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• Stephen Fry
• Sir David Attenborough

For translating the high falutin’ theory into actual programmes is tough. Lord Reith defined the BBC’s role as entertaining, informing and educating – and insisted on objectivity and impartiality as values underpinning everything. I think that remains a pretty good starting point but I would go further.

Today’s ever more strident commercial values and pressures are undermining the private sector’s capacity to sustain an independent truth-seeking media even as the powerful are becoming ever more astute in hiding what they want to hide. I argue for a reassertion of Reith’s ideas – a new Reithianism. Put simply, a public service broadcaster has to enlarge and enrich my life as a citizen by trying to establish the truth of matters across the range of its programmes – in drama and documentary as much as in news and current affairs. It follows that we should ask three questions of the BBC. Do its programmes enlarge our lives as citizens? Has there been a diligent attempt to capture the truth of the matter? Is it proactively ensuring that it is serving the public realm by making sure information is available to the universe of citizen viewers and listeners?

The centrepiece of the BBC’s role in our lives as citizens is thus the provision of information. It must furnish news that is objective and impartial. It must provide for discussion and debate that fairly reflects a wide range of views. It must in its documentary and current affairs provide us with a depth of analysis that deepens understanding. It must be creative and energetic in ensuring that every citizen in these islands gets the chance to join in. And in all these areas we need to know that the programme makers are attempting to find and tell us the truth of the matter. They may not always succeed. They must always try.
Here there is an encounter with three more pivotal words – truth, objectivity and impartiality. Michael Jackson, one-time chief executive of Channel 4 and a former controller of BBC One and Two, once said that public service broadcasting was a redundant piece of voodoo. There was no such thing as objectivity or truth; rather there was a plurality of objectivities and truths depending on your vantage point and values. Instead of trying to deliver programmes which struggled for an unattainable balance and objectivity, it was much better for programme makers to break out of the straitjacket and offer a plurality of deliberately partisan programmes so that viewers could watch those that conformed to their prejudices or which aggressively challenged them.

I could not disagree more with Jackson’s view, or the post-modern view of truth that lies behind it. I think many of Channel 4’s subsequent problems – crystallised by the rows over Big Brother or the doubts that the excellent expose of Islamicist fundamentalism in Undercover Mosque could be true because of the channel’s unenviable record of dodgy editing excused because truth is only in the eye of the beholder (a referral which today the police and Crown Prosecution Service apologised for…) having being robustly sued by Channel 4 and the programme maker) – root back, in my view to Jackson’s mistake. It has been good to see that Channel 4 itself in its latest mission statement – Next on 4 – wants to recommit to what it once considered voodoo. For there are truths about matters, and they can be sought even in hard circumstances.

One of the most memorable demonstrations for me of the idea of objective truth-seeking in public service broadcasting was 25 years ago during the Falklands War; Brian Hanrahan, restricted by war-reporting rules, was reporting from the aircraft carrier Hermes about the numbers of Harriers that were returning during a raid. He had counted them out, he reported, and he had counted them all back in; and none were shot down. Not only the British public believed him – but so did a world public. Everybody knew that this was classic BBC objectivity, that the reporter and entire organisation were committed to truth and tried as far as they could to broadcast it, and that Hanrahan had counted the planes out and counted them back. These values were an important reason why our cause was more legitimate than the Argentinian juntas.

Getting to the truth of any matter is tough – but the BBC sets itself this task every day. As a national community we allow it to drop or qualify that mission at our peril. When broadcasting began in the 1920s the US imposed the fairness doctrine on its broadcasters in the same way Britain established the Reithian values that underpin the BBC; in a world of spectrum scarcity it was clear that those privileged to occupy it had to commit to fairness and truth-seeking.