“It's the news, stupid”

“Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run would be more effective… Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness.”1

BBC values were forged in response to the first world war, and repeatedly tested by later conflicts. The corporation was founded a century ago out of revulsion against the misleading propaganda of that war, at a time when there was concern over how the invention of broadcasting would affect politics. There was even fear that voters would act not according to their material interests or ideals, but because public views could be distorted by foreign (or domestic) idealogues. This was soon after the Russian Revolution, and Bolsheviks were discovered inciting the British working class from a suburban house in Penge, so this was not an abstract concern. An alternative anxiety was that the public's views would be bought behind their backs by ‘big business’. None of these worries seems dated now.

John Reith, the first director general and architect of the BBC as a public service, saw broadcasting as a means to share information on an equal basis, so that individuals would “be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment”.2 It was to make people's lives richer, and their choices more intelligent and informed, so that society functioned better.

The BBC then developed a set of tools that still work:

And war always brought the BBC into confrontation with government, especially when public opinion was deeply divided, as in the Suez crisis in 1956. The Conservative government objected to the fact that, as part of a review of the British press, the BBC's widely listened to all over the middle east Arabic service had quoted an editorial in the Manchester Guardian, which condemned the invasion. This was then compounded when the BBC gave the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell a right of reply to Anthony Eden's prime ministerial broadcast in which Gaitskell was highly critical of the invasion.5

This tradition of reporting the full spectrum of British opinion, on both internal and external broadcasts, was followed in the knowledge that any discrepancy would fatally undermine the BBC's reputation for impartiality. In the end, the government did not carry through its threats to take over the BBC during the Suez crisis and the BBC reaffirmed the principle that broadcasts overseas could not be modified for the sake of political convenience. To young British soldiers about to risk their lives, hearing that a large section of the British public thought the enterprise morally wrong and practically doomed, must have felt unsettling. Nevertheless, it firmly established the superiority of strategic broadcast objectives over tactical political warfare as the surest way of retaining an audience over the long term.

Suez cemented the BBC's reputation for independence and its credibility. The Cold War led to a huge evolution in BBC broadcasting abroad. It was greeted with gratitude all over the Eastern bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But each of the wars and conflicts that followed produced their own clash with government.

Similarly, there were claims during the Falklands War in 1982 that the BBC was not patriotic enough, not willing to talk about ‘our’ troops. And so it went on, with disputes 20 years later over what was reported about Tony Blair's reasons for going to war in Iraq subsequently leading to the resignation of a director general. Through all this the BBC continued as far as it could to report what was happening; not what the government wanted to be happening, not even what seemed the most likely thing to be happening, but what was actually going on.

Does this still work in an age when people are fodder for algorithms that draw them into “conspiracy theories which provide a bottomless well of distraction for a community of believers”, in the words of Barack Obama's speechwriter Ben Rhodes?7 Too few have the presence of mind of Orwell's Winston Smith from 1984, as he contemplated: “The sacred principles of ingsoc, newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past … He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster.”8 Propagandists have merely learnt what advertisers understood very well and viral advertising provides. In these new conditions, does truth work? The answer may be that as in witch crazes in the 17th century, or tulip or dot-com investment manias in the 18th and 20th centuries, or the belief in fascism and communist regimes, people do get swept away. But reality remains and we need new, ingenious, at-scale ways of describing it.

We need to battle on all these fronts, at a time when there is a real kinetic war going on that is reshaping the world. The day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, 24 February 2022, is as pivotal a date as 3 September 1939 or 11 September 2001. In this environment, dis-, mis- and mal-information cannot be tackled by preaching or manipulation (although they can indeed be manipulated). Rational policy, of the kind pursued both in the Second World War and the Cold War, would be to hang on to the benefits of public service broadcasting news like mad, and indeed to unleash its imaginative scope to get beside audiences. The BBC should not be cut; it should be bigger.

50 million Americans now use the BBC's news each week,10 and 56 per cent of them find it ‘trustworthy’, far higher than for their domestic news providers. Meanwhile the international audience for the BBC since 2018 has doubled,11 and there has recently been a huge growth of visitors to the BBC's enhanced Russian and Ukrainian news sites. All this would make a compelling national case for the UK government to double down in supporting the BBC and all public service broadcasting as a matter of national and international interest.

Of course, it is not simple. The challenges the BBC faces abroad are considerable. In the case of South Asia, as the UK has a large domestic population with South Asian roots and connections, these problems rebound at home as well as in the region. Home-grown nationalism in India, amplified by audiences and communities here at a distance from conditions back in South Asia, rebounds into the UK in ways that influence political calculations unexpectedly. Different perspectives on national interest, different sets of long-term strategic alliances with Russia (in India) and China (in Pakistan) and a sense that the Ukrainian war is a “white war” (the language of some Indian journalists, not mine), all contribute to a sense that the BBC's coverage is from a ‘biased’ Western viewpoint. South Asian countries have very limited reporting capacity from overseas, which also plays into a layered information space, where the comfortable assumptions we might share of the injustice and savagery of the Russian invasion are challenged. But the region is also subject to an extensive, subtle and energetic Russian mal-information drive.12

This is quite a different order of threat than the BBC has faced before in its 100-year history. Yet during the coronavirus pandemic, when it mattered to people, BBC audiences rocketed. Now, when everyday life will become more insecure and uncertain, the BBC and its news is necessary. All wars are information wars.