Reading Fraser’s post last night, you’d be forgiven for thinking the BBC is
running up the white flag in terms of its global reporting. Yesterday — as Gaddafi was breathing his last in Sirte — Coffee House was praising Sky and Al Jazeera, and pouring scorn on
the BBC’s “stifling bureaucracy”, accusing us of being “short sighted”, “slow-moving” and being constantly “bested” by others in terms foreign
news. There’s only one problem with Fraser’s analysis: the facts don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Timing is everything. Yesterday the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse was the only UK broadcaster in Sirte. On the biggest day of the eight-month story, only the BBC was at the site where Gaddafi was killed — not much point in racing to Tripoli if you’re not there for the death of the dictator.
Yes the BBC is in the middle of change — some of it enforced by the Spending Review and our decision to freeze the cost of the licence fee, but some also by design. We want to ensure that we deliver real value for the licence fee payer when the BBC begins funding the World Service in 2014. That’s why we want to create a single reporting operation, working across the English & language service to join-up our journalism. That’s not retreat — quite the reverse. It’s an ambitious plan to innovate and deliver better value for those who pay for us — something I’d have thought CoffeeHousers would support.
Yesterday, dozens of public radio stations across the United States dropped National Public Radio’s respected “Morning Edition” breakfast show to take the World Service’s rolling coverage of Gaddafi’s death. In the major US markets, public television broke into their schedule to simulcast the breaking story from BBC World News. Last month the BBC took the top prize for its website at the US Online Media Awards, beating the New York Times and other international news organisations. Two days later, we beat all the US networks to win the Emmy Award for Sue Lloyd Roberts’ reporting from North Korea.
The BBC may not be Fraser’s first choice, but I’m delighted it is the choice of more than 250 million people each week around the World — including many in Libya. In Tripoli’s ancient souk last month, an elderly Libyan wearing an England football cap came up to me and proudly reeled off the names of the presenters of Newshour, the World Service’s flagship news programme. He’d braved Gaddafi’s secret police and a poor shortwave signal for decades listening to the BBC. Today he listens in crystal clear quality on FM thanks to a deal done with the NTC by the BBC’s “slow-moving”, “stifling bureaucracy,” soon after the fall of Benghazi.
War is not a competition. I salute the courage of my colleagues who have braved much over the past eight months to report from Libya — and those from Sky, Al Jazeera & ITN who have risked
all to tell an important story. Today we remember colleagues lost and friends injured. Too many have paid a heavy price in Libya.
Jon Williams is World News Editor of the BBC.
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