The BBC. Tom Mills
was ‘neither commandeered nor free’.14
In the meantime, the BBC leadership were in any case not mindful to report impartially on the dispute. Reith maintained close contact with the Cabinet at all times and was flattered that the BBC had been trusted to responsibly represent the ‘national interest’. He famously remarked that the government ‘know that they can trust us not to be really impartial’. Indeed, so ‘partial’ was Reith that at one stage he assisted the prime minister by inserting lines into a key speech he was about to broadcast from a desk in Reith’s home study. The BBC’s first director general later wrote that he and his wife, ‘thought we would get a little brass plate put on the desk as the speech was such an important one, and was really instrumental in breaking the strike’.15
In the aftermath of the strike, Reith wrote a ‘highly confidential’ letter to senior BBC staff in which he referred with pride to the prime minister’s ‘gratifying trust in the Company’s loyalty and judgment’.16 BBC staff replied with a memorandum commending Reith’s ‘magnificent leadership’, which they said had ‘carried the BBC through the crisis with its prestige not only maintained but greatly increased’.17
In his efforts to avoid the BBC being commandeered, Reith had made arguments which were strikingly similar to those advanced by the Cabinet ‘moderates’. He wrote to Baldwin urging him that if the BBC were ‘commandeered or unduly hampered or manipulated now, the immediate purpose of such action is not only unserved but prejudiced’. ‘This is not a time for dope,’ he argued, ‘even if the people could be doped. The hostile would be made more hostile from resentment.’18 Whether Reith persuaded Baldwin and Davidson of this position, or vice versa, or they arrived at it more or less independently, is less important than the fact that their interests were closely aligned. Both the government and the BBC wished the latter to be perceived as independent. But while the BBC naturally favoured total freedom, from the perspective of the government the question was how much pressure was expedient for its purposes.
Moreover, the convergence of interests at the senior levels of the BBC and the government was not just a meeting of minds. During the strike, the BBC was further integrated into the infrastructure of the British imperial state. Reith moved into an office in the Admiralty, where Davidson and his team were based.19 With him came several other BBC members of staff, including Walter Fuller, who had recently been appointed editor of the Radio Times, and the BBC’s deputy managing director and head of public relations, Gladstone Murray.20 Both men shared an office with Davidson’s liaison officer21 where they worked together in ‘close collaboration’, drafting news bulletins from information received from the regional civil commissioners and other government sources.22 News from Reuters, which itself had come under covert government control during the First World War, was passed on from the BBC to the Admiralty before being approved or amended as deemed appropriate and sent back for broadcasting. All bulletins were submitted to Davidson for approval, and Reith recalls that he too personally vetted ‘almost every item’.23
The BBC’s chief engineer at the time recalls ‘the staggering experience’ of witnessing ‘bias by elimination’, despite having been ‘proselytizing the BBC as the impartial public servant’.24 This crucial evidence has rarely appeared in accounts of the strike,25 which have tended to focus on controversial editorial judgements rather than the fact that BBC news was routinely shaped around a partisan political agenda.
The failure of the BBC to assume anything resembling an impartial position during the General Strike has been readily acknowledged in the many histories of the BBC and British broadcasting, although the extent of these failures and the level of collusion between the BBC and the government has been hugely underplayed. The classic account is offered by the Corporation’s first official historian, Asa Briggs, who writes that the BBC ‘maintained a precarious measure of independence throughout the strike’.26 This is broadly correct. Reith worked hard to ensure that the BBC was not ‘commandeered’, and this meant at times making significant compromises. But the conventional readings, which see the episode as something of a bumpy start on the road to more substantive independence, are misconstrued. They overlook the extent to which the compromises reached during that early period of crisis set in place terms of the BBC’s relationship with governments, its incorporation into the Establishment, and arguably the state itself. A precarious independence has in fact defined the BBC’s institutional existence ever since, and the highly circumscribed notion of impartiality it developed in parallel with state institutions has also proved enduring.
Briggs’s successor as the BBC’s official historian, Jean Seaton, concludes her discussion of the General Strike by noting that the compromises and accommodations reached between the broadcaster and the government during that early period of crisis gave rise to an enduring ‘ethic of political neutrality’ at the BBC, drawing on a tradition of propaganda based not on the dissemination of falsehoods, but a strategic ‘selection and presentation’ of information.27 Indeed, both J. C. C. Davidson and Reith shared this same ‘ethic’. They associated propaganda with explicit falsehoods, or emotive material, and saw themselves as responsible distributors of accurate information, distributed in the national interest. In a confidential report following the strike, Davidson wrote:
When the Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner was appointed it was understood that he would be the member of the Government responsible for publicity and it was agreed that he should not make himself responsible for any propaganda but should confine himself to acting in the capacity of collector and distributor of Government news, censored when necessary but undoctored.28
This was a notion of propaganda that would be operationalised again by the BBC and the British state during the Second World War, and one that would become deeply engrained in the BBC’s institutional culture.
The ‘ethic of political neutrality’ led to some curious contradictions. This is well illustrated by a memo from the BBC chairman during the General Strike, which decreed that the Corporation should ‘maintain an objective news service’ and
try to convey to the minds of the people generally that the prolongation of the general stoppage is the one sure process calculated to reduce wages and the standards of living which it is the avowed endeavour of the Trade Unions to maintain and improve; and to try to make it clear that the sooner the General Strike is satisfactorily terminated the better for wage earners in all parts of the country.29
Seaton characterises the BBC’s stance during and after the General Strike as a ‘denial of politics’. But her account is less suggestive of a naive idealism than an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the state. Not so much a denial of politics, as a profound identification with, and subordination to, a particular set of institutions and governing arrangements which profoundly influenced the Corporation’s culture and editorial practices. An internal BBC report drafted in the years after the General Strike noted that there was no censorship in its early news service, but since the BBC maintained ‘close touch with the appropriate departments … the bulletins fell in line with Government policy’.30
Given the close embrace between the BBC, the government and the Establishment, should the BBC be understood as a ‘state broadcaster’? Champions of public service broadcasting in politics, journalism and academia have sought to distinguish the approach pioneered by the BBC from more overtly politicised models elsewhere, more readily referred to as state broadcasters. Seaton, for example, claims that the BBC ‘never has been a “state” broadcaster’, since it has ‘income separate from a state grant’, and elsewhere she has noted that its senior personnel work independently of government direction and do not change with changes of government.31 But the BBC’s income has been readily wielded as an instrument of political influence throughout its history, while the other features Seaton points to are shared by a good number of non-partisan state bodies. Indeed, the British Civil Service shares with the BBC its core values of political impartiality and objectivity, as set out in the Civil Service Code. Reith, for his part, considered that the BBC had been established as a body constitutionally committed to public service, and ‘certainly not as a department of state’,32 and while this much