As the Jimmy Savile scandal continues, and it becomes
clear that the repercussions for the BBC will be grave, the question has been
asked continuously: surely someone at the BBC must have known what was going on?
Kevin Marsh, author of Stumbling Over Truth: The Inside Story of the Sexed Up Dossier, Hutton and the BBC, spent 28 years at the BBC, and he joined the Guardian’s Media Talk podcast with John Plunkett, to discuss the scandal. Listen here.
But this is not the first time the BBC has been engulfed in scandal - 8 years ago the Hutton Report, which personally criticised Kevin, editor of the Today programme at the time of the infamous Andrew Gilligan broadcast, was published. The scandal created today's BBC. Will the Savile scandal have a similar effect? That waits to be seen, but for a firsthand account of the Hutton inquiry, Kevin's book is well worth a read.
The Hutton Inquiry cost the BBC its Chairman and Director General and seemed to many to usher in an age of self-doubt and caution. It was also the end of the most extraordinary experiment in news management Britain has ever seen – the decade of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, charged with delivering what Peter Mandelson described as New Labour’s mission to ‘create the truth’.
But Lord Hutton condemned the BBC and its journalism without hearing a single word from the man who put the ‘sexed up’ dossier story on the air: Kevin Marsh. Had Hutton done so, his conclusions would surely have been very different.
Now outside the BBC, Marsh can tell for the first time the inside story of Andrew Gilligan’s notorious 6.07 broadcast on the Today programme. He explains how he was certain the story of the ‘sexed up’ dossier was true, but also how Gilligan’s ‘flawed reporting’ fatally damaged the BBC’s case. And he tells of his growing disillusionment with the British media’s aptitude and appetite for holding power to account – or even telling the truth.
Stumbling Over Truth is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the toe-to-toe confrontations between Tony Blair’s government and the BBC, and the fight to resist unremitting government attempts to manipulate the media.