Khalid Aziz: Still legal, decent, honest and fair? (From Hampshire Chronicle)

Khalid Aziz: Still legal, decent, honest and fair?

2:56pm Wednesday 15th August 2007 in

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SO BBC employees are to attend seminars on "Truth and Trust" following the recent own goals perpetrated by them and other broadcast media.

Naturally the newspapers have had a field day at the expense of their traditional enemies, but of course Fleet Street is no stranger to mendacity.

Indeed the majority of the population believe that the concept of "journalistic ethics" is the mother of all oxymorons. And they may be right. Having spent over 20 years in broadcasting and rubbed up against and even written for the print media, it strikes me that the last vestiges of any decency left in media are finally and inexorably falling away.

I am not particularly fussed about the phone-in scandals as, frankly, if people are daft enough to take part through the misplaced notion that they are exercising some kind of quasi-democratic power, then caveat emptor.

This is not some corporate calumny perpetrated on the chav classes, helpless to restrain their dialling digits.

If spending a quid on a phone call relieves an otherwise short and brutish life, who are we to deny them?

When I joined the BBC in 1970 we had it dinned into us (not through seminars but by example) that we had to be "legal, decent, honest and fair". These days the media just about manages to cling onto the first of those qualities (though dubiously when it relates to high profile court cases where the tabloids regularly drive a coach and horses through the sub judice rules, watched, it seems, by an increasing supine judicial system) but the others have gone hang long ago.

Amidst all the hubris surrounding the misrepresentation of the Queen in the yet to be aired documentary - Mark Thompson at the BBC suddenly discovering that urgent remedial action is required (where has he been looking up to now?) or Michael Grade disingenuously attempting to claw his way to the moral high ground, whereas at Channel 4 he presided over programming that was anything but decent - one aspect has gone unreported.

The Queen is an 81-year-old woman who will never retire. While others of her generation can reasonably be expected to lead a life of ease, glass of sherry in hand and looking forward to the next trip to the bingo hall, our sovereign has to keep on going.

Even if it was true she had a hissy fit, was it really fair to make large of it to a bunch of hacks in the craven hope that they would help boost ratings? No, of course it wasn't, and that is why the controller of BBC1 should have resigned - for his poor judgment and a lack of fairness. No amount of seminars can teach that.

It used to be done by those of proven sound judgement mentoring the young, callow and unschooled.

The BBC should look to its illustrious history for real and lasting solutions to present ills.