HIDDEN AGENDA - Oxford Forum [Issue Two]

IN 1938 THE BBC held a post-mortem into how the Corporation’s news department had covered the Munich crisis, when the British Government of Neville Chamberlain postponed war via a deal with Adolf Hitler. The post-mortem concluded that “there was no censorship by the Government of the BBC news bulletins or broadcast material, though the Corporation naturally kept in close touch with the appropriate departments and the bulletins fell into line with Government policy”.
    It is a classic example of self-censorship. Why would a Government need to impose censorship when the nation’s only broadcaster says it will “fall into line” with official policy? The line between censorship and self-censorship had become academic.
    When I began researching the events of 1938, I was curious rather than suspicious. I wanted to discover how the events of that year were covered by the electronic media of the day – namely BBC radio and the cinema newsreels. (Television news didn’t start until in Britain until the 1950s.) What I discovered was disturbing.
    The memories of the First World War two decades earlier were understandably very fresh in British minds in 1938. The Government and mainstream public opinion were very keen to avoid another war. So when the Prime Minister decided to compromise with Hitler in his very first territorial expansion outside Germany it seemed to some to be a price worth paying ‘for peace’. The government of Czechoslovakia was persuaded to give up some territory to Hitler. To others this kind of peace was an illusion: the German chancellor would be back for more.
    But in pursuit of the official line newsreel films were ordered back from the cinemas by the producers because the Government didn’t like some of the content and opponents of Chamberlain’s deal were kept out of the newsreels and off the BBC. One commentator of the time, Harold Nicholson – whose diaries are in the library of Balliol College – recorded how he was told that he couldn’t talk on the radio about the Nazi threat. The message to the BBC from the Foreign Office was that “it would prefer that no talk at all was broadcast on the subject” that night.When the BBC asked if this was an instruction, the Foreign Office replied that it could not instruct the BBC on a matter like this, “but that the recommendation was very strong”.
    The self-censorship practised by the BBC and the newsreels was partly a misguided form of patriotism and partly the result of a very sophisticated campaign by Chamberlain: the Prime Minister and his advisers lobbied media owners and editors with an energy and enthusiasm that would put Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell to shame. It was an example of what’s known in America as ‘big tent politics’ – gathering under a single political roof a range of different interest groups. The other intention, of course, is to try to marginalise those outside the tent. So the ‘big tent’ helps create a subtle form of self censorship on editors.
    When I moved on from researching Munich to learning more about the coverage of the Suez crisis of 1956 I discovered other ‘big tents’ being erected at times of crisis. By then there were two television news services – BBC and ITN – as well as radio and newsreel. The Government of Anthony Eden questioned the right of those who opposed its invasion of Egypt to get access to these airwaves. The BBC and ITN resisted but the newsreels ignored the lessons of 1938 and again avoided interviewing those who spoke out against the official policy.
    What 1938 and 1956 demonstrate is that spin existed long before we called it spin, and probably before the public knew that it was going on. Politicians and journalists have always been at it and always will be. Spinning, taking spin, reading spin, playing a straight bat against spin – indeed, every cricketing metaphor you can think of – they all pre-date any date you choose to select for the birth of the ‘modern media’.
    It always has been and always will be natural for humans to want other humans to think well of them and to try to put their best case and best face forward. The bigger sin in my mind is the self-censorship that allows spin to work and to prevent legitimate voices being heard at times of conflict.
    Being in a ‘big tent’ alongside ‘all right minded people’ can be a seductive place for media owners, executives and editors. But the late Hugo Young, the doyen of political columnists for many years, often warned of the dangers. He said journalists could discover as insiders but should write as outsiders. And my trip around the 1938 and 1956 archives confirms that there are some very real examples from history that today’s practicing and aspirant journalists would do well to remember.

Stewart Purvis is this year’s News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University, and is also Professor of Television Journalism at City University. He worked at ITN for 31 years and was Chief Executive from 1995 to 2003
[Photography Leon Neal]

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