BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
Independent revealed programmes were made by third-party in pay of governments and firms
Ian Burrell
Ian Burrell is Assistant Editor and Media Editor of The Independent.
Saturday 11 February 2012
The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming.
BBC World News viewers from Kuala Lumpur to Khartoum and Bangkok to Buenos Aires will watch the remarkable broadcast, available in 295 million homes, 1.7 million hotel rooms, 81 cruise ships, 46 airlines and on 35 mobile phone platforms, at four different times, staged in order to reach audiences in different time zones. The BBC will apologise for breaking "rules aimed at protecting our editorial integrity".
The Independent exposed last year in an investigation into the global television news industry how the BBC paid nominal fees of as little as £1 for programmes made by FBC Media (UK), whose PR client list included foreign governments and multinational companies. The company made eight pieces for the BBC about Malaysia while failing to declare it was paid £17m by the Malaysian government for "global strategic communications". The programmes included positive coverage of Malaysia's controversial palm oil industry.
The BBC also used FBC to make a documentary about the spring uprising in Egypt without knowing the firm was paid to do PR work for the regime of former dictator Hosni Mubarak.
The BBC Trust's Editorial Standards Committee carried out an investigation into BBC World News which reported in November it had uncovered 15 breaches of editorial guidelines. Eight of the breaches were in respect of FBC programmes made about Malaysia. The trust also identified other breaches of rules on sponsorship in programmes shown by BBC World News, which is a commercial entity and carries advertising. In its apology, the BBC will say: "A small number of programmes broadcast on BBC World News between February 2009 and July 2011 broke BBC rules aimed at protecting our editorial integrity. These rules ensure that programmes are free, and are seen to be free, from commercial or other outside pressures."
Making a direct reference to the FBC documentaries, it will say: "In the case of eight other programmes, all of which featured Malaysia, we found that the production company which made the programmes appeared to have a financial relationship with the Malaysian government. This meant there was a potential conflict of interest, though the BBC was not aware of it when the programmes were broadcast."
It concludes: "Editorial integrity is the highest priority for BBC World News, which is why we apologise for these breaches of our normal standards."
The Independent has revealed FBC, which was run by the former Financial Times journalist Alan Friedman and the CNN presenter John Defterios, was also making editorial programmes that featured FBC clients for the global business broadcaster CNBC, which suspended its FBC-made show World Business. Other FBC clients included the governments of Greece and Kazakhstan and companies like Microsoft. FBC also tried to suggest in its promotional literature it had "cultivated" key opinion formers, such as economist Jeffrey Sachs, as "ambassadors". Sachs totally rejected the claim.
When The Independent published its investigations into FBC the firm said it had kept strict divisions between its editorial and PR operations. FBC closed its London offices and went into administration in October. Broadcasting regulator Ofcom is investigating FBC.
Bad practice: The stories
Hosni Mubarak
As Egypt was in the throes of a revolution, the BBC commissioned FBC to make a documentary on the country. But the firm had a commercial relationship to promote Egypt as "liberal and open". The programme, Third Eye: Egypt, warned of the threat of takeover by Islamic fundamentalists.
Mark Thompson
The BBC director general has ordered an end to the practice of acquiring news programmes for "low or nominal cost" after the BBC admitted 15 breaches of its editorial guidelines and buying documentaries for "nominal" fees as little as £1 from a company that was working to promote foreign governments.
Malaysia
Since 2009 FBC has made at least four BBC documentaries dealing with Malaysia and controversial issues such as the country's palm-oil industry and its treatment of rainforests and indigenous people. The company has received millions of pounds in payments from the government of Malaysia for a "global strategic communications campaign".
Labels: BBC, BRIBERY, DOCUMENTARY
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Mugabe in black and white
PERCY ZVOMUYA - Jun 17 2011 15:09
The film Robert Mugabe ... What Happened? is premised on the idea that the Zimbabwean president was a political saint who, inexplicably, turned into a sinner. Mugabe, a staunch Catholic, would disagree with such an assumption; years ago in an interview with a British journalist he dismissed such a notion, insisting that “what I was, I still am”.
A passage in activist Judith Garfield Todd’s memoir, Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe, seems to confirm this.
She quotes from a rather long statement made by Aaron Mutiti, a war veteran, just before Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections in 1980: “What Mugabe himself has done to his fellow Zimbabweans in exile during the last three years deprives his hollow assurances of any credibility. Unless the people of this country are vigilant, they are in for a rude shock. Family life, religious life and economic life as we know it will progressively disappear if Mugabe gets to power. We must not close our eyes to this threat. He rates his communist ideology higher than people.”
If we are to use these two quotes, the epigrammatic one by Mugabe and the sprawling and incisive one by Mutiti, the question “what happened?” seems rhetorical and pointless. Mugabe has remained true to himself.
To answer this question Capetonian filmmaker Simon Bright talked to the Mail & Guardian‘s publisher, Trevor Ncube, exiled newspaperman Geoff Nyarota, activists Elinor Sisulu and Michael Auret (the latter also produced the film), academics Lovemore Maduku and John Makumbe, former minister and Zanu-PF insider Simba Makoni, writer and patriarch Lawrence Vambe, opposition politicians David Coltart, Paul Themba Nyathi and the recently deceased Edgar Tekere, farmer and former minister Dennis Norman and war veteran leader Dzinashe Machingura.
It is a largely underwhelming list featuring the usual people who have opinions about Zimbabwe.
Treasured wisdom
But the unearthing of Vambe and Norman, ageing wise men, is something of a coup. Norman, a member of both Ian Smith and Mugabe’s governments, gives the other perspective -- the view of the (formerly) propertied white elite. On the other hand Vambe, a peer of Mugabe, talks about him in the way an age mate would. Ncube, with a background in economic history, is interesting for his reasoned analysis and his attempts to understand the man he wrote about in his days as a journalist.
As most of the people in the documentary are sworn enemies of Mugabe, much of the middle-ground analyses come from Ncube, Vambe and, surprisingly, Norman.
It would have been interesting if past and present Mugabe acolytes such as Tafatawona Mahoso, Vimbai Chivaura, Enos Nkala, Jonathan Moyo and others had been given a chance to balance the narrative in the way Heidi Holland tried to do in her biography, Dinner with Mugabe, in which she interviewed both opponents and friends of the man. Other interesting voices would have been former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and his Mozambican counterpart, Joachim Chissano. I have seen these men in documentaries and other platforms on which they gave the other side of the story.
The film begins and ends with Mugabe’s ideas about democracy. “Democracy is a difficult proposition because the opposition will want more than they deserve,” he observes. (In 1980s Zimbabwe there was an attempt to establish what was called a one-party democracy.)
African democracy not ideal
I recently read Philip Gourevitch’s masterpiece on Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You that You Will Be Killed Tomorrow, in which he engages Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. If the Ugandan president had his way, he would practise what he calls a “no-party democracy”. It’s not that Museveni is a totalitarian; he believes that essentials such as “universal suffrage, one person one vote … free press, separation of powers” should be adopted by all, but that the particular form that democracy takes “should be according to situations”.
The problem, I hear you say, is that those who want to impose their own version of democracy are incumbents who stand to benefit from its practise in the particular ways they impose. I am far from convinced that democracy as it is practised in Africa is ideal, but until we get a “perfect” system we had better make do with what we have.
The documentary has great archival footage of a young Mugabe, looking dashing without the spectacles and sounding articulate. This is where the commentary by Tekere and Vambe is crucial. They know or knew Mugabe in ways most of us will never do. Even though Mugabe and Tekere fought until the latter’s death, he is buried in the National Heroes Acre, perhaps the only person who had a serious rivalry with Mugabe to be accorded the privilege.
One of the problems with the documentary is its lack of context. For instance, there’s an episode in which David Coltart (minister of education in the present government of national unity) talks about receiving a telegram from Mugabe in the early 1980s. What it doesn’t say is that he received it when he was a law student at the University of Cape Town.
Then there are strange turns of logic I couldn’t understand. Nyarota, for example, seems to think part of the “change” in Mugabe was because of the arrival of the incarcerated Nelson Mandela on the world stage, thus eclipsing the erstwhile icon. He thinks the “tragedy” we have witnessed could be “a reckless attempt [by Mugabe] to reinvent himself”.
Idealistic days
Such tilts of logic are balanced by intelligent voices such as that of Nyathi, who observes that Zimbabweans in the north (mostly Shonas) and the world at large should have shown interest in the fate of the people of Matabeleland, where thousands were being killed in the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s.
These faults aside, Robert Mugabe ... What Happened? is worth watching, if only for some of its great footage gleaned from vaults that go all the way back to the idealistic days of early Zimbabwean nationalism.
The Encounters documentary festival runs until June 26 at the Nu Metro on the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, and in Johannesburg at Nu Metro Hyde Park and at the Bioscope in the Main Street Life centre. The festival features 37 films from 14 countries and five continents, including 11 world premieres. There are 19 recent documentaries from South Africa. For schedules and details of panel discussions visit www.encounters.co.za.
Labels: DEMOCRACY, DOCUMENTARY, RHODESIA, ROBERT MUGABE
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Check out this excellent documentary online. There are lots of similarities with Zambia's experience with 'globalisation', including an entire Jamaican factory staffed by Chinese migrants. :)
From the lovely Stephanie Black. Just in case anyone still thinks that the IMF means well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsUXQhxb2to Labels: DOCUMENTARY, IMF, JAMAICA
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