A big thank you to Guy Goma: the wrong man in the right place

20 May 2006

Rod Liddle salutes the Congolese man interviewed by mistake on the BBC, who revealed an uncomfortable truth about the way the media works

And much fun was to be had at the BBC’s expense afterwards. Here, after all, was the emperor revealed brazenly in the altogether; News 24, with its constant parade of expert commentators pontificating upon important events — well, actually, who is to say they’re experts at all, that we should pay any attention to their perorations? Maybe they are all as divested of expertise as Mr Goma. It’s not journalism at all, really — just a cheap and mindless method of filling up airtime. People who know nothing interviewed badly by people who know even less.

Ah, there but for the grace of God. Journalism is a house of cards which is too rarely dismantled by the sudden intrusion of the wind of truth — by and large, we are all happy to continue building the edifice and are not always terribly scrupulous about it, no matter how highbrow and prestigious the newspaper or programme. Here’s an example.

Many years ago I was a youthful producer on BBC Radio Four’s World at One; it was a good time to be a journalist because the world was in joyous tumult with the end of the Cold War. I was extraordinarily proud of myself to have secured for my programme an interview with Georgi Arbatov, head of the Soviet Institute for American Studies and an adviser to every Soviet president from Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev. What a coup! As the Soviet Union dissolved and geopolitical relations were being turned on their head, I had tracked down and persuaded one of the five or six most crucial and significant people in the world to talk to us live on air, in the lead slot. It was a good interview, too. Georgi said he wanted better relations with the USA and was in favour of world peace and disarmament. ‘We must all now be frentz, yes?’ he asked at the end, with benevolent rhetoric. His broadcasted comments were duly written up in the following day’s broadsheet newspapers.

But as I discovered when I spoke to him after the interview, they were not the views of Georgi Arbatov, close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, but the views of Georgi Arbatov, an insurance salesman from Minsk. Thank God, I mused later, reading the delighted reaction to his comments from Western politicians, that he was not a hawkish insurance salesman from Minsk: the missiles might have been leaving the silos.