WEDNESDAY 25 JULY 2007

______

Present

Corbett of Castle Vale, L. Eccles of Moulton, B. Fowler, L. (Chairman) Hastings of Scarisbrick, L. Howe of Idlicote, B. Inglewood, L. King of Bridgwater, L. Manchester, Bp. Maxton, L. McIntosh of Hudnall, B. ______

Witnesses: Ms Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News, Mr Nigel Chapman, Director of the

BBC World Service, and Ms Sian Kevill, Managing Director, BBC World, examined.

Q325 Chairman: You are very welcome. You know, I think, that the Communications

Committee have launched an inquiry into Media Ownership and the News. What we are looking at is essentially the impact of the concentration of media ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion, but we are also looking at a whole range of associated points – how and why have the agendas of news providers changed, how has the process of news gathering changed. It is with that in mind that we would like to open our questioning today. We have got very full biographies of you all, most of which doubtless you will deny, but we know exactly who you are so I will not ask you to introduce yourselves. We were going to meet previously but we were very glad that Alan Johnston was released. Perhaps I could turn to events which are not quite so happy for the BBC and the reputation of the BBC. Do you think you have suffered a blow because of what has been happening with these radio phone-in shows?

Ms Boaden: Radio and television, yes, I do think we have suffered a blow. I think the way we are trying to deal with it should mitigate that blow, but undoubtedly a lot of our staunchest supporters – and I talk about family and friends here – are shocked and disappointed. They expected more from the BBC and for whatever reason they feel let down. That is the kind of thing you have to build up over a period of time to renew the trust. Up to now our trust ratings have been higher than anybody else’s and it will be interesting to see in the long term, depending on how we respond to this current crisis, whether that trust is restored, but I do not think we can dodge the fact that people feel let down.

Q326 Chairman: What do you think the causes were? What do you believe the root problems were?

Ms Boaden: I think they are probably multi-faceted. As you know, we are doing an investigation into each one of the specifics and I am not going to pre-judge those because clearly disciplinary action may be involved and it would be very unfair on an individual to talk about those things. However, somewhere in some parts of the BBC “the show must go on” became the cultural norm at any cost. It is very interesting to read the Ofcom report on the Blue Peter phone-in fiasco, which I did, because I wanted to see if there were lessons for

News in it, and actually I think there are. Although this was entirely about the phone-in programme and a relatively young researcher, what surprised me was that when she did her strategy, using a child as the winner who was not a real child because the phone lines had gone down, this was her planned contingency. This was not something sparked off; this was a little girl thinking, “If it all goes wrong this is what I will do”, and I think the lesson there is that if you manage any kind of team you have to make enough space for junior people to be able to ask awkward, difficult questions or rather simple and naïve questions, and if they are not coming forward you have to think through all the things that could go wrong so that someone does not find themselves in that position. You have to create a culture where people can say, “If it goes wrong what do I do?”, not, “If it goes wrong I will just do this thing that is not actually truthful”. It was very revealing, and I said to my team, “This is the lesson we

2 have to take from the Blue Peter incident, that we have to create a managerial culture where boundaries and values are perfectly clear but where there is enough scope for rather inexperienced people to be able to ask questions about process and procedure if things go wrong”.

Q327 Chairman: In our inquiry we are dealing with the provision of news. We do not want to go into all the detail of the phone-in competitions unless it is relevant, but just let me ask a question on journalism. We all heard this morning that the Managing Director of GMTV has resigned following an investigation by BBC’s Panorama. It is a bit ironic, is it not, that similar things were happening in the BBC?

Ms Boaden: If you saw that Panorama programme, we were very tough on Blue Peter, very, very tough. It was one of the case studies and I was extremely happy with that programme because we did not spare anybody. In fact, there was some debate in other parts of the BBC that perhaps we had been over-harsh on Blue Peter. I do not think we were harsh at all on them. I think we dealt with them fairly in the way that we dealt with each of these cases, so in terms of a piece of journalism at that point the only case we knew of was the Blue Peter case and it absolutely had a central part in Panorama.

Q328 Chairman: You have half answered my question, but what would be the process if

Panorama came to you and said, “We have got wide suspicions that the BBC is cutting corners in this particular area”? Would you say, “Fine. You go in and investigate it”?

Ms Boaden: You would have to put it in terms of public interest, “Is this a minor infringement or is this something absolutely scandalous?”. If you remember, we did throughout the Hutton experience report on ourselves very freely and fairly and with great discomfort to parts of BBC management. The John Ware Panorama and the way the BBC handled the Hutton investigation was extremely uncomfortable for some members of senior

3 management at that time, so I think that is proof that we are capable of examining our own failures with the same scrutiny and rigour that we would examine anybody else’s.

Q329 Chairman: So if evidence was picked up by Panorama or any other BBC investigative programme that something was going wrong in the BBC, you would expect them to investigate it?

Ms Boaden: I would expect them to investigate it. Clearly I would have to decide then if I were, as it were, editorial director or manager, because you have to have clear lines. What happened during the Hutton experience, when that Panorama was going on, was that the managerial structure was kept entirely separate from the editorial processes. That is what you have to do if you are examining yourself, but yes, clearly, if there was a scandal within the

BBC that it was in the public interest to reveal and our people got it first, I think it would be obligatory on us to at least investigate and see if there was a programme in it.

Mr Chapman: Can I just make a point about transparency and culture, which is what you are driving at, I think, is that we have to make sure that our producers and our editors understand that in live television and radio, and we do thousands of hours of live television and radio, things do go wrong and there is no loss of face to say to audiences, “Right: we need to change what we are going to do now. That particular facet of the programme in which we were going to bring you in in five minutes we are going to have to delay or postpone until next week”, because that sense of transparency is the right thing to do and it is also in a culture where audiences increasingly understand how media works and they are often the creators of content themselves, so they do understand this in a way that I think perhaps audiences did not before, and if you can bring that about then that temptation to cut corners, to keep the show on at any cost, will be watered down. I think Helen is right: that is the tension that we have discovered in the last few weeks.

4 Q330 Chairman: The point I am really getting at is that we had the Editor of The Times here last week and we asked him about the newspaper’s policy on reporting BSkyB, a part of the News Corps company, and I think his reply was basically that he would that as he would regard any other company, and I think what I am asking you is, if you found or suspected that there was something going wrong in the BBC World Service, and Nigel Chapman is sitting next to you, you would feel no compunction in ordering an investigation into that?

Ms Boaden: Yes, I would have no compunction if it was in the public interest to do that. If anyone saw the way we reported last week’s horrible time for the BBC, the six cases coming out and Mark Thompson, we led the Ten O’Clock News on it and we were open, tough and challenging of the BBC.

Q331 Chairman: But that is after it has happened, that is after it has been revealed, is it not? What I am wondering is whether you would do the investigative bit and reveal.

Ms Boaden: Yes, I think we would. The down side of it being our company is that people can get very insular and start to think that something in the BBC is more important than it actually is to the rest of the world. We are very self-centred often in large organisations. But if we did find prima facie evidence that something scandalous was going on and it was in the public interest for Panorama to investigate in the BBC, yes, of course. That is why we get the money.

Q332 Chairman: It has very little to do with our focus but in fact the World Service has been one of the companies, has it not, with your World Service programme White Label?

Mr Chapman: Yes, that is right.

Q333 Chairman: How did that come about? What happened?

5 Mr Chapman: Put very simply, White Label was a half-hour programme that went out every week which looked at new record releases from the United Kingdom and elsewhere. It was a pretty simple format, to be honest, and it has now been discontinued. It stopped broadcasting in 2006 but it was obviously caught as part of the trawl and the trawl ran from 2005 up until the present day. This show asked its listeners to send in short reviews of records they had heard from the previous week and then normally the show would talk about one of them; they would effectively read them out. On occasion they either had too few sensible reviews to read out or they had reviews coming from the same sort of people, like a sort of club, and they wanted to widen the group, so I am very sorry to say, to our great dismay when we discovered it, that not very often but on more than one occasion the producers made up the review and ascribed it to a fictitious name, which is clearly deceiving the audience and clearly wrong and clearly damaging. When I heard about it at the end of last week I was really shocked because it is just inexcusable.

Q334 Chairman: And this was not an outside company? This was actually being done inside the BBC?

Mr Chapman: This was being done by the BBC Audio and Music team, who make many programmes for the World Service. Obviously, the news programmes are made by BBC

News but they make quite a lot of factual programmes, they make music programmes, they make -----

Q335 Chairman: Is it a bureaucratic operation?

Mr Chapman: It is a BBC operation, yes. It is quite wrong and it is an example of people getting into a mindset, getting into a sort of format in their head which is, “We need a review this week of this particular record and we are going to have it by hell or high water. If we do not get it legitimately occasionally we have to make it up”. To be honest, this programme

6 was on the fringes of the World Service; it was not its core activity, but that does not excuse it in any way, it does not excuse it one iota. It just brings home to me that every output of the

World Service has to live up to the highest standards and any less than that is completely unacceptable. I do not know what the damage is going to be in terms of the brand over time.

The trust reputation of the World Service around the world is very high. I hope people will see it as an aberration, not a trend or a pattern, and we will move on, but the staff are very dismayed about it.

Q336 Chairman: When did you yourself discover it?

Mr Chapman: I first got an inkling of it about ten days ago, and obviously it was confirmed in its details two days before Mark Byford and the Director General went to the Trust and talked about the six incidents. The trawl deadline was coming and, to be fair to staff who worked on it, they confessed. We would not have found out otherwise but one of them came forward and said he had something he wanted to share with his senior management about something which had been going on in the past, and obviously we then talked to other members of staff – it is a small team, three or four. They confirmed it had been going on and then we felt, because there was a competitive element there because the good review winner got a CD, so it fitted with the criteria of the other findings, and therefore it was entirely proper and appropriate to come clean about it.

Q337 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: You have been remarkably candid, honest and transparent in your responses so far. One of the things that people are asking about is the assertion by the Director General that all BBC staff are now going to be trained in ethics and independence. If we think back to a time when I was with the BBC not too long ago, under the previous Director General, there was the creation of the BBC values and one BBC culture,

7 which have been referred to, and that the foundation value of the BBC was trust. What has happened to that?

Ms Boaden: What, people misunderstanding trust? I think it is very important to remember that most people in the BBC behave honourably and transparently and most people are incredibly upset and ashamed and angry about what has happened. It was very interesting. I went round the newsroom on the day of Mark going to the Trust and there was a real sense of sadness in the room because people knew the BBC brand, as it were, had been let down and these examples had let down people’s connection to the BBC, so my instinct is that fundamentally BBC staff have a very strong commitment to maintaining that trust and now it has been damaged. Repairing it, as much as you could ever repair damaged trust, is a tough thing to do.

Q338 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: But that was very much a cultural drive that the previous Director General, Greg Dyke, put in place and some would say that that drive has been somewhat abandoned in the course of the last couple of years. Are there any links between the absence of eternal ethics training over the last period of years and these seven incidents which have come out?

Ms Boaden: We have to remember that we had no ethics training until Greg Dyke started it.

It was sort of in the DNA of the organisation. We did not even articulate our values until the

Making It Happen programme. It was the first time we had said, “We have got these values and we are going to put them down on a piece of paper”, which is what we did, and everyone said, “That is a bit obvious”, but until you articulate them it is not obvious and you do not know what you all share. I think there have been a lot of other things going on. You have to remember the transition from Greg Dyke to Mark Thompson was unexpected. We then went through a very powerful value-for-money process which absorbed a lot of time. I do not think commitment to the values disappeared in any way, shape or form, but I think self-awareness

8 and talk about them probably did diminish, except, of course, in journalism, where, because of the Hutton situation, we went through a great deal of training about honesty, ethics and transparency. Every single person in BBC journalism went on a compulsory course, which was a fantastic course, called Stories, Sources and Scoops, where a real-life scenario was played to a mixed group of people, I did it too, and through different stages they had to work out what judgments they might have made and people came to very different judgments. The point was to get people to think, and you cannot dip people into honesty, ethics and integrity.

You have to do it like you do with doctors. You have to go into scenarios, you have to get them to think about their judgments, you have to get them to be open-minded about other people’s information and experience so that they will make a journey, as it were, and that is what the new course will be. At the moment it is not everybody in the BBC; it is everybody involved in content, and it is going to be quite a challenge to develop, we were talking about it yesterday, because finding scenarios that work for people in journalism, real scenarios because they have to be credible, and also for people who work in comedy is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, so it is a tough call.

Q339 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Should you not also include people who are involved in the interpretation of content, such as the recent instances to do with the Queen?

Ms Boaden: Yes, I do. Eventually I suspect we may apply it to everybody but we are starting with people directly involved with content, which includes commissioning and also includes, as far as we can, the independent sector. Ethics training is always interesting and challenging and many professions do it as standard, and in journalism we do it as pretty standard, but clearly we need to expand that.

Q340 Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick: Who do you feel now has the ownership of this responsibility? Is it the BBC Trust, which is going to be undertaking an objective review of

9 what has happened, or is it the BBC management who have the editorial responsibility?

Where do the ownership and values lie?

Ms Boaden: In a sense the ownership of the BBC rests with the Trust under the new organisation in that they represent the licence fee payer and therefore they are the scrutineers of all our values, but it is absolutely an obligation on BBC management to fulfil what we have said we will fulfil and probably more. A lot of that is not just about training; it is also about the right sorts of conversation. It is actually about this thing I was talking to you about, the young Blue Peter researcher feeling confident that she can ask a difficult question but also knowing that under no circumstances does she fake something, even if we fall off air. That is the thing that really is the cultural problem, that somehow you go to that extent to keep the programme going. That is barmy. Nigel’s example I think is a classic. Why did they not just say, “We have not had any reviews this week so we have asked the producer to do the review”, or, “We have asked a colleague”, or, “The presenter is going to do a review”. This feeling that they have got to stick to a particular format is silly.

Q341 Lord King of Bridgwater: You are Director of News.

Ms Boaden: I am.

Q342 Lord King of Bridgwater: Whom do you report to on the board?

Ms Boaden: I report to Mark Byford who is the Director of BBC Journalism and the Deputy

Director General.

Q343 Lord King of Bridgwater: You have told the Committee, very fairly, the chairmanship you have. A problem arises which may be either negligence or indiscipline or incompetence, which in any other business might be dealt with reasonably by the management in some way, but you have the other competition about whether it is a

10 newsworthy story. In deciding on these recent stories, for instance, did you consult Mark

Byford before you decided what order of priority you gave them on the news?

Ms Boaden: No, absolutely not. I did not interfere in any way. I trust my editors to understand news judgments and it would have been wholly inappropriate for me to start interfering on a story about -----

Q344 Lord King of Bridgwater: So you had a story that involved serious failings by some of the employees of the BBC and you did not report it to your senior management?

Ms Boaden: No, no. With respect, it was senior management who revealed the serious failings.

Q345 Lord King of Bridgwater: Which you were not aware of?

Ms Boaden: I was not aware of, as with Nigel, until they were revealed. The point is, they were revealed by senior management to us at roughly the same sort of time as they were revealed to the press.

Q346 Lord King of Bridgwater: But the BBC is a priceless national asset, as we know, as is trust in the BBC as the public sector broadcaster and the image of our country in many ways around the world.

Ms Boaden: I completely agree.

Q347 Lord King of Bridgwater: And you take it on yourself to run a story that may be extremely damaging to the reputation of the BBC without consulting your immediate boss or the Director General?

Ms Boaden: As long as they know about what has gone wrong, which of course they did because they were the people who gave the newsroom the information. It would be extremely damaging to the BBC if senior management interfered in our editorial processes.

11 Q348 Lord King of Bridgwater: Have they ever said to you, “You should not have run that”?

Ms Boaden: No, never, absolutely never. I have been doing this job for three years and however uncomfortable it has been for senior management – and during the charter renewal period there were programmes on Panorama, for example, the investigation into David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, which was not, you could argue, a very easy programme – not a whisper or a word was ever said to me about it. That independence is sacrosanct.

Q349 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: My question is not entirely unrelated to Lord King’s but perhaps takes it a bit wider. I gather from the answers you have just given that judging whether or not a matter is in the public interest is an editorial judgment.

Ms Boaden: Yes.

Q350 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: What I was going to ask you before finding out that that is the precise situation is how do you make those judgments because the public interest can be audience ratings?

Ms Boaden: Yes, it can be, but for us it has to be a bit more than that. We could do the most scurrilous journalism and we would get lots of people watching or listening but that is not our job. Public interest for all of us in this room is quite a complex thing. It is about sometimes making judgments that lots of people do not see are necessarily in the public interest at all because they conflate public interest with being interested in it. There are stories we do in news, for example, on China or on India, where an awful lot of the public out there do not automatically think, “This is very interesting”, but clearly it is in the broad public interest to educate and inform people about all sorts of stories that have a big impact. The thing you have to remember about the BBC is that we need to understand a lot about our audiences. We

12 need to understand their patterns, their moods, what they watch, what stories they are interested in, and then we need to use that but never be led by it. We must never be led simply by what the audience tells us because we get the licence fee to go the extra mile. We have a thing called “the Pulse”, which is an overnight survey for television at the moment. It is an online panel of 15,000 consumers who tell us what stories they find interesting, what they would like to know about, and it is absolutely fascinating but you cannot let your news judgments be dictated by that because otherwise you are a market-led organisation, in which case you give back the licence fee. You have to be making judgments based on your values.

Q351 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I just want to follow up one point that I think you mentioned, that as far as training was concerned you would bring in the independent sector as far as you could, because clearly the charter review and all the rest of it has been encouraging the BBC to involve more independent contributors, so how is that dealt with?

Ms Boaden: It is not my specialism, I must say, because we do not deal very much with independents, but we will be liaising closely with PACT, the television independent organisation, and radio does not have an equivalent but we will be talking to the radio independents and working through with them what they think is the best way to get this training to their people. It is expensive training so some of them will be worried about the cost and the time. The other thing is that the television industry is incredibly fluid, particularly in genres like drama and comedy and entertainment. When I was a reporter I worked for an independent for a brief spell. I was a presenter and what really struck me was that halfway through the production schedule all these young researchers were on the phone trying to find more work, they were not focusing, so this fluidity is something that if we want these very important values and ethics to be embedded we have to start dealing with it, and it is not easy and we cannot force the independent sector to do it but my sense is that they will be very open to this.

13 Q352 Lord Maxton: Your own area has not been totally free of this.

Ms Boaden: No.

Q353 Lord Maxton: Even just last week you had to apologise to the First Minister in

Scotland, Alex Salmond -----

Ms Boaden: Quite right too.

Q354 Lord Maxton: ----- about Jeremy Paxman, not an inexperienced researcher, for the misinterpretation of facts. You also, however, in the same way when the running order of the

Queen documentary was misinterpreted, did that on a story with Gordon Brown.

Ms Boaden: We did, a Newsnight film.

Q355 Lord Maxton: Can I ask whether you actually apologised to the Prime Minister for that?

Ms Boaden: I have not apologised to the Prime Minister because the complaint did not come from the Prime Minister. The complaint came from the Treasury and we have apologised to the Treasury.

Q356 Lord Maxton: You have?

Ms Boaden: Yes.

Q357 Bishop of Manchester: Just to go back to the public interest point, could you explain how it is in the public interest to show on the news bulletins some of the footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein and also the coverage of the July 7 bomb attacks? The BBC has apologised for using some of the harrowing footage of an injured man being taken into the

Royal London Hospital. Interestingly, that particular item on the news was covered by other broadcasting companies but they were not accused of using that wrongly. Ofcom actually

14 accused the BBC of using those pictures generically, saying the accompanying commentary did not reflect the seriousness of the situation. It just seems odd to me that if you really do take seriously the concept of public interest in the news items like that should somehow get through the net.

Ms Boaden: I think they are two very different items, with respect. The latter was clearly an error and it was an error that we should not have made. For those that do not know, there was somebody in the background of a shot who was, I think, very near death and it was used. It should not have been used and we apologised for it. The pictures of Saddam Hussein I do not think we should apologise for. We thought very long and hard about it. It was a historic moment. We did not, of course, show the hanging or the body after the hanging. We gave many warnings. We used Jon Simpson, one of our most experienced people, to set up the piece. We were aware that it was over the Christmas holidays so we needed to be extra careful because News 24 might be on when children were in the room when normally they would never have seen News 24, and what was interesting about the Saddam Hussein story was that when the audio came, because do you remember initially it was just silent shots, which showed the rather ghastly shouting at him that took place, that changed our understanding of that event? It became a very different thing and I think it was entirely in the public interest and if the BBC had censored those shots we would have been very severely and rightly criticised.

Q358 Bishop of Manchester: But how then did July 7 get through that rather rigorous screening?

Ms Boaden: People make mistakes. You of all people should know that people make mistakes. I think it was an error of judgment. The sin may not be great but we did apologise for it.

15 Q359 Bishop of Manchester: And the excuse given was that the contents of the tape had not been checked thoroughly, which I think is one that is used quite often.

Ms Boaden: I think you need to remember what was going on on 7 July. This was a catastrophic, extraordinary event. We sent people out. We did not even know what people were going into. We had to get the chemical suits out for people because we did not know if chemical bombs had gone off. Quite a lot of our people we could not even locate because, of course, the phones went down, and in that kind of intense pressure it is never an excuse because a news organisation should always aim for 100 per cent perfection, but I would argue that that particularly, deeply regrettable as it was, was understandable within that context.

Q360 Chairman: Okay; I am going to cut it off there before you get into too deep a theological debate -----

Ms Boaden: Bring it on!

Chairman: ----- and move on to the more general questions that we are interested in.

Q361 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: This is very straightforward by comparison. Can I just ask you, going back to an earlier point you made about your researcher, for instance, in

Blue Peter, amongst the people who are involved in news output what is the average length of contract that most of them have?

Ms Boaden: Long. BBC News has a very low turnover, so an awful lot of people are, as we call them, lifers. They are on ongoing staff contracts. Journalism is probably the most stable part of the BBC. People come and they stay a long time.

Q362 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: And within the wider -----

Ms Boaden: BBC?

16 Q363 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: No, the area which is not news but is current affairs, people like researchers.

Ms Boaden: They will be much shorter.

Q364 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: So if you are a researcher on, let us not say Blue

Peter; let us say Panorama, what is your average age likely to be?

Ms Boaden: I do not know the average age but, from looking around, you are probably likely to be in your early thirties.

Q365 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: And what is the average length of contract that you are likely to be on?

Ms Boaden: I can find that out for you but it will depend on what kind of programme you are working on and what kind of track record you have. Some researchers will be staff researchers, ie, they are absolutely permanent, and some will come in and do specialist work.

I can certainly find out the average length of contract.

Q366 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: I think it would be quite helpful to know, particularly in relation to training issues and other things.

Ms Boaden: Absolutely. I think you are getting to a very interesting issue, which is where journalism meets, as it were, the fluidity of the rest of the television industry.

Q367 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Yes, which you have referred to.

Ms Boaden: It is something we are acutely aware of because for those difficult programmes that we often do – Panorama, This World – it is incredibly important that anyone who works in them understands what is and is not acceptable. We are acutely aware of that.

17 Q368 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: I will now ask you the less controversial question.

Can you tell us as briefly as you can what the structure of BBC News output is, what it provides and on how many different platforms does it do it?

Ms Boaden: It is quite a long answer, actually.

Q369 Chairman: If you want to we can have some of this in writing.

Ms Boaden: I will do a quick précis and I do have a document that we give to people who do our impartiality reviews in the Trust which you might find interesting.

Q370 Chairman: That would be much better.

Ms Boaden: The key thing is that you have the Trust at the top and then the executive and then you have the journalism board which involves nations and regions, global, which my colleagues here are part of, news which I run, and sport, and they all work to Mark Byford who is the head of journalism. I have a team – a head of radio, a head of television, a head of interactive, a head of Millbank, a head of news-gathering and then HR and those people.

They are responsible for great chunks of output but the thing you have to remember about the

BBC is that the scale is enormous. For every hour of the day there are four and a half hours of news and current affairs. The only way you can possibly run something like that is by what the army calls mission command. You set the strategy, you set the values, you set and regulate quality control and you appoint the right people who you think understand those values inside out, and then you have to let them get on with it with their objectives, which obviously connect to our statement of programme policies and those kinds of things. You have a series of meetings, which is the document we can give you, which are about quality control, so I have an 8.50 meeting with my team every morning where we go through the key programmes – what worked, what did not, is that a bit biased, do we need to make sure we cover that angle, and then those people continue those kinds of meetings with their teams and

18 then the editors continue with their teams. In the programme teams they will have two meetings a day which are both looking forward and reviewing. That does not mean to say that things do not go wrong, it does not mean to say things do not slip through the net, but when you are looking at that kind of scale – and again I can send you the information specifically but we have output on BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, Radio 1,

Radio 1 Extra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, we have the online site, we have

BBC Parliament, we have News 24, we have the World Service and we have BBC World – we have an extraordinary mix and range. In a sense it is a bit like the army in the sense that you have to be able to rely on the editors to hold the values for you in that kind of structure.

Q371 Bishop of Manchester: In the section on the media in The Guardian on 5 July there was an interesting article which was exploring some of the issues that the Ofcom report had raised about “firm evidence of disengagement from mainstream news sources, in particular by

16-24 year olds, who say they follow news only when something important is happening”, and that that has risen from 33 per cent to 50 per cent in five years, which is really quite a serious change. You were referring earlier to some of the data that you keep about news stories and I wondered whether you were able to give any indication about what you perceive to be important, particularly by that age group but not only by that age group, and whether you could see a shift from interest in international and traditional news stories towards something of the more celebrity, softer type.

Ms Boaden: One of our big challenges is how we keep that audience engaged. We have to be slightly realistic about this. Young people have never been deeply engaged in news but the

Ofcom finding was interesting because they are using television news in particular much less.

We have got quite a scary graph which I can again give you which says that in terms of television news even big stories like the Suffolk murders, which you remember, that awful story last year which did grip the country for a period, that age group did not go to television

19 news, not us or anybody, for information about that. They often get their information in different ways. They get it online and they get it from radio. Newsbeat on Radio 1 is critical for us in engaging that audience. Newsbeat, I think, is a very good model for understanding how as a public service broadcaster you can try and have the best of both world because undoubtedly they do far more stories on celebrities and brands than anywhere else in BBC

News but they also do the European Union. They do the elections in Turkey, they certainly do the big stories. They are a classic Reithian concept. They do a lot on Iraq and

Afghanistan, because, of course, a lot of their listeners are the young men who go and fight there or their friends and family, so that is a very important part of the BBC’s portfolio and we learn from them how to engage audiences in that kind of age group. It is genuinely very interesting. The pattern has always been that young people were not terribly engaged with news and then if they got a mortgage and families they suddenly became much more interested because that is the moment when you grow up and you have to engage with how the outer world has an impact on the little protected world which teenagers tend to live in. It will be fascinating as we go forward to see, in an age of YouTube and Facebook and all those very introverted (one could argue) connections that young people have if they are going to connect with the wider world. In terms of international stories they do not talk about being gripped by them but then they go off and do gap years and come back and find it much more interesting. Very often you have to get into those stories in a slightly different way. As I said, the Newsbeat audience is quite interested in Afghanistan and Iraq for the very specific reason of their constituency. We have a generation of young people who are more interested in celebrity, they are more interested in branding, they are more interested in business very often and personal finance, and they are fascinated by relationships. We are clearly not going to move our news to absorb all of those things because all of us would be driven completely mad by it, would we not, and we are called consumers, but we have to acknowledge that in some

20 of the things we are doing, and, of course, we are moving to a broadband world where eventually you will be able to personalise your news so you can get the news that you want.

That has in many ways great strengths. If you are passionate about Africa you will be able to find out a lot more about Africa than you can at the moment just by watching or listening because it will all be there on the web, but if you are not at all interested in Africa you will be able to avoid those stories altogether and for the public body that is a real challenge for all of us.

Q372 Bishop of Manchester: Do you see any discernible shift in the kinds of things which define BBC News in the various areas that we have talked about, and indeed the way in which news is covered by other companies? Would you accede, for example, to the BBC at any stage going nearer to the way in which Fox News will produce a much more opinionated kind of news coverage?

Ms Boaden: Nigel might want to talk about impartiality but no, I do not see that at all. First of all, in a regulatory framework we are not allowed to be anything other than impartial, and that for me and for the BBC is absolutely core. Free, fair, independent information for a liberal democracy is one of the reasons we are here.

Mr Chapman: The evidence I have got on the international news is that they are really quite hungry to understand the connectivity, if you like, between various forces in the world. There is a great opportunity now for international news broadcasting in the World Service and BBC

World too to connect up around issues like terrorism, climate change and so on. There is a big appetite for that. I think it is one of the reasons why the World Service has been successful over the last few years, because it has focused an awful lot of attention and energy in its news agenda on doing it now. In terms of that, for instance, when Paris Hilton is released from jail in California it has got to be legitimate that that is part of the mix but it is not the lead story by any stretch of the imagination. I think that gives you an example of the

21 range of what you need to cover because if you slam the door on curiosity and only go for significance it becomes a very lopsided world. You definitely need significance. Journalism is meant to be the first draft of history. You do need significance, but you also occasionally need to satisfy the curiosity of the wide range of interests of the listener and the user, and those are judgments that good and experienced people make in the overall mix of what are many hours of output.

Ms Boaden: I always say to my people, “You cannot sack the audience”. You might like to on occasion but they have a huge number of choices and if we are going to keep them with the BBC for all the good things that we think are very important we have to respect their curiosity for the things that some audiences do not find very palatable at all.

Q373 Chairman: Except that I do notice from the report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel Jeff

Randall, who was a very successful business editor of the BBC, doing something that the

BBC do not do very much of, saying of the BBC, “It is a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society”, and on impartiality he said, “That’s what it’s like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC”.

Ms Boaden: Bless him! That is just a view. I could argue point for point with Jeff on that.

He feels very strongly about it and he also enjoyed working with us enormously and went away to a great job that he wanted to do but he keeps in touch and he still has a programme on

Radio 5 Live every Sunday.

Ms Kevill: I wanted to pick up on that because BBC World has a slightly different audience in that it is quite cosmopolitan and aimed in cities but what is quite interesting about the research we have done on the audience is that it is quite young; it is between 30 and 40. What is emerging is that globally there is quite a young generation which is much more connected through the internet, through the work that they do, through the ability to travel in a way that previous generations have not done, and we are finding that they are our core viewers.

22 Domestic viewers tend to be a lot older than that so for us it is a comparatively young audience which is, as Nigel has said, interested in the connectivity of the world and how events in the world relate to and affect them. We have done some research recently which puts them at about a quarter of a billion, this particular group around the world, and in a sense that is what BBC World is aiming to do. The other interesting thing is that that group is very interested in business and on BBC World we do far more business, including company business, which is something which often is not covered as much on domestic television, so I think that again when you get a different audience, as Helen was saying, with Newsbeat, you understand what that audience wants and our audience does want more business coverage so we do a lot more and we have teams based in New York, India, Singapore. We have a global news-gathering team connected with business.

Q374 Bishop of Manchester: Can I ask one final question following that up because you have a massive amount going on in the background? I go into Oxford Road occasionally to pick up Ariel, and earlier in the year I see Helen Boaden was quoted as saying that she is aware that some of the news staff feel “knackered and frustrated because of their workload”, and then a journalist from The Guardian was quoted as saying “News 24 has always been a high pressure place but it has now become relentless”, and Bob Sheenan on Radio 5 Live saying it was “hard making rolling news with fewer staff”.

Ms Boaden: It is; it is very tough. We went through a value-for-money process pre-charter, and we will be doing more value for money over the next five years because, as you will be aware, our licence fee is not just not pegged to inflation; it is going down, so we are currently working on plans to rationalise further, to streamline things so that ideally what we want to do is be able to deliver the same quality with fewer people but without quite as much relentlessness, which means that some of the duplication that I still think we have too much of in BBC News will be eliminated, without, I hope, losing the originality and bespoke qualities

23 that all of us like in the output. This is stuff that most of these organisations have to go through once in a while. CNN, for example, have had to do it. We talk to ITN and they have had an incredibly tough time. Even though it is a big challenge I do not think it is right for the

BBC to moan about their financial situation when we do get guaranteed income. I have worked in the commercial sector and, believe me, it is different.

Q375 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Presumably it is the core values that you absolutely have to hang on to through thick and thin because otherwise you will have to let some values go perhaps.

Ms Boaden: I so totally agree with you. Impartiality, fairness, accuracy, honesty, transparency, trust – frankly, if we let those go, which is why we are taking so seriously what has happened recently, there is no point to us.

Q376 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So the economies will have to come in other areas?

Ms Boaden: The economies do not necessarily undermine your values. Your values are something different from the economies but clearly you have to make sure that you do not get yourself into a situation where you are so tight that you are undermining the ability to act on those values. We do not know in the six cases that we were talking about quite what the dynamics were of what was going on, and culture is not just about finance; it is also about group expectations. The interesting thing about Nigel’s case is the desperation to appear to be interactive. This is a new world for us. We are learning about interactivity and one of the things we might discover is that the audience out there likes it and quite understands that it does not always work. How many of us have had broadband go down or the phone line go whizzy or on the mobile it suddenly cuts out?

24 Q377 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: It could be that the question I am meant to be asking you is not at all unconnected with this, which is about media ownership’s influence on news values, and it is whether or not you think that the BBC has more or less editorial freedom as a result of being funded by the licence fee and not having to answer to shareholders.

Ms Boaden: It is not so much editorial freedom because I think it would be extremely unfair, particularly on our colleagues at ITN and Sky, to give the impression that they are less editorially vigorous than we are, but I do think we can make different decisions about where we invest our money which do help with editorial processes. For example, we are the only

British broadcaster to have a permanent base in Iraq and Kabul and Gaza. Even though Alan is not there we still have Palestinians there. Those are extremely costly in terms of just security, enormously expensive, but we think those stories are so important that that is an investment we can afford to make, and that gives us an editorial freedom. It is not about bias or pressure. It is about what we can do in terms of reporting the world. We have 40 bureaux.

Seven of those are hub bureaux, which are big bureaux, but we have bureaux around the world which provide, particularly for the World Service, regular information from often quite obscure places about stories that are important to be reported both online and on radio because we have the licence fee and that allows us that freedom.

Mr Chapman: Can I make one observation about the quote from Ariel? In the end it comes down to management making a judgment about the extent of the activities they want to do and what they can afford, and I do not think it is a bad thing sometimes to say, “We are doing too much. We want to stop something”. I know we often get criticised for that. I as the Director of the World Service closed ten language services, not an easy thing to do, but that was the right thing to do and is the right thing to do. What we cannot let happen is that the values get stretched and break because the staff get to the point where they just cannot have enough time to do things properly and they feel under pressure to start cutting corners to get things to

25 happen. That is an awful vicious circle that we can never allow to undermine the core values of the BBC. I suppose I ask for some understanding sometimes from people that we sometimes have to make difficult choices and say, “We are not going to do that any more because we want to focus our energy more intensely in this area at the expense of this and please will you come with us on that journey?”. We say it to staff, we say it to the public, we say it to our stakeholders and that is the kind of intelligent conversation to have and the right conversation to have rather than just pressing blindly on thinking that with ten or 20 per cent less resources, however efficient and clever you are, you can always carry on doing 100 per cent of what you did before.

Q378 Chairman: You have been very helpful in offering to set out the number of overseas bureaux you have at some stage.

Ms Boaden: Yes, we have got all of that.

Chairman: That would be very interesting to us.

Q379 Lord King of Bridgwater: And how much common working there is between all of you in sharing resources?

Ms Boaden: Yes, we can do that.

Q380 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Are there any staffers, by the way, in those bureaux?

Ms Boaden: Yes, there is a mixture. There will be some local hires and then there will be a lot of staff people. Think about Alastair Leithead in Kabul. He is on the staff.

Q381 Lord Maxton: BBC World, of course, is the one area that is not funded by the licence fee; it is funded commercially through advertising. Does this make any difference to the way in which you look at news? Does it change your perspectives at all?

26 Ms Kevill: No, it does not, in the sense that I am essentially a publisher of Helen’s output, so to that extent the core values that run through the news on BBC World are absolutely the core values that Helen and her management team instil in all journalists that her area runs. My role is in a sense a strategic one. It is certainly to ensure that there is a separation between the commercial and the editorial and to ensure that those two things remain separate and that there is no influence from the commercial on the editorial, but my role is also to ensure that we continue to make money as a company and therefore I will make strategic decisions about what we might want to develop in our journalism. For example, we have more business on

BBC World which is also something where we know that in commercial terms we are likely to get more money around it than we would if we were investing in something else. We do take some strategic decisions like that but broadly speaking the content is completely separate from any commercial pressures and comes from Helen’s area and it is protected as Helen was describing.

Q382 Lord Maxton: I have been asking this question for a long time. I am never quite sure what audience BBC World is aiming at. Sky News is quite clear. It sells abroad to where they think British audiences are going to be on holiday or on business. You do not do that, do you?

Ms Kevill: No. Our aim is not an expat audience. We have 75 million who watch worldwide. We are much more in line with the World Service. We are about reaching out to people all around the world from whatever background or nationality who turn to us for news which is trustworthy, impartial, accurate, fair, all those core values that we all stand for here.

That is what we aim to give our audience. It is not aimed at expats. We cover British news pretty well because we obviously feed off the domestic output, so we have done quite a lot on the floods recently. We do cover it where we feel it is a story of significance but it is not our prime aim to give English news to English people abroad.

27 Q383 Lord Maxton: Therefore, if I may, I will switch to Helen Boaden and ask whether or not you have considered and whether it is possible to sell BBC News 24 to, if you like, the expat audience or would you not be allowed to do that?

Ms Boaden: I do not think we are allowed to do that at the moment because it would be seen as abusing our competitive position. It has genuinely never come up since I have been in this job but I imagine it was considered, almost certainly by Greg Dyke who was very entrepreneurial, and may well have been turned down. We have to be very careful even with

BBC World that the separation between them and us is very clear.

Q384 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I think you have answered quite a lot of my question but perhaps you could encapsulate it very quickly. What say does the BBC executive board have over the content and editorial direction of BBC News content?

Ms Boaden: As I have said, the Trust is there and the executive board are below it and the journalism board is below that, so if there are big issues of policy they will go to the executive board, but in terms of day-to-day editorial and editorial direction that is left to the journalism board and then to my board and teams. If, for example, we were planning to invest a lot of money in more interactivity, those plans would be approved by the journalism board, the executive and then, of course, finally by the Trust. You lay out the strategy and they have a say in that sense.

Q385 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: Just thinking of some of the wider criticism that has been made of the BBC because of the fact that they have a guaranteed income and so on, they spend quite a lot of their time on air advertising their own programmes, and I am thinking of

Panorama, et cetera. How would you respond to that?

Ms Boaden: There are two things. Having been a controller of Radio 4, one of the key lessons you learn as a controller is that the audience often gets very frustrated because it does

28 not think it gets enough information about where things are on both radio and television, and it is one of the ironies that if you consume a lot of, say, Radio 4 or BBC One, you get jolly frustrated with seeing those trails, but if, like the majority of people, you dip in and out you still feel you were not told that this programme you wanted to watch or listen to is on. On

Panorama you may remember that there was a great debate three years ago about where

Panorama should sit in terms of the schedule, and it was at that point kept at 10.15 pm and it was decided that we would do a lot of trailing for it to remind people that it was there. The slot was then switched to Monday evenings, mid evening, with a new controller who felt it was an important programme and it was reduced to half an hour but trying to get a broader spectrum of people interested in the Panorama subjects, and to remind people of this new slot there was again a lot of trailing. My own view, and this is a personal view, is that we have come to a point where people do know it is there and we can reduce some of that trailing. I think there is a point where it feels overheated.

Q386 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: But bearing in mind, of course, that the commercial sector would be saying exactly the same thing about their range of programmes, do you think there is any justification in the criticisms they are making that they have to use their valuable time, as it were?

Ms Boaden: It is what you are trying to do. What we are trying to do is educate the audience about where programmes might be that they want to watch. We are not doing it to make money. We are doing it as an information service.

Q387 Baroness Howe of Idlicote: But so are they presumably.

Ms Boaden: Well, no. Clearly it is an information service but they have to deliver for their shareholders, so those slots are absolutely critical. What you trail somewhere can make a

29 difference to the audience numbers in television terms and that can make a difference to advertisers. There is nothing wrong with that. It is just a different place to start from.

Q388 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Can I just say on the matter of trails that there were four trails before News at Ten, I think it was last Thursday, and I nearly threw a brick through the screen because I want to get other news, but that is just me being old-fashioned.

Ms Boaden: I will take it back to the head of marketing.

Q389 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Can we have a look at journalists’ independence? The trust, to which you attach great importance and quite rightly you have to earn, is principally built upon the independence and integrity of the journalists you employ. That is absolutely core to that, I would argue. Do you see any value in finding a way of guaranteeing that independence to BBC journalists in terms of the contract you use for them and for editors, say?

Ms Boaden: When BBC people sign a contract with us they sign up to support our values. I think it would be very difficult and could end up feeling rather Stalinist if we did more than that.

Q390 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Could you give us that in writing, just give us a quote from the contract document? That would help enormously.

Ms Boaden: We can do that, yes. Recently we imposed a series of what many regard as rather draconian limits on what people can do for newspapers, just on journalists, because we felt it was so important that their independence and impartiality were maintained across the piste. Any news and current affairs journalist or person as presenter who is associated primarily with the BBC is very limited in what they can write about and absolutely has to steer away from expressing a personal view on an issue of controversy.

30 Q391 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Andrew Marr does a column.

Ms Boaden: Andrew Marr does a diary column for The Telegraph, and in fact that is outside our guidelines and the reason that has gone on is that he was in a contract but that will come to an end at some point and that gets vetted by our people, supervised, and we have made it very clear that that must never stray into areas of controversy.

Q392 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: I have a high regard for Andrew Marr.

Ms Boaden: It is a terrific column.

Q393 Chairman: Even after you have vetted it?

Ms Boaden: When I say “vetted” I have slightly given you the wrong impression. I do not see it but we have somebody who does. Andy is so good and so experienced. He entirely understands the parameters of this.

Q394 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: So as far as you are concerned, and I take your point about not wanting to be accused of being Stalinist, do you think that the words you have in your standard contracts -----

Ms Boaden: I cannot remember what they are. I know we do expect people to live by our standards and people do take impartiality very seriously. It is one of those things where you have to keep banging on about it because people can slip unconsciously into a particular approach to the subject and that is part of my job and the job of my team. That is one of the reasons we have my meeting every morning, to say, “Was that fair? Was that unbiased or biased? Did we, without meaning to, slip into a certain sort of approach?”.

Mr Chapman: The phrase I often use is “diversity of view”. Is the diversity of view that is relevant to this story being properly reflected at the time? It may not all be reflected in the same hour because that would be impossible, but is it being reflected at the time across the

31 output? The World Service has similar editorial meetings, the nine o’clock meetings. At the heart of Bush House is the editorial machine and these are the things that are batted around for about 30 minutes every morning on angles and participants and why have we not heard from X and do we get on with Z and what is the core thrust of this story? It is quite an intellectually rigorous exercise going on here which is a great tribute to the people who work there.

Ms Kevill: I have come here from a global news breakfast meeting with senior leaders where we were discussing the whole impartiality report, what are the implications of that, how we take that back to our teams and discuss it with them. It is an ongoing process in daily morning meetings and also in response to reports like that to get our teams thinking about it.

The main thing is that they are thinking about it and recognising that impartiality is not a state of being; you have to work at it. It is a process.

Q395 Lord Maxton: You talk about impartiality and I know he has now left the employment or even the freelance employment of BBC Scotland, but Ian Macwhirter was used by you as both a presenter of programmes and an interviewer of political programmes and yet wrote anything up to four articles a week of a highly controversial political nature in newspapers in Scotland. How was that impartial?

Ms Boaden: I do not think it was and I would not allow that. It did not happen on my watch and I have no idea how it happened but I can tell you it would not happen on my watch.

Q396 Chairman: I think we are jogging back again, are we not, on this one?

Ms Boaden: Seriously, I would not allow that.

Q397 Lord Inglewood: You said rather nicely in response to an earlier question, “I tell my people, ‘You cannot sack the audience’”. Of course, the audience can sack you.

32 Ms Boaden: It certainly can.

Q398 Lord Inglewood: I would like to try and look at how over time your audiences may have changed but, of course, that is complicated by the fact that you have different channels and different outlets. First of all, given the way in which there has been in a sense a reduction in the audience the BBC gets, how does that break down in terms of the people who get news from you?

Ms Boaden: We need to be careful because what is happening here is a mixed picture.

Audiences to television news are in decline, as they are to all television, but audiences to television news are in slightly less decline than in other genres like drama and entertainment, so we are quite pleased by that. It is very interesting for me, coming back to news, having been at Radio 4 for some time, that on BBC One when I left the news was seen as, “You have got to have it”. It is obviously very important but it does not bring audience into it. Actually, now the news drives the schedule on occasions, particularly when you have a big story like the floods. In radio the reach is stable, which is to say we are not losing large numbers. I think that is because of the very brilliant decision made by people a long time ago to have the portfolio of radio stations we have and, of course, radio is unbelievably convenient. You can have it in the garden when you are gardening. You can listen in the bath. It is the perfect mobile medium and I think that has helped it. The audiences to online are doubling every year but the growth in online is not making up for the drop in television yet. Those are the three primary ways people get their news. Within that there are fantastic differences between how much audiences consume, so what you might call older, up-market audiences are pretty stable. The young, as the Bishop has pointed out, are not engaging with either our television news or others’ television news. We have a whole strategy about interactivity through providing news on the web, providing news on mobile phones that we hope will both appeal to all of us but especially to the young because we have to start where they are, and they are

33 young people for whom their mobile phone is a lifeline. I had my half sister stay with me recently. She is in her twenties. Her phone bill was very high and I suggested that perhaps she would like to give it up and you would have thought I was destroying her human rights.

This is absolutely fundamental and therefore the mobile phone is incredibly important.

Equally, we have got devices now such as the iPod to which you can download radio programmes and listen to speech or music, and vodcasting where you can download little television programmes or the whole thing. The world is in flux and the job of BBC News is to make sure that as the flux goes on we have a stake so that any audience that wants to get to us can find our news in an easy and accessible way.

Q399 Lord Inglewood: What you have said is quite interesting in that over a period it seems that news has gone from being in a number of parts of your empire, if I can put it that way, a thing that you have to do, to something that draws the audiences in.

Ms Boaden: In television terms it is very cheering, I find.

Q400 Lord Inglewood: What follows from that is that you must find that you get tensions between producing the news in a sexy way to draw the audience in as opposed to making sure you get your other values.

Ms Boaden: No. You see, I do not think audiences want us to be sexy. They want us to be straightforward, reliable, comprehensible and connect with them. Often connecting with them is the tricky bit. For example, there was an impartiality report done on our business coverage recently that was basically very supportive and said we were not biased, which was a great relief, but said that sometimes we over-focused on consumer news, and I think they were right. When our people have over-focused on it is has been because it is one way we know we can get audiences in to then listen to or watch something that is more complicated. You have to start where audiences are and audiences are in very different places. The Ten O’Clock

34 News, like the Today programme, has a broad audience but an audience that is absolutely going to sit there and trust us to tell them the ten most important stories of the day in the order that we think is important and in the depth and range that we think is important. They trust us to do that. Your under-24s do not particularly trust us to do that or do not want us to do that.

It is not where they start. They start in a world where they have got a myriad things coming at them and news is one tiny bit of it, so we slip it to them on Radio 1 in the bulletins. That is why I think it is very Reithian. Newsbeat is 15 minutes but they do stay with it. Equally, if you go online and you look on the Radio 1 site or go on to the news site, you can see this whole world and they can find the stories that they are interested in. The real tension, however, is around resource because all the content that we do we can push out online, vodcasting and podcasting, but it is how much money you need to put into the technical infrastructure to make that possible as you go forward. Again, I am sure it needs to be done in other cases. Do you invest money in making all your vicars have broadband? This technical stuff is a huge dilemma. The BBC has always had to deal with it and that is one of the reasons why we do not just need to meet the Government’s efficiency targets. We need a bit more extra money to make sure we have got the infrastructure right.

Q401 Lord Inglewood: Clearly, if you are the under-25s that we have been talking about who have different approaches, you suggest -----

Ms Boaden: By and large, yes.

Q402 Lord Inglewood: ----- and I do not disagree from my experience of them, do you think that this is a function of the possibilities that are there or do you think it is something that has changed, that they are different from what we know about us?

Ms Boaden: Do you know, we do not know. I mentioned it earlier. We genuinely do not know, when those young people settle down, get a mortgage, get a steady job, worry about the

35 pension, whether the news as we know it will engage them in the way it has previous generations or whether they will not see it as relevant.

Ms Kevill: However, there are indications to suggest there is a shift going on. We see people who have been brought up on computer games are still doing it and they are not just doing it in their teens; they are carrying on doing it into their twenties.

Ms Boaden: They are men, are they not?

Ms Kevill: They are men, but there is a sense that there is a shift in texting and things like that, for instance, -----

Q403 Lord Maxton: How sexist of you!

Ms Kevill: ----- that is pretty embedded in female culture.

Ms Boaden: Girls like texting because it is communication.

Lord Inglewood: Don’t I know it!

Q404 Lord Maxton: I am tempted to say that all the top chief executives in America now are people who were brought up on gaming, not necessarily at university, because it gives multi skills. One of the things that is going to happen, of course, and is already beginning to happen, is what one might call connectivity between the computer in one room and your television so that instead of watching BBC 24 you will be able to pull up the BBC website onto your television screen and then select that piece of news you want to watch.

Ms Boaden: Yes, that is right. That is what I was talking about – personalisation.

Q405 Lord Maxton: You think that is happening?

Ms Boaden: Oh, definitely, it is already happening on the web but when connectivity really happens, and the manufacturers are still struggling to make this work but it will happen, the point is the degree to which you will get, as it were, a national conversation about issues of

36 importance and people can select out what they do not want. It is a huge issue for the public policy makers: how do you get a national conversation in a world where at least a great chunk of your consumers opt out because they are not interested in that so they get different sorts of news?

Q406 Lord Maxton: This raises what, if you like, is a very philosophical question, which is, is it your job to ensure people watch news or is it your job to provide news that people can watch?

Ms Boaden: I do not think you can make people do anything. I do not think the public is biddable; I do not think it has ever been biddable. You have to provide something that people think they need and want. This is this whole point about both being connected to audiences and understanding them deeply but as the BBC not just saying, “That is what they want so that is all we are going to give them”, because that is just a market-led organisation. The licence fee obliges us, and I believe this passionately, to go the extra mile, to feed in information that will touch their curiosity about a wider world than they thought they were interested in. We do that not just in news and current affairs but in a huge amount of what we do at the BBC. That is what we do all the time. It goes back to Lord Reith.

Mr Chapman: “Raising the sights” is a phrase we use. I think “raising the sights” is quite a good phrase for this.

Q407 Chairman: We are coming to very much the last part of this inquiry. I would just like to give you a rest for the moment and ask some questions of Nigel Chapman on the World

Service. We learned from the last inquiry that you are going to launch a television Arab language service later this year.

Mr Chapman: Yes, all being well.

37 Q408 Chairman: “Later this year” and “all being well”?

Mr Chapman: In the sense that there are serious technical challenges and staff challenges but yes, the ambition is to launch it.

Q409 Chairman: When?

Mr Chapman: I am not going to give you a date because I do not want to get into the situation that other organisations have done where they change the date four times in the space of about three months. I will just say by the end of the year.

Q410 Chairman: You were giving us a date before.

Mr Chapman: No, never.

Q411 Chairman: Who will you be competing with?

Mr Chapman: Obviously, in the Arab world you have a whole series of satellite television news broadcasters who have moved into that domain in the last four or five years – Al-

Jazeera, Al Arabiya, to name but two, but what will be different about what we are trying to do is that those channels are centred in the Middle East and their agenda is quite narrow when we look at them. They are pretty obsessed about every development in the Middle East at a given moment, and I do think the BBC has had a wider role than that. I think these are very important issues and we would not want to avoid them but I do think, to put it in a phrase, we want to bring the world to the Middle East.

Q412 Chairman: They do have one advantage, do they not, in that these two channels we have mentioned are going to run 24-hour news services?

Mr Chapman: They do at the moment, yes.

Q413 Chairman: And you are going to offer a 12-hour news service?

38 Mr Chapman: That is all we can afford at the moment, yes.

Q414 Chairman: What happens if there is a crisis in the Middle East, the bombing of

Lebanon, something like that? It might not happen in the 12 hours that you are on broadcast.

What happens then?

Mr Chapman: I agree it is a weakness and it depends on the level of notice you get about it.

Let us take the case of a more set piece occasion. Then you could go on the air a bit earlier to cover it, but, obviously, something totally unexpected, out of the blue, is going to be a problem, which is why I have said to the Government repeatedly on numerous occasions that the number one priority in this spending round after confirming the funding for Farsi television which the then Chancellor announced last October, now the Prime Minister, is to give us the funding of £6 million we need to make the Arabic television service a 24/7 service. There is, to be honest, a consensus, and everybody I have talked to says this is necessary. The case intellectually is made. We have to win the case in terms of the Treasury discussions and the spending discussions.

Q415 Chairman: To be blunt, you are not going to win, are you? Things like Al-Jazeera have not just appeared overnight. They have been there for several years. They are well established and you come along, and the BBC has got a history here which has not been altogether helpful, and you offer a 12-hour service, you are not going to win the audience, are you?

Mr Chapman: You have to be careful though because actually the biggest audience for

Arabic television will not be in the morning. It will be in the afternoon or the evening and this is the time when it will be broadcast, so we will be broadcasting at prime time along with everybody else. Having said that, I accept your point, Chairman, that it needs to be a 24-hour

39 service. I do not dispute that for a minute. I have lobbied extremely hard, as others have. I hope and pray that it will work.

Q416 Chairman: You are seriously telling us that the only thing that stands in the way of a

24-hour service is £6 million a year?

Mr Chapman: Yes, I am seriously telling you that.

Q417 Chairman: And this is going to be decided in the current -----

Mr Chapman: In the current spending round which is where discussions are going on at the moment. What we have said, let me be quite clear, to both the Foreign Office and the

Treasury, other than confirming the funding for Farsi, which you have got to do through the spending review process through 2008/09 onwards, is that the number one priority is to give the World Service the £6 million for Arabic television. If there is a decent settlement that will be part of it. If there is a very poor settlement where it is effectively a cash flat settlement then you could end up in a situation where you had no extra money at all for anything. I do not think that is where we are at the moment. I think the conversations are going well. This is not falling on deaf ears, this conversation. This is falling on ears which are alert to it, but until you see it in writing and you see the cheque arriving in the post you can never guarantee anything.

Q418 Chairman: I think many of us would find it extraordinary that we are even having this discussion where it self-evidently leads to one conclusion.

Mr Chapman: Chairman, that is your view and I share it but you do not have to convince me of this argument.

Q419 Chairman: But you are the only one here.

Mr Chapman: You have to convince the Treasury and the funders.

40 Q420 Chairman: I hope you will take it back at any rate that it is our view, and it certainly was the view of the old BBC Charter Committee.

Mr Chapman: And your previous Committee’s deliberations made a specific recommendation. I remember it very well.

Q421 Lord King of Bridgwater: I thought they had already announced they were going to give you the money for it, but I cannot keep up with announcement and re-announcements.

You know better than I.

Mr Chapman: No, Lord King, they have not announced it.

Q422 Chairman: Can I ask you the question that I asked Helen Boaden – who do you answer to?

Mr Chapman: I answer to Richard Sambrook, who is Head of Global News who in turn answers to Mark Byford, so we are part of the journalism group.

Q423 Lord King of Bridgwater: You answer through him to Mark Byford?

Mr Chapman: Yes.

Q424 Lord King of Bridgwater: What about these difficult issues? You are in a very sensitive position and you are going to be in an even more sensitive position if you get an

Arabic service going with our forces out in harm’s way. You referred obliquely to the stakeholders. What proportion of your funds come from the Foreign Office grant?

Mr Chapman: Ninety-eight per cent, I think, comes from it.

Q425 Lord King of Bridgwater: I just want to get something factual on the record.

Ms Clarke: The amount of money we get from other sources is absolutely tiny in the context of a £250 million budget.

41 Q426 Lord King of Bridgwater: On these issues you have a steering committee. How does it work?

Mr Chapman: The World Service management board is responsible for both the managerial and the editorial activities of the World Service.

Q427 Lord King of Bridgwater: On which the Foreign Office is represented?

Mr Chapman: No. This is entirely inside the BBC. My relations with the Foreign Office are conducted through quarterly liaison meetings with the civil servants and also through an annual ministerial meeting with the minister responsible for the World Service, who is now

Jim Murphy, the new minister, and we see them once a year. Obviously, I am in regular contact with them on a needs basis, if you like.

Q428 Lord King of Bridgwater: Because the issue the previous Committee discussed was that it is very important for your reputation in the world that you are seen to be a totally independent service with its own integrity.

Mr Chapman: Indeed, absolutely.

Q429 Lord King of Bridgwater: And we are now in a much more dangerous world in which there are obviously things that can be said on your programmes. We have seen what happened in a different context with cartoons in a Danish newspaper and the sorts of repercussions those produced. Are you satisfied that you are sufficiently in touch with the

Foreign Office, ie, ambassadors and other people, in terms of being sensitive to the situations that now exist in different territories that you cover?

Mr Chapman: I am satisfied, and I am also satisfied on the other side of the equation, if you like, that I am balancing out editorial independence with those sorts of considerations you have talked about. Nobody is going to want to trust someone who has deliberately put our

42 troops or anybody else into harm’s way and that would be a silly thing to do. On the other hand I have to respect editorial independence. To be fair to the Foreign office, they also respect it. There has never been a conversation while I have been Director of the service about editorial content on the World Service. What there are conversations about, which are quite legitimate, are where do we want to broadcast to and how do we want to broadcast, ie, which medium do we want to use – television, radio, new media and so on? The actual what we broadcast, the editorial content, is not a subject for discussion.

Q430 Lord King of Bridgwater: The closures of all those eastern European language channels was by agreement with the Foreign Office?

Mr Chapman: Absolutely, because under the broadcasting agreement the minister has to give the green light to that. That is one of the few things that formally the minister has to sign off.

Q431 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: I was going to ask you a question about the impact of the impartiality review that was recently published. I think you have covered quite a lot incidentally through the course of this morning’s work, but is there anything else that you would like to say about how that would impact on the way that news is gathered and disseminated, and what is your view of it?

Ms Boaden: I was on the committee that drew that up and the key thing for me about impartiality is not just fairness and balance. It is also about getting a breadth of voice. It is getting beyond this idea that we are all agreed somehow that these are the parameters of the argument. In the past we have had occasionally been guilty of, say, on issues of Europe of assuming that those who wanted to withdraw from the European Union altogether we did not bother to interview. This is a long while ago. There are examples in the report that I gave them. I do not think that would happen now. I think both the shifts in politics in the real

43 world and the emphasis that I and my team put on impartiality as a breadth of view has changed that, and I think the impartiality report is incredibly useful. All my teams are discussing it with their editors and heads of department to keep this conversation going because, as Sian said, there is never a perfect point with impartiality. Impartiality is a process and it is a process about being open-minded and catching yourself out at your own unconscious prejudices, so it is an ongoing piece of work.

Q432 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Can I ask your colleagues who have specific responsibility – and of course, the BBC has worldwide responsibilities – for disseminating news to non-UK audiences whether it has any different kinds of inflexion, the question of impartiality, where you are dealing with audiences about whom perhaps you know different things or not as much as you know about your home-grown audience?

Mr Chapman: I think the principles are the same. I think the execution of the programming has to be sensitive to audience need. The range of views and the relevance of certain topics and the accentuation of those things obviously does vary depending on the audience need. It is not going to be the same in every part of the world. A listener in Afghanistan is not going to want the same things from the BBC as, say somebody in the Middle East although there will still be a core level of commonality, if you like, in terms of subject matter. What really matters is the treatment, if you like, of the values and principles behind the treatment of the story, that they are the same. There is not a different set of values for covering, say,

Afghanistan for Afghan listeners or viewers as there would be for covering Afghanistan for people who live in America.

Q433 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Not a different set of values but there might be a different perception of what constitutes impartiality within the way in which certain kinds of news is received in some audiences rather than others. Is that not possible?

44 Mr Chapman: That is possible but that should not undermine the core way we go about it.

At the end of the day you cannot always be sure what listeners get from you and the filter through which they see and use it. What you have got to be sure of is that you offer them the range, the accuracy, the fairness of the views that are relevant to the story. They may discount them, they may only hear certain things, but often you get people saying, “I heard X on your airways and that means the BBC is biased because it gave them a particular opportunity to comment on something”. Actually, that is not logical but that is often how people think, that by giving a platform to somebody you are being biased. We have to educate listeners and viewers that that is not a logical conclusion. It is quite legitimate from those points of view. You may not agree with them as a listener or a viewer, you are quite entitled not to agree with them, but it would be very strange if we did not reflect them because that would not be covering the full gamut of relevant points of view on a particular topic.

Ms Kevill: I always think it is a good thing that there is a lot of commonality. You mentioned the Danish cartoons and that is the sort of issue that would have been discussed, not just in the domestic context but also on how those pieces were playing in an international context because the teams are sitting together in meetings discussing it, so there is also consistency. We often have debates around the use of the word “terrorist”, which is an old chestnut, but obviously it is very important to have a way of using that word which is across all the outputs. There is a lot of commonality in how we approach these things.

Q434 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: This is a much closer to home and very specific question for Helen. Out there there is a view amongst people who listen to the Today programme, which, of course, is highly accessible, that it is not always conducted on an entirely impartial basis. Is this an erroneous perception?

Ms Boaden: I never like to contradict perceptions because it is sort of saying someone has listened wrong, and actually you have to take very seriously what people say. I think the

45 consistency of trust in the Today programme, and the audience figures are very high, suggest that most listeners, even if they find it occasionally very irritating, do think that overall it is a highly impartial programme. Clearly, there are very different ways it engages in debate. The presenters have very different styles and what we know from our audience research is that by and large most audiences like that range and that is what protects our impartiality. On any specifics we always take it incredibly seriously if someone says, “That particular thing was biased”, and sometimes we say, “Yes, we got it wrong”. We are absolutely not claiming here that we are at a state of perfection. Sometimes even the mood of the presenter can give the wrong inflexion to a subject.

Q435 Chairman: You will have seen the comments in the From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel from Janet Daley who said of the BBC that there was not a systematic political conspiracy to impose party-political bias but there was a kind of corporate conformity – “the uncritical acceptance of smug consensual received opinion accompanied by journalistic credulousness”.

Is that fair comment?

Ms Boaden: No. We bring Janet in quite often to talk to our journalists because Janet has got a great mind and she is a lovely woman and she challenges us in a very particular sort of way.

What she is getting at is what can happen in any organisation, and this is what I talked about earlier, that without anyone really intending it to be the case everyone starts thinking the same thing, and that is the job of people like me and my team and my editors, to challenge ourselves and our teams to get beyond that, which is why these ongoing conversations are so editorially critical, the meetings I am talking about and all of that.

Q436 Chairman: The meetings are important as long as there is challenge.

Ms Boaden: But that is the point of them. As Nigel said, they are pretty rigorous. When I came back to News from having done Radio 4 for nearly five years what struck me was the

46 seriousness with which people take this job. The rest of the BBC obviously sees people in

News as overly serious. I think it is a real badge of honour because they do take that responsibility very seriously.

Q437 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Just as you mentioned the Today programme, do you have any figures on the irritation that John Humphrys often causes, where he asks perfectly reasonable questions, not always in a reasonable tone of voice, and then does not wait for the answer before moving on to the next question? Is that not measured?

Ms Boaden: No, we do not measure that.

Q438 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: Is it just me?

Ms Boaden: I can tell that John is an incredibly good journalist who is incredible self-critical and he is the first person when he feels he has overdone that to know about it and to try and correct it, but (a) he is not unique if he ever does that and (b) an awful lot of listeners listen because they think John Humphrys is the bee’s knees. He is unbelievably important to that programme.

Q439 Lord Corbett of Castle Vale: I am not contesting that. I am on about, if you ask a question normally, when I was a lad and working as a journalist, you waited for the answer.

Ms Boaden: Yes. He is not perfect. None of my presenters is perfect.

Q440 Lord King of Bridgwater: Did you know what Gavin Davis said on this issue, because funnily enough Gavin Davis said something to the previous Committee which was almost identical to what Janet Daley is quoted as saying, and this was on reflection, having left the BBC, not, of course, as a Conservative supporter. Obviously, every Conservative and certainly every Conservative MP bases half his constituency support on saying the BBC is impossibly biased when they get stories that they do not like, but the interesting thing was that

47 Gavin Davis said this. He said that he thought the problem was that there is a certain type of person, put it this way, who is attracted towards new media and working in the new media and there is a sort of consensus view formed, a sort of club attitude, to these things and he thought it was a sort of soft left attitude and I think he was a bit self-critical that he had not addressed it during his time as Chairman, and he particularly said it about the BBC. It is interesting because you do not hear it said about Sky, you do not hear it said about other programmes and you do not hear it said about ITN very much.

Ms Boaden: It is something we do take seriously. It is one of the reasons the impartiality report was commissioned. It was a joint Trust/managerial report to interrogate these kinds of concerns and if they are true, and I would argue that it is a much more complex picture than that, to make sure that we are as rigorous as we can be with ourselves. Complacency of any sort is not to be admired or encouraged, from whichever direction. That is the point.

Q441 Chairman: Does it worry you, just to follow Lord King’s point? All parties have their reservations about the BBC, as Campbell’s diaries fully illustrate, but certainly a sure way of getting a round of applause at a Conservative conference is to have a go at the BBC.

Does that in any way worry you that that should be the perception? After all, we are in

Opposition; we are not even in Government.

Ms Boaden: Of course it worries me. Perceptions like that always worry me, although I can assure you that there are many Labour Party events where I suspect the same to happen. That is not to say that we are perfect because both are criticising us. You want people to perceive you as you see yourselves, as trying very hard to be independent and impartial, but perception is a complex thing. Very often when you interrogate perceptions in the BBC it is not what people actually consume from us; it is what they read about us in the newspapers. A number of canards about the BBC, when you interrogate where people’s attitudes come from, and this includes people in political circles, are not about what we have actually broadcast; they are

48 about the way it was reported in the papers very often. It must happen to MPs all the time. It must happen to yourselves, I am sure, and that is a very difficult thing to change. What I would come back to is that consistently over many years trust in the BBC by the people out there has remained extraordinarily high, so although they may be irritated by us and occasionally annoyed, and at the moment I suspect rather disappointed, at heart they do trust us.

Q442 Lord Inglewood: These remarks have got me thinking that frequently when the BBC reports things about this part of Parliament you see a rather dramatic lurid photograph of people in red robes and white fur trimmings. You have not seen many of them around here today, have you?

Ms Boaden: No.

Q443 Lord Inglewood: Or on many other days of being here.

Ms Boaden: No. I think it is a fair point. I think getting over the working of government is genuinely quite difficult because process does not work well on television. Radio often gives a much better picture and, of course, we have got The Parliamentary Channel which, for those of us who like it, is a revelation very often.

Q444 Lord King of Bridgwater: Why do you not use the picture of the House at Question

Time, which, I have to say from my Other House experience, is much fuller in the House of

Lords than it is in the House of Commons, and use that instead of the everlasting picture of people in ermine?

Ms Boaden: I shall pass that on.

Q445 Lord King of Bridgwater: Thank you very much. I would not want it in any way to influence your editorial judgment.

49 Ms Boaden: I shall say I was bullied into it.

Q446 Chairman: The trouble is, of course, that the red cloaks are such a good picture.

Ms Boaden: They are a wonderful picture; that is exactly right.

Q447 Chairman: And that is one of the troubles of television news.

Ms Boaden: It is always a challenge; television news should not always be about neat pictures, and that has been from time immemorial, and if you talk to ITN and Sky they struggle with the same thing, except very often we feel an obligation to do stories that are difficult to do without pictures. If you think about someone like Evan Davis, who does economics, the most difficult and often the most abstract thing, I think there we have actually cracked a very abstract thing on television because he does it brilliantly, but often he does it because he uses words very well.

Q448 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: Which is why he is now on the Today programme.

Ms Boaden: He is on the Today programme sometimes and he is enjoying it greatly.

Q449 Chairman: You have been very patient and we have gone way over time but thank you very much indeed, all of you, for coming and perhaps if we have other points we can come back to you and there is some information I think that we would like in any event in writing.

Ms Boaden: Can I just say how grateful I was to you for allowing us to come at this date because there is very little we would have not come for but we had to break the appointment because of Alan and we do appreciate your patience.

Chairman: Okay. Thanks a lot.

50