High stakes in government feuds with BBC

With its dulcet tones and extensive reach into the synapses of the nation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has a presence in British living rooms that long ago earned it the affectionate nickname “Auntie.” The public broadcaster still is regarded as the default channel on big national occasions in Britain. And in the digital age, the BBC has evolved into a global, round-the-clock news brand, with a pedigree as the gold standard of independent journalism.

But Auntie also has a sharp tongue. And at the moment, the BBC’s words have embroiled it in unusually nasty and high-stakes clashes with two prime ministers: Labor leader Tony Blair at home, and Ariel Sharon in Israel.

The two leaders have accused the BBC of being reckless and unethical in recent coverage. Both prime ministers have fought back ferociously, contending the broadcaster’s lofty reputation makes it impossible to shrug off stories they believe are wrong.

These are not polite protests. Sharon’s government has severed relations with the BBC, denying it access to officials and refusing to rule out forcing the BBC to close its operations in Israel.

The Israeli government’s outrage followed the worldwide broadcast last month of the documentary “Israel’s Secret Weapon,” which examined the country’s alleged development of biological, chemical and nuclear arms and included a claim that Israeli forces used a mysterious new gas against Palestinians in Gaza in February 2001.

The Israeli government also has long-standing complaints about how it is portrayed on the BBC. The broadcaster’s overall attitude toward Israel is “verging on anti-Semitic,” spokesman Danny Seaman told British newspapers last week, adding that the BBC had an agenda “to delegitimize Israel [that] showed some of the attitudes once familiar in [the Nazi journal] Der Sturmer.”

The BBC issued a statement defending its reporting and said Seaman’s choice of words was “unfortunate.”

For his part, Blair contends the BBC did nothing less than “lie” when it ran reports suggesting that Downing Street manipulated British intelligence information last fall in order to -- as the BBC report put it -- “sex up” the case for war with Iraq.

Facing persistent criticism over the failure to uncover the banned weapons on which he largely based his case for war, Blair said he could not allow claims of doctoring intelligence information to go unchallenged.

“You could not make a more serious charge against a prime minister, that I ordered our troops into conflict on the basis of intelligence information that I falsified,” Blair said in an interview Sunday with the Observer newspaper. “The charge happens to be wrong.”

On Monday, both the broadcaster and the government rushed to claim victory after a parliamentary committee studying the handling of intelligence on Iraq issued its report. The findings were sufficiently vague to allow each side to assert it had been exonerated.

There is no sign anyone is ready to kiss and make up. The BBC’s battle with Blair is perhaps the most ill-tempered exchange between broadcaster and politician in recent memory. In an open letter to Downing Street, the BBC’s director of news, Richard Sambrook, accused the prime minister’s office of trying “to intimidate the BBC in its reporting of events leading up to the war and during the course of the war itself.”

Relations between the occupants of Downing Street and the rich broadcaster, which boasts eight TV channels, 10 radio networks and an annual budget of $4.25 billion, are, by nature, perennially fraught. Blair’s office already had a reputation for confronting and castigating journalists whose stories it didn’t like, a culture nurtured by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s acid-tongued communications director.

“Alastair’s attitude is you should keep the pressure on the media the whole time, keep them on the defensive,” said Lance Price, Campbell’s former deputy at Downing Street. “Especially the BBC. He likes to prod the beast and see how it reacts. And it works.”

Campbell’s tirades over coverage he deems unfair to Blair are legendary at the BBC. “Let’s just say a letter from Alastair is no rare thing,” one senior BBC journalist told The Times. The reporter said he had seen some of the private correspondence Campbell sent to BBC executives during the Iraq war, and the language was “very, very bitter.” The current storm, which has been front-page news in Britain for two weeks, stems from one controversial BBC radio report.

On May 29, the broadcaster quoted a single, unnamed official who alleged that in the months leading up to the war, Downing Street insisted -- against intelligence advice -- on pushing the dubious claim that Saddam Hussein’s regime could launch chemical or biological warheads in as few as 45 minutes.

Campbell and Blair first tried privately to get the BBC to retract the allegation. When the BBC refused, and after what he described as “a sheaf of correspondence,” Campbell took his argument into the public arena. On June 26, in testy exchanges with the House of Commons committee investigating the use of intelligence on Iraq, Campbell said he found it “incredible that people can report, based on one single, anonymous, uncorroborated source, that the prime minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence agencies, people like myself, connived to persuade Parliament to send British forces into action on a lie.”

“Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on, that correspondence file will get thicker, and they had better issue an apology pretty quickly.”

Instead, the BBC fired back with its own accusations. In another open letter, Sambrook said Campbell was “conducting a personal vendetta against a particular journalist whose reports on a number of occasions have caused you discomfort.”

Tha prompted Campbell to show up unannounced at the studios of rival broadcaster Channel 4. In a moment that would be comparable to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer storming ABC’s World News Tonight to trash the journalism at NBC’s Nightly News, Campbell walked onto Channel 4’s live evening news broadcast for an extraordinary 10-minute finger-jabbing attack on the BBC.

“I don’t want 12 pages of weasel words, sophistry and a defense of unethical journalism,” he said of the BBC. “Far better would be a 12-word apology.”

The BBC said it would not apologize. On Sunday, the broadcaster convened a meeting of its board of directors, which reviewed the reporting that went into the original story and then came out counter-punching. The board “emphatically rejects Mr. Campbell’s claim that large parts of the BBC had an agenda against the war,” its members said in a statement. “We call on Mr. Campbell to withdraw these allegations of bias against the BBC.”

The BBC’s refusal to cave in has astounded critics. For one thing, the broadcaster’s top executives are Labor government appointees. Chairman Gavyn Davis, an economist, is a close friend of Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (Davis’ children were part of Brown’s wedding party and his wife, Sue Nye, works as an unpaid advisor to the minister).

And Director-General Greg Dyke, the BBC’s senior day-to-day executive, was widely regarded with suspicion by his journalists when he was appointed in 1999 because of his personal links to Blair. His arrival aroused public anxiety about whether the BBC would keep its independence, especially after it was revealed that the independently wealthy Dyke had donated more than $70,000 to the Labor Party (critics took to calling the BBC the Blair Broadcasting Corp.). But he has shown feistiness in his defense of BBC journalists during the current furor. “We all think Greg has come through wonderfully,” a BBC journalist told The Times.

The broadcaster also is operating under the shadow of having to apply to renew its 10-year charter, or license, in 2006. That charter is awarded at the government’s discretion, and several official reviews of how the BBC provides its services are pending.

Meanwhile, private broadcasters and hostile right-wing newspapers have begun grumbling about the license-fee arrangement that provides the BBC with about 90% of its revenue. Each household in Britain pays $183 annually for the right to have a television, something critics describe as a cultural poll tax.

For their part, both Downing Street and the Israeli government insist the issue propelling their anger is the BBC’s responsibility to a higher standard of journalism. Tabloid newspapers can tailor their coverage to conform to particular political views, Campbell told the House of Commons committee, saying he happily did so himself back when he was an “avowedly pro-Labor, anti-Conservative” editor of the Daily Mirror.

“The BBC is different,” he said. “The BBC has got a deserved reputation around the world, but when they have bad journalism amid the good they have a responsibility to admit that.”

Seaman echoed that theme in an interview in Jerusalem with The Times.

“It’s the organization we have a problem with,” he said. “If it had been any other organization, it wouldn’t have mattered so much.”

“But because of the reputation of the BBC and because of the history, it compounds the disappointment.”

Times staff writer Megan K. Stack in Jerusalem contributed to this report.