Did they learn anything from Caroline?

Three and a half years ago I wrote about “a modern tragedy”, one that shouldn’t have happened. I’m talking about the death of Caroline Flack, who was found dead in her Stoke Newington flat just over a month after she had been charged by police with assaulting her tennis player boyfriend. 

She had committed suicide, a horrendous outcome from a truly sorry story, in which heavy-handed processing by the Crown Prosecution Service, coupled with intense media scrutiny and even more intense social media commentary appeared to compel the 40-year-old - who’d been struggling with mental health issues for several years, despite portraying herself as a bubbly, fun public persona had already been suffering from mental health issues - to kill herself. As I wrote, “Fans blame the press. The press blames social media. Social media blames the press. Everyone is blaming everyone else for Caroline Flack’s suicide. It’s an unholy mess.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, and The Sun’s publication of a story about an unnamed BBC presenter allegedly paying a young individual tens of thousands of pounds for explicit photos over the course of three years, starting when they were just 17. And so began a five-day media firestorm, plunging the BBC into crisis, and launching a frenzy of speculation as to who the “well-known” presenter was. Day-after-day The Sun doubled-down on the story, with other media outlets - including the BBC itself - echoing the reporting with their own. Despite other things going on the world the BBC presenter story led TV news bulletins and dominated front pages. Rishi Sunak couldn’t even fly off to the NATO summit in Vilnius without being asked for his six cents’ worth. The story was, according to Alastair Campbell, what happens when “media culture loses any sense of perspective about a story”. “We have to get a grip on our sense of perspective when these things happen,” he told the BBC itself, pointing out that the frenzied saturation coverage had managed (perhaps conveniently) to obliterate other big stories such as the NATO summit and Boris Johnson's apparent lack of producing his WhatsApp messages by Monday’s deadline for the Covid inquiry.

On Saturday The Sun published further allegations, opening up the BBC’s complaints procedure to scrutiny. By Sunday, the still-unnamed male presenter was reported by the corporation as being suspended while it worked “as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.” In the meantime, high profile male BBC presenters had to fight a rearguard action of their own to dismiss speculation that the presenter was one of them. One presenter went out of his way to post on both Twitter and Threads that he wouldn’t be appearing on air the next day because he was “looking forward to taking annual leave”, a somewhat absurd statement to say “it’s not me”.

Three more days of speculation ensued, with The Sun and its rivals still not naming the presenter on the basis that they didn’t have any legal grounds to do. Even the young person at the centre of the original controversy said, in a letter to the BBC issued through lawyers, that nothing inappropriate or unlawful happened had happened the unnamed presenter, declaring The Sun’s story as “rubbish”, and even highlighting the fact that the paper hadn’t even acknowledged the individual’s denial on Friday night.

That, though, didn’t stem the media pile-on. By yesterday morning, Jeremy Vine - one of a number of people caught up in the speculation about the presenter’s identity - spoke on his Channel 5 programme that it was time  the presenter named himself in order to spare others from being falsely accused. ”I know the individual concerned,” Vine professed, before magnanimously adding: “I am very worried about his state of mind and what this is doing to him. I know his survival instinct has kicked in and I know he saw what happened to Phillip Schofield, but my God look at the damage to the BBC, look at the damage to his friends, to those falsely accused - and the longer he leaves it the worse it will be for him.”

And then, some hours after it was revealed that the police had decided that “no criminality was identified” out of The Sun’s lurid coverage, the pressure that had been building on the presenter and his family came to a head when Vicky Flind (producer of Robert Peston’s weekly political discussion show on ITV) named her husband - Huw Edwards - as the presenter (confirming what had been known amongst journalists as the media gossip network had done its worst, with less-than-disguised posts on social media). 

“As is well documented,” Flind wrote in a statement, “[Huw] has been treated for severe depression in recent years. The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters, he has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.” Let’s just linger on that last point for a second. Is it any wonder?

Earlier in the day, on The News Agents podcast, former BBC reporter Jon Sopel - a friend and colleague of Edward for over 30 years - told co-presenters and fellow BBC emigrés Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall that he disagreed with Vine’s view that the as-yet anonymous presenter should out himself: “I would say Jeremy is a friend of mine and I disagree with him on this,” Sopel said. “I think that whoever the presenter is needs to work it out himself. I cannot begin to imagine the sort of pressure, the sort of anguish, turmoil that is going on in his life. And just to hear from your colleagues, come on for the sake of me, can you out yourself please? I’m not sure that’s the best look.”

After Flind had released her statement, Sopel appeared on Andrew Marr’s show on LBC, making the very salient point that: “There was no criminality and if there was no criminality - which we have had confirmed by the Metropolitan Police - what are you left with?”. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression. The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning: that he might have solicited photos from someone who was underage and had therefore committed a criminal offence.” “I did gasp when I saw the headline [on Saturday],” Sopel added. “I didn’t know who the presenter was but I thought ‘bloody hell this is serious’.” But, he said, after the story had been plastered across the next seven pages, “it was nothing”. “I don't know what went on at The Sun. But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

At the heart of this story are humans. Vulnerable humans. And victims, too - Edwards himself, his wife Vicky and their five children, the family caught up in the original story, other people who’ve come forward to make claims about Edwards’ behaviour. Was The Sun wrong to run the story in the first place? Possibly, possibly not. It will use the morally ambiguous argument that running the original story was ‘in the public interest’. But stringing it out for five days while not naming the presenter and therefore putting itself into legal jeopardy merely added the pressure on Edwards himself. If The Sun was so sure of its story, why didn’t it name Edwards when it clearly knew his identity? It begs the question - what was its intention.

This brings us to the BBC. In essence, this story isn’t about the BBC. It was, in Jon Sopel’s words to Andrew Marr,  “Someone who had a probably rather complicated personal life, who was wrestling with certain issues,” and who wouldn’t have been the first to do be in that situation. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression,” Sopel continued. ”The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning, that he, you know, might have solicited photos from someone who was underage, and therefore had committed a criminal offence. And that seems to have gone away completely, given what the Met has said this evening. And so you're thinking, well what is this all been about?”.

This, inevitably, leads to the conclusion that The Sun - whose proprietor has a known ideological dislike of the BBC - were handed a golden, cynical opportunity to use Edwards’ apparent indiscretions as a means of damaging the corporation’s reputation. There is certainly a suspicion that every headline opportunity the newspaper (and its rivals) had to tag the BBC, it did.

“I don't know what went on at The Sun,” Sopel told Andrew Marr. “But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

In fairness, though, the BBC does appear to have a lot to explain itself of how it handled the original complaint, raised with it in May after the family of the young adult in the initial story had flagged it in April to South Wales Police, who deemed the allegations not worthy of criminal investigation. It took from 18 May, when a family member went to a BBC building to make a complaint about “the behaviour of a BBC presenter” until last Thursday, 6 July, when The Sun raised with the BBC press offer that there were allegations about Edwards. 

Here’s where the BBC itself has ended up doing The Sun’s job for it. Although a specialist BBC investigations team had instigated an enquiry into the claims made in May, new allegations appeared over the weekend that were different to those initially investigated. Under it’s “neither fear nor favour” editorial ethic, the BBC itself started reporting extensively on the story, leading news bulletins with it, and even pumping out breaking news alerts received on mobile phones about one of its own. This has been met with incredulity by Jon Sopel: “I think the BBC is a complicated beast and it would be lovely to think of it as a streamlined organisation where one bit knows what the other is doing. But the BBC is a series of completely uncoordinated limbs”. On the one hand, he said, BBC Director-General Tim Davie was claiming that its internal investigation was put on hold while the police decided whether there was anything to investigate (or not), while at the same time “BBC News is carrying out investigations and produces a report at 4 o'clock in the afternoon saying he had spoke to someone, and aggressive tones, or used swear words. I just thought: ’Hang on, does one know what the other is doing?’. I think the worst thing the BBC could be seen as being is the provisional wing of The Sun newspaper.”

My issue here with this debate is that it becomes something of a self-serving media ‘bubble’ story. In the days and weeks ahead, fingers of blame will continue to be pointed at the various actors in the media coverage. Questions will be rightly asked about many aspects of the BBC’s handling of a human resources issue, but also about The Sun’s motives, and the motives of newspapers with similar interests and their role in the pile-on. What’s not clear is what happens with the figures at the very heart of the story - the victims. Edwards himself is one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters (according to the BBC Annual Report, published on Tuesday as the furore was growing louder), but also one of its most respected, not only as one of the presenter of the 10 O’Clock News but lead anchor on state occasions. 

Should Edwards’ “rather complicated personal life”, to quote Jon Sopel, preclude him resuming his roles? And what about the young adult - now aged 20 - whose alleged receipt of £35,000 for explicit pictures at the request of the person we now know to be Edwards do next? If, as has been reported, this as-yet unidentified person has a crack cocaine addiction, you would hope that they can get the help they need. I don’t doubt, either, that their family - who raised the complaint in the first place - will be going through purgatory over the way the story has evolved (and I’m deliberately avoiding being judgemental about their circumstances or motivation for raising the complaint to begin with, even if their child has dismissed The Sun’s story as “rubbish”).

The bottom line is that, unless we see evidence to the contrary, what has been extensively and intensively reported on over the last five or six days amounts to little more than one adult’s complicated private life being made public. And he is now in hospital being treated for an acute mental health condition. Perhaps the media didn’t learn anything from Caroline Flack. Compassion, for a start.

My favourite aunt

I owe a great deal to the BBC. My late father worked there for 35 years (that's him, behind the camera). I was brought up in a BBC household, rarely ever watching ITV (remember, kids, there was a time when there were just three - THREE! - channels...) appreciating what the corporation provided the nation and even the world, via its television and radio output. There was also its authority. It’s journalism was beyond question, its presenters peerless. And, best of all, you could watch a film at Christmas without interruption from adverts. As a child, I was able to visit Television Centre often, thanks to my dad. I’ve sat ‘in’ Daleks, been on the Blue Peter set, met the legend that was Brian Cant and still is Johnny Ball, Crackerjack presenters and Roy Castle, and was able to get precious tickets to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops. OK, all that was privilege, but they still emboldened my appreciation for the institution that is the BBC.

So, I’m naturally biased towards Auntie. However, within that very nickname lies the reason it, today, comes under attack from every direction like never before. Just look at the last six weeks: politicians from both sides have accused the BBC of editorial bias towards one side or another and, now Boris has landslid into No.10, the murmurings and mutterings have begun again about the sanctity of the TV licence fee, which funds everything from the Beeb’s television output to five of the UK’s 13 symphony orchestras. Paying for a licence is therefore considered to be a contribution to the national cultural fabric.

The inescapable truth, however, is whether this is still relevant. The days when the ever-cheerful Christmas Day episode of EastEnders drew audience figures of more than 20 million - somewhere close to a third of the population - are long gone. Ditto big-budget dramas and variety shows. Even a big draw like the Strictly Come Dancing final this year lost a million viewers from 2018. Thishas nothing to do with the quality of the BBC’s output (as the profoundly anti-Beeb Daily Mail would have you believe) but, simply, the continuing drain on so-called “terrestrial” audiences (an anachronistic phrase given the availability of most terrestrial programming on catch-up services) from other places. Kids, in particular, are just as likely to be consuming television in bite-sized chunks from YouTube, mainlining Jack Whitehall box sets on Netflix, or glued to TikTok*. And with that particular service commissioning ever more ambitious series and co-investing in semi-theatrical films like The Irishman, plus the inroads made by Amazon Prime to original programming of its own, the television landscape has shifted further than I think many people with a traditional view of it realise.
*A teenager reliably informs me

30 years ago I was involved in the last great revolution in British broadcasting, the launch of Sky TV. Then, on 5th February 1989, five new TV channels were added to that landscape on a single day, just seven years after the UK had gone from three to four. Today there are around 460. Something - quite a lot, actually - has to give: if you’re watching Lisa Snowdon’s Jewellery Collection on QVC you won’t be watching Pointless on BBC1. And yet you still need to have a TV licence to watch La Snowdon flogging her sparkly wares. No wonder there have long been Tory murmurings about the licence fee (most recently, the idea of decriminalising non-payment, a thin end of the wedge), but while inevitably some of that will be down to vindictive intent, some will also be the result of free market thinking. The topic of the BBC’s funding comes up periodically, and it is always regarded by noted beard scratchers as an “existential threat”. But with the return of a weaponised Conservative government, empowered like never before and driven by belligerent strategists like Dominic Cummings, that threat is actually, now, looking very real.

Picture: BBC

The argument over the TV licence’s relevance in an age of streamed entertainment is a strong one. I’m relatively happy at paying for one, and between Sir David Attenborough documentaries, Countryfile, Mock The Week, Gavin & Stacey, Rick Stein’s foodie travelogues, Radio 5 Live and my mate Gary Crowley’s shows on Radio London (plus of course, much, much, more), I couldn’t be any happier at effectively paying a subscription fee to the BBC. Given one option in the future, with a licence fee replaced by a pic’n’mix model, I would continue to pay for BBC programming, such is the quality of its output. But with the arrival of Netflix as a producer, not just a rebroadcaster, and Sky planning to invest millions in new original productions at its forthcoming new studio complex in Elstree, programming choice to dilute BBC viewing figures is only going to increase.

Daring to mention the general election just gone, those with an agenda against the BBC have been gifted a fresh grinding wheel for their bilious axes. The accusation of editorial bias is one that I’ll defend any broadcaster from. Generally the rule is that if both left and right are accusing you of political bias, you’re getting it right. The online and even institutional bullying that broadcasters like the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Kay Burley received during the election campaign was at times beyond toxic. The far left accused Kuenssberg of being a shill for the Tories, and I’d accept that her comment about postal votes looking “grim” for Labour in a live report was ill-advised. Interestingly, though, both Labour and the Conservatives have had a pop at the BBC’s election coverage, something robustly defended by election night anchor Huw Edwards in a LinkedIn blog post: “You are expected to deliver a results programme which upholds the BBC's reputation for quality and fairness,” he wrote, “but you're doing so in a world where toxic cynicism and accusations of bias (from all sides) are adding to the pressures on the entire team. And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.”

Edwards pointed out, validly, that unlike journalists working for certain newspaper and website proprietors (“where regulation is risibly weak and blatant propaganda can be passed off as 'news’”), broadcast journalists are obliged to adhere to strict laws on impartiality. Political interests might not always like that - such as the Tories’ petulant complaint to Ofcom over Channel 4 replacing the absent Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage with melting ice statues during a televised leaders’ debate on climate change - but on balance, the BBC in particular gets it right. Occasionally, it will get it wrong, or appear to do so, such as Kuenssberg’s gaffe and that by political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who referred to Boris Johnson winning “the majority that he so deserves” during a live broadcast. This prompted shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald to say the BBC was partly to blame for Labour’s defeat last Thursday. “I’m very worried about our public service broadcaster,” he told the Today programme on Radio 4. “I’m really worried about the drift. You’ve seen the catalogue of criticisms that [Labour is] making,” adding, “if the BBC are going to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial manner, I think they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot to say about this.”

Labour, of course, have other things to consider when it comes to their “period of reflection” on the election defeat and, frankly, the BBC should be the least of their considerations. The Conservatives, too, should lay off the BBC. Their victory had nothing to do with the BBC and, in what was most certainly a clear strategy, in spite of the BBC. I’m as uncomfortable with Boris Johnson evading scrutiny as anyone else, but swerving Andrew Neil in favour of doing selfies with Phil and Holly on This Morning was as belligerent a dismissal of the BBC as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “disappearance” from the election campaign was a deliberate policy. Time will tell whether Johnson’s media performances in the election will come back to haunt him (hiding in a fridge to avoid an ITV reporter is not a good look, and despite his permanent ‘bumbling oaf’ comedy persona - honed on Have I Got News For You - he is as terrible a communicator as his predecessor, Theresa May). The Fourth Estate exists for a reason. The trick is how you engage it. Refusing it is counter-productive.

Picture courtesy of Huw Edwards/LinkedIn/Jeff Overs, BBC

At the weekend Lord Grade - Michael Grade, the former BBC chairman and scion of one of British entertainment’s most influential families - wrote that Neil’s rant-to-camera, goading Boris to come on his leaders' interview show, was petulant. “The situation appears to be bordering on open warfare – in which case I’d advise all concerned to take a step back and remember that it’s normal for governments and independent broadcasters to be at loggerheads.” Grade, writing in the Mail On Sunday, reminded readers that government enmity towards the BBC is nothing new, citing Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell “declaring war” on it over the ‘dodgy dossier’ row, and Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to appoint sympathetic governors to the BBC’s board following alleged negativity towards her over the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. During this election, however, Grade said that the BBC got things wrong. “I’m a huge fan of Mr Neil’s intellectually rigorous style,” he wrote, “and have been for 40 years, ever since I oversaw his selection as an unknown presenter on a London Weekend Television current affairs show. I am not a fan, however, of the way journalists such as Neil hijacked the airwaves, using humiliation tactics in a bid to force the Prime Minister to face their questions. This was a serious abuse of one’s position, and I have written to Ofcom requesting an urgent review to ensure it does not happen again.”

“The issue here is impartiality, and broadcasters have a statutory duty to respect that,” Grade continued. “It is not their job to use the airwaves to cajole and try to coerce politicians into interviews – or to shame them publicly if they exercise their right to refuse. British viewers do not want to see blatantly biased political reporting on mainstream television such as the Americans get with the Right-wing Fox News. But I fear that’s the way we are going.”

Senior Tories are now said to be staying away from Radio 4’s Today, too, ironically now that John Humphrys, and his uncompromising approach to interviewing, has retired. Nick Robinson, one of Today’s presenters, was even president of the Oxford University Conservative Association while a student. But he is still one of the most capable of political interviewers. Avoiding him is not the answer. If I had one criticism of the Tory election campaign (and I’m not going to get into lies and deceit here), it was the flimsy nature of some of the people they put up for broadcast interviews. With Rees-Mogg benched after five minutes of play over his awful Grenfell Tower remarks, the likes of Nicky Morgan and Matt Hancock were deployed, both lightweights. In fact, on one day of media campaigning, Morgan had to be augmented by Hancock. Where were the heavyweights, like Michael Gove and Sajid Javid? (I’d include Dominic Raab here, but he, too, was clearly - and correctly - judged to be too cold and toxic an Alan B’Stard to go anywhere near any broadcast outlet of influence).

But back to the BBC’s future: Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rishi Sunak, has said that the BBC’s funding model is something the government “should look at”, targeting the iPlayer service as one particular area of focus. He has also said there would be wider consideration of licence fee when the BBC’s current Royal Charter ends in December 2027. “The media industry is changing,” Sunak has said. “How people consume media is changing and it’s of course right that we continue to look at those things over time.” For once, I agree with someone from this government, up to a point. That point is where a government - any government - adopts frankly dystopian tones about the BBC. Funding is one thing, but censoring by stealth is something else entirely.

In another piece for the Daily Mail, John Humphrys has also weighed in on the darkening skies gathering over the BBC. “Much more worrying are the threats emanating from Number 10,” he wrote pointing out - as Grade did - that Downing Street leaning on the media is nothing new. “I can't think of a single prime minister in the past half century who would not, at some point in their career, have despatched the BBC director-general to Devil's Island if they'd thought they could get away with it.” But, he ended, senior BBC executives come and go, but the corporation “tends to sail on regardless. When Mr. Johnson raises the question of the licence fee, though, we are entering infinitely more dangerous waters. Make no mistake, this is an existential threat to the BBC.”

In the short term, it is something that the ‘temporary’ Minister for Culture, Digital & Sport, the newly ennobled Nicky Morgan, will no doubt be looking at as she arrives back at the desk she vacated to stand down as an MP at the election. Some on the left will regard any threat to the BBC from this government as karma for the supposed bias during the campaign. But politics aside, by 2027 when the BBC’s charter is renewed, the media landscape will have changed even further. 5G, for example, will have arrived (and even, according to the wonks at my old employer Nokia, 6G), transforming how and, notably, where media is consumed ubiquitously. Even with the BBC’s embrace of online technology, it is still largely a construct of the broadcast industry it invented almost 100 years ago. It is still, though, whether hawks like it or not, a national institution like few others, save for perhaps the Royal Family. It’s motto “nation shall speak peace unto nation”, adopted on 1 January 1927 by the newly formed Corporation to signify its purpose, was a latent symbol of a decaying empire, an empire that itself would come under existential threat 12 years later and the outbreak of war. The BBC’s purpose has clearly shifted since then, and even if people who dress up in red, white and blue to wave flags at royal weddings still see the BBC as a projection of Britain and British values, that function has long since ceased to be relevant. At the end of the day, we should just want Auntie to keep producing the best of British television and radio. We just need to figure out how to pay for it, first.