1 May 2007 | Comment, News and features
The BBC have fought me from ditch to ditch using a top class legal team and every litigation tactic available. This is an organisation of enormous repute devoted to providing impartial news coverage and comment to Britain and indeed the world. How strange that it is fighting so vigorously to keep its secrets to itself. What is going on?
The simplest answer is that given by David Davies MP, who said the BBC was guilty of ‘shocking hypocrisy’. It uses the Freedom of Information Act widely in pursuit of its own journalism but is unwilling to accept its own responsibility, as a public body paid for by the public, to publish material critical of its own standards of impartiality. In fact, it’s a bit more complicated than that and the complications expose some important issues about the BBC and about public policy on freedom of expression more generally.
First, I should explain why I have been willing to fight this case personally for the last two years, representing myself before the Information Commissioner, the Information Tribunal and the High Court. Although I am a lawyer, my field is not public law and I do not present cases in court. So I have been through a pretty steep learning curve. Why have I taken this on and what do I seek to achieve?
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is of great concern to me. I am Jewish, and although my Jewish background has been only of peripheral significance during most of my life, I have strong feelings that the world owes the Jewish people the right to live in their own country in peace and security. But for the whole 50 years of its existence Israel has been threatened with annihilation by its enemies. Of course, the Palestinians must have their state too. It is tragic that the obvious two-state solution has been so hard to achieve.
Public opinion in the world outside the US has shifted strongly against Israel since 2000. Many people say that this is the consequence of Israel’s actions. Israel’s defenders say it has not received a fair hearing in the media. They are especially worried by the BBC’s coverage. The BBC is trusted throughout the world as an institution devoted to the highest standards of impartiality and so BBC coverage adverse to Israel is perceived as particularly threatening.
And I mean physically threatening. Threatening to Israelis certainly, but also to European Jews who have experienced a much increased level of anti-semitism over recent years. Anyone going to a synagogue in the UK for the first time is shocked by the level of physical security deemed necessary. A recent Parliamentary report on anti-semitism in the UK called on media organisations to reflect on their responsibilities.
Whatever your views on Israel and on the BBC’s coverage of the conflict, everyone must surely agree that it really does matter whether that coverage has or has not been impartial. But sadly the BBC has so far responded to criticism of its impartiality on this subject in a way which has been more political than professional. First it reacted simply by defending its journalists in general terms without descending into the detail. Three serious reports by BBC Watch submitted in 2002-3 went largely unanswered. Finally, it did the right thing and brought in a senior TV news editor, Malcolm Balen, to conduct a serious review. The BBC’s top Journalism Board considered his report in 2004-5 and took a number of important decisions in response to his critique. But the BBC has repeatedly refused to publish Mr Balen’s report – although it had publicised his appointment.
Instead of publishing the Balen report, the BBC Governors appointed a group of the great and good to do a quick report, which was published, on three months’ current coverage during a relatively uneventful period in the Middle East – they were not asked to go back to the critical period of 2000-4. They asked for the Balen report and eventually the BBC reluctantly gave it to them but they were forbidden to tell the public about it.
It is hardly surprising that all this has created mistrust and cynicism about the BBC’s motives. That is what secrecy does. The BBC of all institutions really should know better.
The BBC’s ideological, intellectual and legal defence of its position is full of irony. All turns on the freedom to impart and receive ideas guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The public policy purposes of Article 10 are the same as those of the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC says these same public policy purposes support the exception on which they rely in declining to release the Balen report. This exception is for information held for the purposes of journalism. The BBC says this covers not just primary information collected by journalists and unpublished editorial material but reviews of broadcast output considered by those charged with maintaining the BBC’s standards of impartiality. The BBC says that this is necessary in order to protect BBC journalists’ freedom of expression.
But it cannot possibly be right that the BBC’s obligation to ensure impartial coverage must be policed only in secret for fear of prejudicing the BBC’s own editorial independence. If that was right we should have no public reports at all on the subject – maybe we shouldn’t even be talking about it. It would mean that there is a fundamental contradiction between the public’s right to know what the BBC, as a public body, is doing and the BBC’s editorial independence. Maybe the whole idea of a public sector broadcaster is a contradiction. It gives ammunition to those who think the BBC is an arrogant, unaccountable bureaucracy which cannot reform itself and should be abolished.
So far the Information Commissioner, the Information Tribunal and the High Court have all looked at this case. The Commissioner was against me – but he did not know that the Balen report had gone up to the Journalism Board and may have thought it was primarily a tool to help practising journalists. The Tribunal was in my favour. But now the High Court has decided on a literal interpretation of the statute that I did not have a right of appeal to the Tribunal after all – ‘most odd’ said the Judge. So the matter goes back to the Commissioner. In the meantime I have asked the new chairman of the new BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, to intervene.
This issue is important for the health and the reputation of the BBC in the long run and indeed for the global reputation of Britain as the land of ‘fair play’. Certainly I have received a fair amount of internet and email support from those who see the whole thing as the work of perfidious Albion or of engrained European anti-semitism. Not that it is easy to wholly discount some underlying element of this. The reactions of a couple of my colleagues were interesting. One said knowingly – ‘You’ll never get it you know!’ Another – ‘I hope this doesn’t mean you’re turning into a Zionist nutter!’
I live in hope that this saga will prove to be a bit of a British muddle which will finally get sorted out in a suitably British way rather than some Kafkaesque conspiracy of which I, and freedom of information, are victims.
30 Apr 2007 | Azerbaijan News, Comment
What was initially billed as a celebration of the importance of religious and cultural tolerance and understanding turned into something a bit harder edged when the 56 nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held a major conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijani foreign minister Elmar Mammadyarov voices pride in his country as a ‘land of tolerance’ where – and by and large it is true – people live in a spirit of ‘harmony in difference’ regardless of ethnic origin and religious affiliation.
The April 26-27 conference on the Role of Media in the Development of Tolerance & Mutual Understanding drew more than 180 delegates to Baku at a timely moment in the wider debate.
The UN has appointed the former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio as High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, to promote reconciliation between religions, cultures and nations. And the world body’s human rights committee has just passed a controversial resolution aimed at stopping ‘defamation’ of religions in general and Islam in particular.
In Baku the lead conference participants very quickly got to their point: that a key problem was the media’s failure to take proper professional responsibility for its various deeds.
‘Both democracy and liberty are senseless if the citizens, the institutions, the state and the media do not have the highest sense of responsibility in all that they do,’ said keynote speaker Ion Iliescu, former president of Romania.
Iliescu cited the case of Don Imus, the US radio station ‘shock jock’ fired after voicing one racist epithet too many for his employers. Forced to choose between audiences, profit, and social responsibility, they chose the last and dismissed him, he said. ‘(Was that) an infringement of freedom of expression?’ Illiescu asked. ‘Obviously not!’
The Imus case was to Iliescu’s eyes, black and white. There were no greys to confuse his judgment when asked whether it was right to qualify the basic human right of freedom of expression solely in the name of racial tolerance and community cohesion.
Taking up the theme, a series of speakers lined up to call on the western media to stop ‘belittling or denigrating’ Islam, in the words of one Egyptian delegate. Yet often the long term beneficiary of such thinking is not mutual understanding, let alone tolerance, but the ambitions of governments to manage communities and constrain political debate.
Examples were close to hand. Only days before, Azeri opposition journalist Eynulla Fatullayev had been jailed in Baku for criminally libeling – ‘belittling or denigrating’ perhaps – an Azeri community in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan efficiently manages the activities of its own Muslim Sunni and Shia communities, plus its various Christian communities and 15,000 Azeri Jews through its State Committee for Work with Religious Associations.
The conference debate tracked the issue on through detailed calls from the Muslim delegates for tolerance, mutual understanding and mutual respect. Director-General Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri of the OIC’s cultural agency cited the UNESCO declaration on tolerance, a quality that is ‘above all an active attitude prompted by recognition of the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others’, and cannot be used to justify infringements of these fundamental values.
Yet the debate still echoed the discussion surrounding the controversial passing of a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council on Combating Defamation of Religions on 30 March. The resolution, though not new – versions of it have been passed every year since 9/11 by the Council’s predecessor body at the UN – has been widely criticised.
Opponents argue that the resolution does little to protect the rights of the believer or their right to freedom of religious belief, and justifies specific controls on the believers’ rights to freedom of expression. The motion puts the focus on confronting defamation, suggesting that artists, writers and dissidents in states where religion has a political context could find their work censored to protect the ‘reputation’ of a particular faith.
In Baku these suspicions were fed by a recurring conference theme; that the western media is a homogenous force with a hostile agenda.
It was not a traditionally censorious position: Mammadyarov was one of many leading speakers to defend the principle of self-regulation of the media. However he argued that it had a ‘key role in preventing irresponsibility of media outlets and (to) encourage media to use its potential for the sake of peace and dialogue between cultures, rather than for the instigation of inter-religious and inter cultural tensions.’
Ironically though, many delegates who accused the western media of simplistically reading Islam as extremist and terroristic, were sometimes just as simplistic in their analysis of the western media itself.
Citing a 2001 Newsweek article by Indian Muslim born US journalist Fareed Zakaria headlined ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ Egyptian senior editor Mohammed Imbrahim el-Desouky of the daily al-Ahram argued that this kind of coverage presented a picture that fostered hostility.
Miklos Haraszti, chief representative on free expression issues at the Organisation for Security & Cooperation in Europe, was not so sure, contending that Zakaria’s article was a self-reflective look at US policy in the post 9/11 context. Western published opinion on US policy was more diverse and self-critical than many speakers from Muslim nations were suggesting.
What about the other side of the coin, asked Reinhard Meier, deputy editor of the Swiss daily Neue Zuricher Zeitung. ‘Is the reporting and information about pluralistic realities more objective and fairer in the media of Islamic countries?’ Furthermore the problem, thanks to the Internet, had gone beyond the realm of the conventional mainstream media.
Haraszti suggested that Islamist groups that issued fatwas that incited violence against writers and journalists should be prosecuted in their home countries. Meier recognized the problem of unbalanced reporting and a tendency to generalize and stereotype among journalists. But the “level of imperfection” was not the same everywhere.
Five journalists are now in jail in Azerbaijan. Fatullayev, jailed for 18 months for a libel in a website post he denies writing, is the editor of Realny Azerbaijan, successor to the opposition weekly Monitor, shut down after the March 2005 assassination of its editor Elmar Huseynov.
Fatullayev’s imprisonment ‘is part of a pattern of increasing repression of independent media in Azerbaijan, often through politically motivated defamation cases,’ says the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Council of Europe secretary general Terry Davis told the Baku conference that freedom of expression is a right that must be exercised in a ‘respectful and civil manner to ensure peaceful coexistence’, but the rights of individuals to express different views and beliefs also needed protection. It is a principle that is still only selectively applied.
25 Apr 2007 | Comment
Last week, Germany, in its capacity as president of the EU, attempted to outlaw Holocaust denial in the EU. In the end, the resolution that emerged was the classic result of hard-fought compromise – that is to say, nobody got what they wanted. States that already had a Holocaust-denial law, such as Germany, Austria and France, did not manage to foist one on countries such as the UK and Ireland, who claimed to be worried about freedom of speech and inquiry. Meanwhile, those countries that did not have laws concerning the Holocaust now find themselves having to pay lip service, as members of the Union, to the watered down proposal – criminalising “trivialisation” of the Holocaust.
Even if the majority of nations in the EU do not sign up to this (and they have every right not to), damage has been done to the EU’s self-image as protector of human rights and free speech, and it is unsurprising who was among the first to point this out.
Step forward the man in the beige anorak.
Speaking to Spanish TV earlier this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran did not hesitate to pick up on the EU’s stance. Of course, Mr Ahmadinejad has form on this: he is the man who responded to the Mohammed cartoons controversy by sanctioning an exhibition of viciously anti-semitic Holocaust denial cartoons, with the expressed attempt at exposing the west’s “hypocrisy” on the portrayal of taboos.
We can agree or disagree on whether he had a point at the time. Personally, I don’t think he did: In terms of taste and offence there’s a difference, not least of historical distance, between mocking a centuries-dead religious leader and an abysmal event from which many still literally bear the scars.
But when one looks at events in Luxembourg over the past week, and Mr Ahmadinejad’s response, one cannot help but see he has a certain logic on his side when he asks: “Does [the] EU consider questions as a crime? Today, anywhere in the world, one can raise questions about God, prophets, existence and any other issue. Why historical events should not be clarified [sic]?”
We all, of course, can imagine where these questions lead (if you can’t, ask David Irving). But how many of us can bring ourselves to disagree with Mr Ahmadinejad’s words above, however much we may be suspicious of the sentiment? If the EU can allow people to raise questions about one thing, then why not another?
We may write off the resolution as a gesture (though, again, David Irving might have something to tell us about that), but even in the gesture, the damage is done. The EU is seen to be the superpower that protects the sensitivities of Jews, but not those of Muslims.
And Ahmadinejad has been quick to take advantage. At a time when already too many in the Middle East see the EU as in the pocket of Israel, this at best pointless resolution will only serve to drive yet more into the arms of the Iranians, who, after the propaganda victories of the second Lebanon war and the hostage crisis, are more and more managing to portray themselves as the champions of the Middle East’s Muslims.
Originally posted on Comment is Free
