My Career at the BBC

Ken Shaw, National Editor, CFTO Television and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; David Milstead, Grade 12 Student, North Toronto Collegiate Institute; Rev. Dr. John S. Niles, Victoria Park United Church and 3rd Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada; Tony Burman, Editor-In-Chief, CBC News; Tom Clark, Host of W-Five, CTV Inc.; His Excellency David Reddaway, British High Commissioner to Canada; Anne Fotheringham, Owner, Fotheringham Fine Art, Director, The Canadiana Foundation and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Peter Mansbridge, Chief Correspondent, CBC News; Allan Fotheringham, National Syndicated Columnist and Author; and Lib Gibson, Corporate Advisor, Office of the President, BCE Inc.

Introduction by John Koopman

Your Excellency, Reverend Sir, past presidents, members and guests of the Empire Club of Canada:

The term "Fourth Estate" to describe mass media is generally attributed to that Irish-born, great British orator and parliamentarian Edmund Burke. In 1772, journalists first gained the right to publish parliamentary debates. Soon thereafter, Burke, believing that the press would soon become as important as Parliament, stood up in the House of Commons, lifted his hand dramatically towards the reporter's gallery and said: "There are three estates in Parliament but in the reporter's gallery yonder sits the fourth estate, more important far than they all."

A century later, another gifted but troubled Irishman Oscar Wilde, speaking of journalists, further built upon Burke's observation when he said: "Burke called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is really the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by journalism."

The recent passing of the Honourable Robert Stanfield, the best prime minister we never had, must give us pause to reflect on Oscar Wilde's observation. Who can forget those infamous photos of Mr. Stanfield eating a banana or fumbling a football and the impact that had on his career.

All humour aside, the BBC has an outstanding reputation of probity and it is built in no small part on the backs of journalists like Mr. Simpson. Mr. Simpson has publicly said on many occasions that he would see it as a great betrayal if viewers were able to infer a political stance from his reports. As Toronto's own Richard Needham once said: "Journalists go to great pains to give us honest, accurate accounts... of the lies told by politicians."

He has published three books and he presents the BBC's current and public affairs program "Simpson's World" which is broadcast in 200 countries. He also writes a foreign affairs column for the Sunday Telegraph. But of course the Empire Club has had many guests who have written books or hosted television programs. What makes Mr. Simpson different is that his experiences have been larger than life.

Mr. Simpson joined the BBC in 1966 after graduation from Cambridge as a trainee in Radio-News. Over the years he has held a variety of positions and was appointed BBC World Affairs Editor in 1998. He has reported from trouble spots around the globe.

He followed mercenaries fighting in the Angolan Civil War and was almost killed at Kinshasa Airport in the Congo. At Tiananmen Square after seeing two soldiers murdered, he saved the life of a third. He refused to leave Baghdad at the commencement of the First Gulf War and found himself telephoning a dispatch to London as a cruise missile swept past his hotel window. When at the start of the 1999 Kosovo conflict the Serb authorities expelled nearly everyone else from NATO countries, he remained in Belgrade to report. He attempted to enter Afghanistan disguised in a burka, and was wounded and nearly killed in a "friendly fire incident" in the Second Gulf War, which was his 34th war.

He also has the honour of being punched in the stomach by former prime minister Harold Wilson (so Jean Chretien was not alone in the Commonwealth in prime ministerial aggression).

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. John Simpson to the podium of the Empire Club of Canada.

John Simpson

Well thank you very much indeed John for a rather techni-coloured view of my history. In fact most of it seems to be terribly boring. I'm not doing much more than radiating the lies of politicians around the world. Because my job is to cover international affairs for the BBC, I just have a wider range of lies to talk about. But that's quite nice.

I apologize terribly for not having turned up here last summer. I can't even remember what it was now, but in the lives of people like me there's always something that seems to come up at the last moment. I hope you understand and you were very forgiving to invite me back. And it's absolutely superb to stand here talking to the Empire Club.

My wife is an Afrikaner from South Africa and had never seen snow until she looked out of the window this morning. Her ancestors were all banged up in British concentration camps and so forth, so she has a slightly, shall we say, quizzical view of the British Empire.

When I opened the letter last June, or whenever it was, and said, "The Empire Club of Canada wants me to go and speak to them," she said, "Yeah, that's exactly your level."

And so I'm delighted and honoured to have found my level, and to congratulate you on your 100th--now 101st-year. I could have done the century, if only I'd turned up properly and on time.

There are all sorts of people here for whom the BBC has reason to be profoundly grateful; people who ensure that it's seen in Canada on cable and in the various other ways--on satellite and so forth--and indeed is broadcast on CBC. We're terribly proud of our Canadian links.

Canada, to any journalist who works around the world, has considerable importance--particularly, but not only, to British journalists. I won't say which newspaper's Web site I look at, but it's rather a long name to have to type in every day. I look at that on a regular weekly basis in order to find out what Canadians think; what North Americans who aren't Americans think about what's going on.

You've only got to open any of the papers here to realize what an interest there is in the outside world and that the outside world isn't just simply Washington and Washington's relations with other countries, which is all you really seem to get for the most part in the American press. It's wider than that.

And it's therefore very, very important indeed for the BBC to be able to do well in Canada, because you're particular judges. You are judges who use a good deal of information and have a good deal of understanding, and indeed a certain element of scepticism about what you see. Now 1.2 million homes in Canada have opted for the BBC and have the service in their homes in addition to the seven million that can see our news bulletin every night at 6 o'clock on CBC Newsworld. That's really, really important to us.

When this last, most recent war happened, it was a very difficult time for any big national news organization, because it was going to be judged very carefully by both the people who were in favour of the war, and people who were against it. It was always going to be a difficult job for the BBC to report it well and accurately and in an unbiased fashion. There are all sorts of people in all sorts of levels of British life--not only British life but also American life--who think that the BBC didn't manage it.

But in Canada, for instance, we noticed that Canadians responded with great favour to the way in which we reported the war, not I think because our reporting was in any sense hostile to the war or to the United States, but simply because it was an honest a look as we could give of what had been going on.

You only had to look at the newspaper comments we received. I was reading them last weekend and was enormously impressed and flattered by how praiseworthy the coverage in the Canadian press had been of how the BBC went about it.

There was one line I really liked in one of the many, many letters we got from Canadian viewers. A lady with the very Canadian name of McDonald said something along the lines of how the presenters of the news asked awkward questions and the reporters didn't go in for gov ernment speak.

Now you see the problem is that with something as difficult as a war, people on both sides are going to want you to side with them. They want you to be the voice of their view. That was as true of the anti-war people in Britain and the world in general as it was of the British government.

The British government, as you will know, was fiercely critical at times of the BBC and the way it reported the war. It was fiercely critical at times of our reporting from Baghdad itself, although I noticed that in the last honours list the producer who worked for the BBC in Baghdad got an award of some kind, an MBE I think, A Member of the Order of the British Empire. I got the same thing and I thought how typical of the British to give you a membership of an organization which no longer exists. But I shouldn't say that to the Empire Club, should 1.

When times are hard, governments always look for support from their national broadcaster and they don't like it if they don't get it. The BBC felt it was the right thing to be as unbiased and objective about that war, as it tries to be about everything else. That, after all, is what it exists to do. It's bound to do that in its charter.

And so we did our best. I'm sure we got it wrong on lots and lots of occasions. I have indeed talked about it being a betrayal if anybody can spot what particular political line I am taking. I very much hoped that nobody could work out from what I was reporting whether I was in favour of the war or against it. It's one of those things that you'd rather not disclose in any sense.

When I made a joke, an ill-advised joke, which had something to do with George Bush and a piece of American shrapnel that I landed up with in what my doctor calls unglamorously my buttock, it got into the newspapers. That's not what I wanted to do. I didn't want to give the impression that somehow there's some personal element in this for me, because there wasn't and there isn't.

It was a joke, you know, but alas the British press, I've noticed, had its sense of humour surgically removed when it was created. It's very difficult to explain that things like people going around dressed up in burkhas when they're 6'2" and have size 10 feet, which happened to me in Afghanistan as John mentioned, do not get forgotten by the British press.

The difficulty I think, has been to persuade people that when Mrs. McDonald wrote to us and said that she didn't want to hear government speak but wanted the hard questions, that is actually not a siding with one particular side or the other in a dispute; it's actually the duty, the tone that ought to be taken.

There's a programme, which anybody here who's watched BBC World will know, called HARDtalk. When the chap who runs it, a very good friend of mine, Tim Sebastian, went to the Middle East to carry out a couple of programmes there, he went first of all to interview a member of the government. It was the Sharon government, the present government. He gave him the most bruisingly hard time that it was possible to imagine. Sometimes you even felt that the poor man could scarcely get a word in before he was interrupted by Tim.

An Israeli friend of mine said: "That was disgusting. When I was watching the programme, I thought it was like watching a Nazi interrogation. The man was asking questions; it was disgraceful; it was anti-Israeli; it was anti-Semitic." And he said: "The next day I saw he was interviewing somebody from Arafat's office, and he asked him the same kinds of questions and treated him just the same. So I thought that maybe there is something in this sense of balance that you're always taking about."

I think that is the way in which we operate. Our intention is to give everybody a hard time. The people who are getting it at a particular moment don't always enjoy it, which is why, alas, we have our present problems with the British government. Not really present problems. I think they've faded away except for the axe hanging over everybody's heads in Britain over the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of the British scientist Dr. David Kelly.

I only know what I read in the newspapers about this sort of thing and I'm sure that the British government and Tony Blair in particular are going to have a very hard time of it indeed. I'm also sure that the BBC is going to come in for quite a lot of criticism and complaint, because what we reported was 95 per cent accurate but it was 5 per cent inaccurate. And, frankly, I may not like the idea, I may find it irksome, difficult, worrying even, but we deserve to be given a hard time for not getting that last 5 per cent right.

It's boring to go into it really, but what happened was that the journalist involved, in one of those awful live things at the disgustingly early time of 6:15 in the morning, gave the impression that the main source for his information came from the intelligence services when it didn't. That was wrong and of course we'll get a caning for it. And we'll get a caning no doubt for how we treated it afterwards.

What we are planning to do, what we have already started to do, is to clean up our act. That 5 per cent and that one report which was inaccurate simply isn't good enough.

We've gone back--in a strange kind of puritanical way to the basics. We've gone back to simply being as unbiased on the issues of the day as we can possibly be.

I am one of the journalists that the BBC employs who has been writing a column every week. I've written it for 12 years for one of the newspapers in Britain. I write about foreign affairs; other people write about domestic affairs, about politics and so forth. I write for the great owner, former owner now I suppose, of the Daily Telegraph--a Canadian whom you may have heard of recently.

That's come to an end and it's rightly come to an end in a way. I don't like it because it means I get less money and I get less chance to have a crack at the people I don't like and do all the other things that columnists do. It is such a pleasure writing a column. You look at it and you think, "I wonder if I should really send this." And then you press the button and it goes, and you think, "Oh, well there's nothing I can do about that now." That's one of life's greatest pleasures really. It's less pleasant, of course, when you see the letters column the following day or the following week.

But that's come to an end and in a sense rightly too, although that's not necessarily what I told the boss of the BBC when he told me that this was what was going to happen. I think it is right to go back to the basics and not to stray near that line where you show people what you think has happened, what ought to have happened, whether you think it ought to have taken place in the first place and what you think is going to happen in the future.

I think you've got to be very careful about that if you're broadcasting to all sides in a dispute and when the very people who are paying your licence fee know that they ought to be getting a service where they feel that at least they're not being treated unfairly. You can't expect to like what's reported about you, I always think, but you can expect not to be treated unfairly, and that's the most important message that the BBC has.

It's got to slightly ludicrous levels in a sense. I was invited to put my name in to be the next chairman of the British Council, which is about as mild and decent and noble an organization that exists. It's the institution, which presses British culture on unwilling foreigners around the globe.

I couldn't think of a nicer job, and I have to say I could imagine the long line of theatre invitations and so on I was going to get, and was absolutely outraged and furious when my ultimate boss said to me that this would represent in some way a conflict of interest. I held the phone away while I screamed at him about how absurd that was, but in the longer run I'm not sure that he wasn't in a sense right.

People like me are employed by the BBC to broadcast as honestly and as fairly as they can for the BBC. It's not to ponce about, writing in the newspapers and being the chairman of rather nice sounding outfits. It is to be a reporter--an honest and plain reporter. Well, I've got the plainness at least.

I'm glad to see that the European Union now insists that one can go on working to age 70. That has got me just under the door as I am approaching my 60th birthday. I've been given a 10-year chance to continue. But I really would be only too proud, if that's not too pompous a way of putting it, to continue working for this strange but very highly principled outfit.

I was involved, as John said, in one of these absurdly named "friendly fire" incidents in Iraq during the war, and our translator, a good friend of mine, alas was killed. We did a documentary about it afterwards in which we went back to the translator's house. It was a very tense moment as you can imagine for me. Td had to break the news to his mother when it happened. To go back after three or four months was a very painful and nerve-wracking thing to do. I didn't know whether she might blame me for what had happened.

Instead she and the family were very pleasant because the BBC had actually been very generous to the family, as they rightly should have been. When we came to write the script for the documentary I said that the BBC had treated the family generously and that stayed in for about a week, I think.

Finally another one of the enormous number of bosses that the BBC seems to engender came to me and said, "You can't say that." So I said, "What do you want me to say? The BBC treated them meanly or something?"

"No, no, no, no, but you can't say generously. You can't praise the outfit like that." And I thought I knew what he meant. I think it's lunatic not to tell people when you have been generous, but there is that sense about the BBC that it wants to be as weirdly, weirdly honest as it can possibly be.

I'm very proud to have worked for it for so long and to have been, as John said, punched in the stomach not only by Harold Wilson but also by, I seem to recall, the president of Austria at one other stage, for asking the wrong kinds of questions. I'm very proud of my colleagues who do keep on asking the wrong kinds of questions.

I'm extremely proud to be here at the Empire Club talking to you. So thank you very much indeed.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Peter Mansbridge, Chief Correspondent, CBC News.