You Haven't Got a Leg To Stand on

A lecture on Media Ethics

by Ken Brassington

Good evening! I am delighted to be with you. Or am I? I understand that you are going to be able to ask me questions at the end. Now once upon a time I could put out a news bulletin to millions of people and not bother my hair about what they thought, but you could perhaps give me a bad time if you think I am wrong or just deep and meaningless. So what I am going to do is to ask you to think of this as a cautionary tale and something that might stand you in good stead if you bump into television news yourselves. This could happen very quickly, very suddenly or very unexpectedly. It is possible that you might be the first student from Lancaster to appear in court for not paying his railway fare. Mr. Pumphrey or others here may tell me it is not the first, but the fiftieth. I have no idea what the crime rate is in Lancaster, but I know if it were London it would probably be the five hundredth, because that is the way that they work down there. You may also come to the attention of television news by running off with the vicar's wife, or the vicar. You might decide to murder one of the tutors who has given you a bad mark or from looking at the posters, supporting the wrong protest group. Even if you don't murder him, you might have let down his car tyres. Now all these things would rapidly bring you to the attention of television news reporters. So what I want to do is to give you a bit of advice: say nothing to them, absolutely nothing. For goodness sake don't try any fanciful or imaginative explanations of what you've done, they'll just love that. As far as you're concerned you are just a good story and that's as far as their ethics go. But if you start to elaborate and try and say that you did it for this or that reason, you could move very quickly from an obscure mention in the local news bulletin to centre stage in the nine o'clock or ten o'clock news. You'll get the legendary five minutes of fame and a lot of embarrassment. Of course some of you may want definitely to talk to television news at some stage of your lives. I am sure that some of you will get on very well and achieve some distinction and because of your positions in society, probably learn all sorts of unsavory things are going on and you may actually feel that you should tell people about them. In that case, you may say that, well I'm in the atomic radiation industry and I'm hearing all about radiation leaks. I'm working in the genetic engineering industry some of the most hideous forms of life are being created. You may be in the City of London and realise that some of the clients are putting out false prospectuses. You may even, I suppose be running a giant supermarket and discover that the company is putting, shall we say, chicken tandori in the Kit-e-Kat. You have to remember that even animals have got no rights these days and perhaps you should tell somebody. I hope gain some insights from an episode in my life with the BBC.

This is the affair of Angela Rippon's legs. Now it all seems a long time ago and we were all very young, but once upon a time there was a real uproar about Angela Rippon's legs. She'd come to work with us in the newsroom and she was making her way as an announcer. That really didn't bother me, as I only knew her as a colleague, but I was on holiday down in Devon with a friend of mine who used to employ Angela as a young reporter. He said to me that he had asked the BBC for the usual Christmas publicity picture of Angela and he had been refused. So I said not to worry, when I get back to London I will go to the publicity department and get a picture for you. I went to the publicity department and they said, "Oh, no, no, no – no pictures this year." And I said, "Why not?" And they said, "Well the tabloid newspapers are very interested in Angela's legs. Viewers see Angela sitting at the desk reading the news, but what's below?"  And the Daily Mirror and papers like that had got this rather frivolous story running, what were Angela's legs like?

Now I was not interested in her legs, but I was furious that the BBC wouldn't give pictures to the newspapers. It seemed real hypocrisy and humbug to me. We are making our living out of photographing and filming people, taking pictures all over the world, but when our turn comes we don't play fair, no pictures. So what I did, I borrowed a camera and went down to a technical area where I knew there was a recording of Angela's Christmas show with Morecombe and Wise and I got an engineer friend to start the video running. And I started taking photographs of the monitor screen. The thing that came up first of all showed Angela doing a high stepping, kicking dance showing her legs all over the place. Well that was just bad luck for me, because I was feeling a bit like James Bond and I was taking some pictures as fast as I could. So I won't hang around, I just took the role of film and sent it to my friend in Devon as fast as I could and said, "Well you've got your pictures, Good Luck." And I thought that was going to be the end of it. But, unfortunately I went back to work a few days later and got a lot of strange suspicious glances. When I asked why, I was told that the pictures of Angela's legs had appeared in the Daily Mirror and the editor was absolutely raving mad, as he had explicitly said that this must not happen. Anyway, I went to the Daily Mirror and said, "Where did you get the pictures?" They said, " Well one of our close friends in Devon sent them to us." Turned out to be my friend George Harris. I rang him and he said, "Well Ken we lost our nerve, we didn't dare to use the pictures. We knew that you had done a lot of hard work to get them for me. So to repay you for your favour, I've sold them to the Daily Mirror and I am going to give you the money." Well, I thought well great. I was hauled up in front of the director general and I explained my theories about hypocrisy, humbug and all that. He explained his theories that this was breaking confidentiality and since he was the boss my argument lost and I was terminated, which was a kind of Darlik expression which meant that I didn't work for the BBC anymore.

So when I knew I had to come and give this lecture, I thought that I would write to the current editor of BBC  television news, asking for his thinking on television ethics. I got a letter back, saying to look in a book published by the BBC called 'Guidelines for the Makers of Factual Programmes'. I asked a friend of mine who was a senior producer at the BBC if he'd got a copy. He said yes it was somewhere in the office, he hadn't read it, but I could borrow it. So O.K., I borrowed it. It was a marvelous publication. It does the BBC great credit. It's a kind of distillation of half a century of broadcasting wisdom and experience. The BBC sums up what it wants with four fundamentals: fairness, reliability, independence and sensitivity. That's what it wants in news programs and documentaries. Now no-one is going to argue about fine sentiments like that, but the tricky bit comes in how they are going to achieve it. They do it through control of the staff. The book does not use the word control, that is a bit too Orwellian for them, but we've got another Darlik expression, referral upwards. That means if a producer comes across something unexpectedly in a sensitive area he asks the people above him what to do about it, and since the BBC has as many buck-passers as most organizations, it soon gets right to the top. It seems to me that this is where the switch-over comes from straightforward journalistic practice and other considerations come into play and I am talking about politics and economics. Because the top man is the Director General and he is worried about his job too. He wants to get the knighthood that customarily goes with the appointment, so he asks the Governors what to do and they have all been appointed by the government and they do not want to lose their next license fee increase or possibly their charter  and so they think what does the government want and you may think that I am making this up, by I am not actually, and if you ever read a newspaper like The International New York, Herald Tribune, you will see that they always describe the BBC as a state controlled broadcasting system and that is actually the truth. At the end of the day it is the government who runs the BBC. Now they are not interfering in the day to day running, but their feelings and their requirements are understood by the people in high rank and if it ever comes to a crisis it is the government view that will prevail. Now the government exercise the same control over independent television. They have appointed an Independent Television Commission. It is a body, a small body of people, who look after what is to be broadcast on ITN and so I wrote to the editor of ITN and said what are his views on ethics? He wrote back and said, "We are bound to obey by the rules laid down by the Commission." So I didn't want you to miss anything, so I wrote to the Commission and said, "What are all these rules?"

They said sent back an enormous volume and again, all very worthy aims, which can be summed up in two words, they want accuracy and impartiality. That sounds great, but this government appointed body doesn't make clear that there are thousands of government employees throughout the country, who are out to thwart those very objectives. Let me give you an example from my life, when I was working for the BBC some twenty years ago.

I was in Northern Ireland, running the BBC newsroom in Belfast and there was all the bombing and shooting going on and one evening the colonel at army headquarters rang to say that he had a very good story to offer to us. What is it? A couple of our soldiers had been kidnapped on the street by the IRA. They had been bundled into the back of a van and driven away, apparently to their deaths. But these daring-do boys had actually overpowered the guards and smashed open the back of the van jumped out and ran away.

I said, "Well, we would love the story, give the details to the reporter."

The colonel did and the story was broadcast a few minutes later on the nine o'clock news. The next day the reporter came in and said there is no truth in this story at all. The IRA have been on to me and it is just a load of rubbish. So I went round to the colonel and said we were a bit suspicious you know of this story you gave us last night, it's just a hoax and he said,

"What story's that?"

"The one you rang up about last night."

" Oh, I didn't ring you," he said, "there is the log with my activities last night," and passed a piece of paper over. Absolutely no mention of the phone call. So I realized that we had been completely duped and we'd fallen for one of these dirty tricks and I don't think I swore at him, but I told him I'd never believe anything he said again.

Now people like the colonel are very active in our society working for the government, to try to influence BBC and ITV journalists and particularly vulnerable are the special correspondents diplomatic, political, defence and economic, because they have to go to the government to get their facts. What's going on behind closed doors. When you think about it how could a defence correspondent have any idea what the armed forces are doing, unless it is suits the government to tell them. There is no way that he can check the facts. I mean our correspondents are not ignorant and naive people, but they have to go back repeatedly always to the same people and gradually a kind of working relationship is built up and the public relations officers can put their thoughts very deeply into correspondents' minds. What you also have to remember is this, you cannot compel people to appear in television studios. If a government minister or the head of any other organisation doesn't want to come, he won't, even if he is a Trade Union boss or the head of your Students" Union. He won't be interviewed unless it suits him and the trouble with television news is that it does need pictures to sustain its bulletins or what happens is that you get an effect called marginalization. If television news has got no pictures, nobody to interview, the issue drifts to the margins and can quickly evaporate. Now, the public relations systems in the country are well aware of this effect and they are able to bring it about by simply declining to appear and they won't let you take your cameras anywhere they don't want. You actually have to have a permit even to photograph and film in Hyde Park. So you see how stymied television news can be. Now at this stage you may wonder if there is anything more to television news ethics than one group of people telling another group of people what to do, the great and the good keeping us all in our places and I suppose, wide-eyed journalists rushing about trying to earn a living. Well you think, is there any sort of deep philosophical thought underpinning the whole crazy structure? Well actually there is, not much, but there is something and the primary sort of seminal work has been done in The United States by a  well known woman philosopher named Sisela Bock. But you can guarantee that most British journalists have never even heard her name. Her books, with titles like 'Lying' and 'Secrets' are out of print in this country. When I wanted to get a copy for this lecture, it turned out impossible, I couldn't buy one anywhere. So I thought, right, I'll go along to the American Embassy, they've got a library there, so maybe they'll have a book. I went along to this magnificent building in Grosvenor Square and that turned out to be quite an experience it itself. I went through the main entrance, they sent me round the side to the library and I was met by a receptionist. I explained what I wanted and they said,

"This isn't a walk in area, you can't come in here."

I said, "Well what do I have to do?"

and he said, "Well you have to go away and phone the library, or write to them and they will vet you and then they may let you in."

I said, "Well could you use the phone on your desk and just ask the library if they've got a copy."

Well at that moment, there was a speaker on his desk and a deep voice sounded,

"Are you having any trouble down there?"

The receptionist said, well yes, he was having trouble and from a door behind him came an American Marine, all medals and decorations, crew-cut and a Chinese fighting stick. He came over to me, I mean, a simpleton could see that this was trouble if I wasn't careful. So I explained, I wanted to see this wonderful book published in his great country by this distinguished writer. He sort of saw that I wasn't the sort of goddam commie that he could kill and he lost interest and he marched back there and he said to the receptionist,

"Give him the phone number of the library."

I tell you, meeting the people from the land of the free can be quite an experience  I can tell you!

 And I thought I would try my luck somewhere else and I went off to the British Museum. I thought the library there, that's a good idea. That's another world, polite, helpful, Within a few minutes I was sitting in that great circular reading room in a comfortable armchair and with a copy of Miss Bock's book, 'Secrets'. Anyway, I couldn't help thinking about what a wonderful country I lived in.

 Anyway, what did this great American guru have to say about it all? Well, she looked in particular at a case you may know or have heard about called Pentagon Papers. Now this was a study commissioned by a new defence secretary, Mr. McNamara, when he took office during the Vietnam War. He'd taken office and he wanted to know what the war was all about. How did the Americans get involved in it? How was it going and could they win? And this study ran to forty two volumes of what he learned was a dreadful story of deception and lying on the grandest scale. The American people had been completely hoodwinked about the war, how they had got into it and the way it was going. It was just a pack of lies that they had been told year after year. Now one of the top officials, who had worked on the preparation of the Pentagon Papers, a man named Daniel Ellsburg and he was so scandalised, he thought that he had to do something. So what he did, he secretly copied the documents and smuggled them out and gave them to journalists and soon these secret papers were all over the television and in the newspapers and the country was screaming. Some were saying that Ellsburg is a real traitor, others said no, he is a great patriot. Now, Miss Bock, in her book, looks at Ellsburg's actions to see whether what he had done could be justified. And she reasoned like this; Ellsburg is a government official and therefore, his loyalty is to the Government. The country is at war and in those circumstances, Ellsburg's personal moral scruples would normally be expected to be subservient to reasons of state. Then she said could he do anything else apart from smuggle them out. Could he tell the police? That didn't seem a good idea. Could he have told anybody in authority? Well, Ellsburg had tried to alert various senior congressmen and nothing had happened. Then Miss Bock said; could he have gone to the President? Well, that was worse than useless, since President Nixon was one of the main culprits. So then she looked at the form of government in the United States, the form of the government and she decided that the form of the government required an informed electorate. And for that reason she decided that what Ellsburg did was perfectly right and justified. Now, that principle, that people should know what is going on is built into the American Constitution. The Freedom of Information Act lays down very clearly that the American government has a duty to reveal what its people have a right to know. And Congress has made it equally clear that Americans have a right to know what their Government is doing.

Now, Miss Bock sums it up like this: this right to know is not a right to truth and knowledge. She thinks that is epistemologically unsound. And what is truth? At best, it is a right to have access to information, not all information, but some information. And the some, as far as Miss Bock is concerned includes anything to do with people's welfare. She thinks if people's welfare is being affected, then they are entitled to know. And this she extends not only to Government activity, but to anything being done by individuals or private companies. If there is any way of doing anything which impinges on people's welfare, they have a right to know. And this is where Miss Bock gets round to the role of the television and the newspapers. She says it is their mandate to act as intermediaries between the various organisations and the public. Only television and newspapers have got the means of making all this information available. And she also says that apart from telling people what they need to know, the press has got a perfectly legitimate interest in satisfying people's curiosity about anything else that is going on in the world, but she says that here, the press and the television should have particular regard for privacy and requests for anonymity. Now, this is clearly a very difficult area, Miss Bock says it is impossible to know where to draw the line beyond which journalists should not pursue their interest in people's affairs and in this country, the Government has recently set up an organisation to look at this very problem. The Broadcasting Standards Council, is a group, again of the great and good, who know what is best for us. They have been charged with looking at things like privacy, personal grief, things like violence, sex, nudity and anything else which could be considered controversial. And the chairman of this body is man called Lord Rees-Mogg and frankly, I would not like his job. But, I think to try to rule on these issues in a country like Britain, where social mores are changing so rapidly and so radically must be almost impossible. And at any stage, he can be dismissed as a fuddy-duddy, just as the way that life is. And also he has got to contend with more and more pictures coming in by satellite from other countries and being seen in all the British households and what strikes me as one of the gross sort of ironies of all this, is that two members of his council are actually clergymen, one of them a bishop, and the rules that they have laid down for the showing of violence would never allow television news to show anything as gruesome as the crucifixion of Christ. Now how you know a clergyman can say well exclude something like that, it is very difficult to know.

Of course, BBC television and ITN, they're not unaware of the effects of violent scenes on viewers. I can remember one of the most fraught evenings in the newsroom was when we had film in from Vietnam of a police chief shooting dead a Vietnamese prisoner. The cameraman had been standing right next to the policeman, when the chap had taken out a pistol and put it to the prisoner's head and fired. You saw the hole appear in the man's head, blood gushed out and the poor chap fell, dying to the pavement. Blood was everywhere. And the two most senior men in the newsroom that night really pondered for a long time what they could show of that film. In the end they decided it was safe to see the policeman pull out the pistol, aim and then to see the body; there was as little blood as possible. That was done, they thought that was acceptable for British households, but this is some twenty years ago or more. And that became a formula for handling violent scenes, you show the preparation, you show the aftermath, but you don't show the actual incident, except in very long range and never in close up.

Now, BBC television news, over the years, has built up a lot of these formulas how to deal with all kinds of groups of people with particular interests and it used be what do you say about the Royal Family, how do you handle them, what do you do about vivisection and Mrs. Whitehouse, so they are always calculating, now because they have a whole new range of people who are always on about what upsets them. You've got the feminists, the gay-libbers, the anti-green this, the anti-hunt, the anti-foxing, the whole thing has built up to such an extent that it seems to be that television news now is so sort of sanitized and pulverized and manipulated that what people are actually seeing on their screens is not real life at all. It is no use looking at it and trying to see the world you live in, anymore that you would go to see a Hollywood romance to understand love or you would watch an old cowboy or Indian film to find out how North America was colonised. It strikes me that if this is a sham that people are watching, there should be something like a mental health warning at the beginning of each broadcast. Somebody should say, well we think this is a rough approximation of something that may be going on and the script should have lots of sorts of qualification; we understand, we've been told, this may not be true and you should sprinkle those through the bulletins to I think to ethically balance up the impression that people are getting that they are seeing real life, because they are not. In almost no area do you actually see everything anyway of the worst kind and everything has been turned and manipulated. Now, whether anything like this 'will ever come about, I can't see it happening at the BBC, although they are very conscious that at this moment they have to look after their charter when it comes up for renewal in a couple of years time. And as far as I know, the people at the BBC may be quite happy about the formulas that they are using. They clearly do not want to upset viewers any more than they feel is necessary. So if there is any change, it might come in ITN because the people who pay their wages bills, the television companies have had new franchises recently and new licenses and they've got twenty years, possibly, ahead of them. And I know that Granada television itself has already started actions in The High Court to contest some of the rulings by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission. Granada think that the Complaints Commission is doing a bad job, so they have gone to court.

I suppose the mention of courts brings up one of these bottom lines, what happens to people who do transgress and step out of line and broadcast the wrong things. Well, apart from losing your charter and your franchise and millions of pounds, something almost as serious can happen, journalists can be sent to prison and individuals can be sent to prison. There is a very strict criminal set of rules, which say television news must not broadcast anything that might prejudice a court hearing and they must be very guarded when they mention children in court cases. And divorce can't be reported openly and these sort of matrimonial issues are protected very severely by the law But the journalists, of course often take risks and it often costs them money in libel actions, you have all seen those. The most serious issue of all of them is The Official Secrets Act, now, as it suggests, this is primarily to protect the government's and the country's most vital secrets, but it is used unscrupulously by a lot of governments to protect minor issues. It is a secret really, how many paper clips are being used in an office in Whitehall, if the government wants to make it so, and any civil servant who might run round and tell someone is going to lose his job. More seriously, he can be sent to prison. You all know, I suppose that Spy-catcher saga, with an addictiveness, as I see it of the Government pursuing a hopelessly lost cause. And you probably know of Clive Ponting, the civil servant, who tried to tell an MP his suspicions about the sinking of the Argentine cruiser, the Belgrano and you possibly even remember Miss Tindle, sent to prison for passing newspapers, the newspaper The Guardian some papers. She'd come across them and sent them and she was actually jailed. Some of you do remember her do you? Well, it just shows that, you know, talking to newspapers and the television if you are a civil servant is a very serious business and in this country it is no defence in law to say that you're acting in the public good. That just will not save you. That is your problem if you become a civil servant and it brings us back, I suppose, the beginning of this lecture, when I thought you might be glad of some advice.

You will find that when you go outside and try and get a job that more and more employers require you to sign conditions of service, which prohibit you talking to television or newspapers about the companies business. I don't mean just the companies secrets, but anything and if you talk out of court, as it is, you can be dismissed and you probably will be if it doesn't suit the company. Now jobs are hard to come by, you may lose your job and you may lose your pension rights. So any of you who may feel I'm red-blooded, I've got a conscience, I don't care, you have to take that into account. You may well have signed a piece of paper to get the job, which in fact signs away part of your freedom of speech and you simply cannot go and tell television news and they'll be glad to hear from you, always, but it will cost you your job.

And I suppose, one final point to keep this in some kind of perspective. When I had my run-in with the BBC, my nephew, Simon Hill, your President, was a boy of about seven and from what he heard then and from what he cobbled together later from family gossip, he deduced an absolutely wonderful idea of what it was all about. He thought I was I was in love with Angela and wanted these photographs for myself, of her legs. Now, I thought it was absolutely incredible, but after what he has heard tonight, he will realise there was a bit more to it than that.

So, anyway. I've given you a brief idea, I hope. You have problems if you talk to us and we have very great problems putting out what you tell us. It may cost us dearly, each one of us, but as I say you've probably got consciences and I hope, you know, when the time comes and you find out something you want to tell television news you won't hesitate too much. I wish you luck and be careful."

"Thank you".

Questions

(Mr. Park): "I suppose the message of that is don't believe everything that you see or hear on the news. Ken's got some time to answer questions or."

(Mr. Brassington): "Yes, I'm happy to answer questions them, Any questions?"

(Listener): "I have a question, which was.."

(Mr. Brassington, quickly): "Which was, how to get a job?"...audience laughs.

(Listener): "One question which was intriguing me was, you were talking about the idea of a sanitized news and what was the....."