If the scale of any BBC crisis can be judged by the number of camera crews outside Broadcasting House, the broadcaster’s position was pretty dire by Monday. Lens after lens was trained on its revolving doors, but none of those waiting outside, and few of those inside, seemed to know how much of the story about the presenter and the explicit pictures was part of a phoney war.
To recap, a story in the Sun on Friday night alleged that an unnamed BBC presenter had paid £35,000 to a young person for sexually explicit images sent from the age of 17. While their parents accused the presenter of fuelling a drug habit, on Monday the young person issued a statement through a lawyer saying there was “no truth” to the “rubbish” claims, and suggesting that the paper had ignored their denials.
Whatever sorry situation is at the heart of this story, it has already provided more than enough material to inspire despair about the state of the media industry.
Amid a flurry of tweets guessing at the name of the presenter on Twitter over the weekend, Elon Musk boasted of his platform on Tuesday: “You are free to be your true self here.” That “true self” had already led to many well-known BBC presenters being wrongly identified.
This kind of inaccurate and highly damaging rumour-mongering should be a boon to print media, given the traditional belief that truth and accuracy are the bulwarks of good journalism. Yet the Daily Mail determined that something it described as a straw poll, in which 49 out of 291 people “correctly identified” the presenter, should be splashed across its front page.
This treatment of a poll the Mail itself described as “indicative rather than scientific” seemed part of an attempt by the media to encourage enough members of the public, or just one of their political friends in the House of Commons, to name the man to avoid the potential legal bill of doing so themselves. In doing so, it hoped to heap further pressure on the BBC.
Even after the young person rubbished the claims, the Sun – a paper that used 16-year-old page 3 models – stood by its reporting. It cites the concerns of the parents about the money funding drug use; the allegation that the young person was 17 when the arrangement began, and therefore could not consent; and the failure of the BBC to speak to the parents. A spokesperson said: “It’s now for the BBC to properly investigate.”
BBC News at least fell over itself to do so, with a gusto that verged on the self-flagellation. Coverage of its own potential wrongdoing went wall to wall, with extensive reporting across the network and a race to get in as many critical voices as possible. Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor of the Sun, was interviewed, and stated that the broadcaster was “in a very, very precarious position”.
Is it? If the police investigation finds wrongdoing by a man using his privileged position at the BBC to exploit a young person who may not realise how wrong that is, the BBC’s position will be very precarious indeed, given the political and financial headwinds it faces. But that is very much an “if”. The story is complex – as those about sex and sexuality often are – but new allegations, this time broken by the BBC itself, that the presenter sent threatening messages to another young person, in their early 20s, is making the pressure on BBC management to act even greater.
Four days after the Sun’s initial story, there is still no published evidence to suggest anything other than deeply unwise, questionable behaviour . An investigation by a special BBC unit of the police is now under way.
According to its own published timeline, the BBC appears to have taken the matter seriously only once a tabloid newspaper got involved, but after a couple of attempts to contact the family members had failed. Such behaviour will do nothing to dissuade those who believe the BBC cares more about its critics in the media and parliament than about ordinary people.
That does not seem to be a big enough mistake yet to justify the Sun – owned by a man who has made no secret of his dislike for a publicly funded rival – making the BBC the central problem in this story. Meanwhile, the Sun demands answers from the BBC but provides very few of its own, such as why it chose not to publish the young person’s denial.
A newspaper columnist suggesting that a rush to judgment on a big story is the last thing anyone needs is hardly likely to prove popular, but the need for truth and accuracy in reporting has never been stronger. We may not like a powerful man paying another adult for explicit pictures, but if he has their consent, he is doing nothing illegal. It may interest the public, but it is hardly in the public interest that it stops.
Until the real truth of this story is known, all we know is that the growth of online media has done little to diminish the power of the traditional media to change lives, or the need for them to do so responsibly.
Jane Martinson’s book on the Barclay brothers, You May Never See Us Again, is due out in October
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