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.”
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.
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