Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC by Roger Mosey

Author:Roger Mosey [Mosey, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, BBC
ISBN: 9781849549547
Amazon: B0100ELM70
Goodreads: 25827010
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

I shared the correspondence with one or two like-minded souls, including Jeff Randall, who had been brought in by Greg as business editor to ensure a broader range of real-world views made it on air. Jeff certainly managed that. He wrote to me: ‘Does anyone in the BBC’s Policy Unit/Thought Police read Richard Littlejohn? They should. He reflects popular opinion far more accurately than the views of those whose idea of a good night out is reading the Indy over a vegetarian meal in a Somali restaurant.’

We had already shown our commitment to broadening the debate on air. A Newsnight special with Tony Blair and an audience of voters devoted the first twelve minutes to questions about asylum. Current Affairs did a film for BBC One about our porous borders. I also went further than normal in putting the debate about coverage into the public arena. In the autumn of 2003, I was interviewed by Tim Luckhurst in The Independent and I had an uncoded bash at Editorial Policy, arguing that we had been very slow on the asylum issue. ‘Two years ago, when it started being raised, we did not realise the level of popular unease about the issue,’ I said. ‘There was a sort of easy knee-jerk tendency, a kind of metropolitan ease, of saying “Oh, it’s all got up by the Daily Mail or got up by the BNP or whatever.” I don’t think that is true.’

This did not make me popular – sainthood was ever more elusive in the hurly-burly of news – and over the years I have lost plenty of battles, some deservedly. But I did feel some vindication when, a few years later, the fact that the BBC had been slow on asylum-seeking and then immigration became the official line of the Trust and the management, with Helen Boaden telling a Trust review that the BBC in general had a ‘deep liberal bias’ on immigration when she became director of news.

As my boss, after Richard Sambrook had moved to BBC World News, Helen was an ally on another awful policy dilemma, where what seemed at the time to be a lonely position has become, thankfully, orthodox. It was in 2004 that hostage videos started to be part of the weaponry of terror groups, with videos of Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan being distributed to the international media showing them in captivity and begging for their lives. It seemed obvious to me that showing these videos was playing into the terrorists’ hands, and I felt viscerally that it was an abuse of human beings to show them on television in a state of great distress. I therefore restricted use to just a still, at a time when other news outlets such as ITN and Sky were showing extensive clips. Many of my editorial colleagues were, according to a subsequent front-page story in Press Gazette, ‘outraged’. One editor said, anonymously, ‘There was a feeling of great despair in the newsroom; everybody else was using it and we were going out on a limb without understanding why.

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