project Zircon. It also includes a series of Guardian-sponsored seminars.
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