A report into the misconduct of a prominent BBC interviewer has shown the difficulty of holding prominent news agencies to account when they make foolish or unethical decisions. Lord Dyson’s 127-page report into Martin Bashir’s blockbuster interview of Princess Diana in November 1995 recounts a “flawed and woefully ineffective” internal probe which found that Bashir had used fake documents to secure the interview but then failed to reprimand him adequately and hid its embarrassing conclusions from public scrutiny. Several years later Bashir was rehired as a religious affairs correspondent despite his clear untrustworthiness.
Dyson concludes his report with the damning verdict that “answers given by the BBC to specific questions by the press were evasive …. And by failing to mention on any news programme the fact that it had investigated what Mr Bashir had done and the outcome of the investigations, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.”
Almost simultaneously the American press has been trying to make sense of what is being called the “lab leak” theory concerning the origins of Covid-19. At issue is the sensitive question of whether the virus originated in a research lab rather than a wet market, as was first claimed, and whether this fact was deliberately obscured by the Chinese authorities. Predictably the issue has become another touchstone in the political and culture wars waged throughout the Trump presidency. Sympathetic rightwing media were always eager to promote paranoid conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, but other news agencies also failed to follow up on the “lab leak” theory because of its incendiary possibilities.
The mainstream media’s reluctance to pursue evidence of a “lab leak” discounted the fact that the US was also funding research at the lab in question — which should have lessened concerns about conspiracy theories — and the fact that in almost every other area the US media would have treated China’s official account with appropriate scepticism. This blindspot also prompts questions about the many times that the same media eagerly circulated thinly sourced and misleading theories that US intelligence leaked to embarrass the Trump administration. These lapses cannot be excused by fact that Trump’s inner circle relied on even weirder sources of post-truth media, as their bizarre submissions in the court cases following the election have exhaustively demonstrated.
Both stories have prompted a flood of what a Guardian columnist, referring to Fleet Street’s reaction to the Bashir revelations, calls “preposterous moralising.” These include the unsurpassable irony of a former editor of The Sun (one who shared Diana’s “covertly recorded phone calls on a premium-rate line so readers could have a listen”) saying that it was time to “Defund the BBC.” Likewise pro-Trump media have ignored all scientific caveats in how to interpret evidence of a possible “lab-leak” and quickly doubled down on their craziest theories. In both cases the hard work of sifting for the truth in complex circumstances has been treated as a peripheral issue.
In a post-pandemic world the integrity of the news will be more important than ever. Information that relies on deception or ignores sensitive stories because they may buttress a paranoid fringe in the political culture are both evasions of the media’s responsibility.
Twenty years after a war that was based on misleading accounts of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the journalistic idea of pursuing truth without fear or favour remains as challenging as ever.
