TRUE TO HIS EVERY WORD THE OXFORD FORUM talks to JOHN SIMPSON, and finds the BBC correspondent pessimistic about the state of British journalism
JOHN SIMPSON IS not a man accustomed to ranting, but tonight he seems reluctant to reign himself in. “Let me tell you something,” he gestures. “It’s one of the bees buzzing in my bonnet right now: I just think that real, good journalism is under attack at the moment.”
Coming from the BBC’s best-respected foreign correspondent – a man himself once accused by a British Prime Minister of “outrageous” journalistic practice (moments after Harold Wilson had landed a firm punch to the young reporter’s stomach) – it is a startlingly frank accusation. Yet Simpson clearly isn’t afraid of appearing the outspoken media conservative. He ploughs on: “There are two ways this is happening. One is through the deliberate desire to slant things, to ‘editorialise’ – the ‘Fox News’ approach, and the approach of quite a lot of newspapers. The other, in my opinion, is the degree of political involvement we’re seeing currently, and the way in which governments – particularly British and American governments – now regard it as completely acceptable to try to manipulate journalism in ways that I think no decent government would have in the past. And it worries me; I don’t like it; it disturbs me.”
It is no coincidence that the issue of journalistic objectivity should be what ires Simpson so. As a man whose career has been spent studiously adhering to the BBC’s principle of political neutrality, it is difficult to envisage him taking issue with anything other than the parameters of debate in Britain – never the actual, partisan arguments within. It is clear, though, from his adamant tone that he believes these parameters are presently being warped like never before. Elaborating on his criticism of Fox News, Simpson explains why he views Rupert Murdoch’s creation with such unease.
“A lot of people out there think it’s genuine and honest – I mean, it says it’s unbiased and truthful. And the more you tell people things, often, I’m afraid, the more they believe it. People said about The Sun newspaper: ‘oh, well everybody knows it’s tosh’ – well, a lot of people do know it’s tosh, but at the same time it does colour their views, and I think we’ve got a problem on our hands – we’ve got a fight on our hands.” Nor is this bellicose criticism reserved exclusively for the right-wing media. True to the ‘balance’ he is advocating, the BBC World Affairs Editor professes similar distaste for the recent turn taken by The Independent towards a ‘liberal’ brand of sensationalism. “I’m not enthusiastic about it, I’m really not,” he sighs. “I really don’t think you need to grab people by the lapels and shout your opinions in their face. I think that a quieter, a more reasoned approach that doesn’t block out one whole side of an argument and only give you the other side is much better. And the old Independent, as it was, would have done that.”
IT WOULD BE difficult for any person whose career demands complete immersion in current affairs to remain free from staunchly opinionated views, particularly given the contentious nature of world politics today. John Simpson doesn’t pretend to be a pure distiller of fact, untainted by any form of ‘belief ’.Yet he is adamant that this need not impact upon his professional life. “I suppose the older I get, the more I think that it’s important to take a stand on matters of principle,” he confesses. “But I would only do that in private. I do think that in my job you really do have to try to be as objective as it’s possible to be, because otherwise, what’s the point? I mean, we’ve got The Sun, we’ve got Fox News – we’ve got The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, for that matter. Everybody’s shouting their opinions. I think it’s quite valuable to have somebody – or an organisation – that tries, strives, to be balanced.”
The organisation to which he is referring is of course the BBC – the uniquely British institution that has employed Simpson ever since he accepted a job as ‘junior trainee subeditor in the newsroom’, aged 22. For all its troubles with the government in recent years, the Corporation remains widely trusted to present the news in an ‘unbiased’ fashion – indeed, throughout the Hutton debacle it was only ever Tony Blair’s credibility that seemed to suffer in the polls, ‘Auntie’ always remaining in high public regard. When Simpson outlines his scepticism for the more campaigning, politicised approach to his trade, it becomes clear the extent to which he has found his natural home.
“I rather suspect people who feel that journalism is a great way of righting wrongs,” he explains. “Righting wrongs is a definite part of journalism – it’s an important part of it – but, to go into it with that sort of motivation … I think the purer is just simply to find out what’s happening.”
It is a viewpoint that would seem to put Simpson at odds with those that perceive a wider purpose for the reporter in a democracy: the likes of John Pilger, or The Independent’s Robert Fisk, who subscribe to Edmund Burke’s model of a ‘Fourth Estate’ (the media serving to keep otherwise unaccountable power in check).Yet the BBC correspondent is prepared to be conciliatory: “Oh, but journalism is like literature – there’s such a range that you can find yourself a niche in just about any of it.
“John Pilger is a friend of mine, and I really admire the fact that we have noisy, outspoken, difficult people. That doesn’t mean to say I agree with everything he says – in fact, often I don’t seem to agree with anything he says very much. But I love the fact that there is somebody like John Pilger saying it in a passionate way.” John Simpson’s approach, though, is one driven entirely by curiosity. As he encapsulates it, “there are some people who just have to know what’s around the next corner”. Perhaps surprisingly, this outlook has led him to welcome the additional degree of scrutiny to which British reporting in general, and particularly that of the BBC, has been subject since the heated days of the Iraq debate.
“I suppose it probably is unprecedented,” he muses. “But if so, I think that’s a very good thing. I can’t see that there’s anything wrong with having to watch very carefully what you say. What is wrong is to be timid about it, and to prefer not to say anything serious rather than to set yourself up in the firing line. But to be honest, I don’t see any greater signs of that now – certainly in the BBC, I think the same people are doing the same sorts of things.”
Moreover, he denies that ‘asymmetric’ scrutiny is a problem – that the powerful alone are in a position to ensure legally watertight coverage of their affairs. “I honestly don’t think that is happening,” he asserts, with indignation. “I wouldn’t want to be part of an outfit which was so terrified it dared not squeak, I really wouldn’t.…We just need to make sure we’re doing the right thing – that we’re not acting out of fear, or indeed of hubris.”
Yet hubris is a quality certainly not found wanting in international political debate at present. Having witnessed the Iraq war firsthand – and had its horrors painfully brought home when a US bomber mistakenly killed the Iraqi translator stood by his side – Simpson confesses to feeling somewhat angry when the ‘chattering classes’ insist upon debating the conflict with poorly-founded rhetoric.
“I get quite frustrated by ignorance dressed up as semi-informed opinion. I do think that is quite irritating,” he confides. “I don’t mind – hell, it’s so difficult to go to Iraq and make your own mind up – but I do think journalists who can go, and perhaps ought to go, shouldn’t necessarily just stay at home and preach about it.”
THIS SAID, SIMPSON admits it can sometimes be difficult to make his own mind up about a situation – even when merely seeking to report the facts. Taking China as an example, he duly outlines the difficulties: “I love China: I love going to China, I love reporting on it – but it is hard, because I don’t speak Chinese at all, and to understand the precise details of a society which is so different … I think that is quite difficult.
“I was at Tiananmen Square, and I felt that was very true then: we were inclined just to assume that the students there wanted the kind of democracy that we have, but in fact they’d been so restrained in their education that they didn’t even know what it was that constituted democracy. It’s very hard to get into the minds of people whose background is so different.”
He laments the all-too-regular tendency for foreign correspondents to simplify – picking ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in any given conflict, for easier audience digestion.
“That’s grotesque, that is. The most obvious example of that was in Bosnia in the nineties, when it was a three-way civil war: most journalists – or a lot of journalists, particularly for television – had a real problem trying to explain that one. I used to be one of the people who most thought it was the function of a journalist to make things simple to people – to say: ‘This is how things are, and it’s not as difficult as you think’. But I realised over the years that I don’t think that is the function at all – I think the function is to say: ‘Listen, you think there are simple answers to complicated questions. Actually, I’m telling you things are a damned sight more difficult and complicated than that.’ And I think that’s a much more valuable approach.”
It’s an illuminating comment. Simpson has spent much of our conversation attacking moves to more partisan news coverage, but perhaps there’s more to this stance than a mere desire to respect the democratic consensus behind an ‘impartial’ media – perhaps it’s founded on a belief that the world is just too complex to be encapsulated in a neat, thousand-word opinion piece. Nonetheless, he refuses to be defeatist.
“I’m uncomfortable about a lot of the ways journalism is going – we’ve got to rally round it and we’ve got to defend it. People have got to be aware that it’s under threat.…In many ways the world is too complicated for journalists, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a bash at it. I think it just demands a bit more understanding, a bit more experience – a bit harder work, to be honest.”
