CAN you imagine any other media organisation indulging in such woeful self-flagellation as the BBC?
Lord Dyson’s report into how Martin Bashir used deceit to secure an interview with the Princess of Wales in 1995 was ordered by the BBC board shortly after Tim Davie became director general.
A mistrustful person might almost wonder if Davie were an undercover agent, an anti-BBC mole brought in to undermine the organisation from within.
Lord Dyson’s findings do not flatter the BBC, but the coverage has resulted in a weird bout of corporate poking-yourself-in-the-eye-with-a-stick. The BBC’s media editor, Amol Ragan, seemed indecently eager to explain how terrible this was for the BBC in a breathless bout of wounding observations.
The self-harming was so intense, and so much in the mould of the BBC Talking About The BBC, that I turned off. This happens more than used to be the case. It’s down to the intense repetition of the news agenda, with every outlet shouting from the same hymn book (Brexit, Covid, endless stories about the Royal Family).
There are reasons to be suspicious about why this report was ordered and who benefits, as well as leaving a moment to wonder why we can’t stop going on about something that happened fully 25 years ago.
The royal family is surely content to see blame for Diana’s death palmed off onto the BBC and one of its reporters. That way a seething mound of uncomfortable truths about how the royals treated Diana, and about how Prince Charles treated her, might be overlooked.
This scandal also offers the BBC’s enemies a perfect opportunity to demand that it be changed or abolished, or at the very least bashed into unquestioning meekness.
Boris Johnson, no stranger himself to a cheating tongue, would be very happy to see unfavourable coverage stifled on the BBC (spoiler alert: it’s possible this has already happened).
While we are kicking that stone down the road, the latest Private Eye has a telling snippet about Robbie Gibb, the former Tory spin doctor who once said he hated the “woke wetness” of the BBC, where he has just been appointed to the corporate board.
According to the Eye, Gibb spoke to journalism students at City University a year ago, telling them that “99 times out of a hundred, the things you hear from ministers are truthful”, and that journalists should stop thinking they are cleverer that the people they are interviewing.
Bizarrely, Gibb also told the students that the Daily Mail and the Daily Express were more truthful than other newspapers – a statement so wrong it might as well be a statue.
As for the general hypocrisy, that hangs heavier than the outrageously expensive wallpaper Boris Johnson had pasted up on the Downing Street walls.
If hypocrisy has a sound, it is tabloid mouthpieces tut-tutting about the morals of the BBC.
The Daily Express, these days not much a newspaper as a government press release in flimsy disguise, said that “pressure grows to reform the BBC”.
That from the newspaper that has done more than any other to flog to death old stories about Diana, including such dubious delights as “Princess Diana was murdered…” from April 2017.
No, she died with her boyfriend in a car crash in Paris, leaving her young sons at home – something that isn’t always remembered.
For newspapers that have spent decades living off the ghost of Diana to criticise the Martin Bashir interview is like one raving hyena telling another to get better manners.
Prince William believes that Bashir’s deceit influenced what his mother had to say, and may have led to her death two years later. While such a comment is understandable from a grieving son, it’s hard to stand up. Diana was desperate to talk about her marriage and her feelings; if not Bashir it would have been someone else.
And to conclude with another dollop of that rank hypocrisy, the nastiest jelly on a plate you ever did see, we’re nearly all guilty of that. Anyone who’s read all the endless words about Diana is as guilty as those who wrote them. Anyone who gawped at that Panorama interview and lapped it all up, is as guilty as the reporter using low trickery to secure the interview.
One day we will all have to stop feasting off that tragedy.