Some exam questions for James Harding

Appointing James Harding as director of news and current affairs of the BBC is a courageous move by BBC director-general Tony Hall.

He is an outsider and BBC staffers hate that sort of thing and he is a newspaper journalist with absolutely no experience of broadcasting. He was dumped as editor of The Times by Rupert Murdoch and unemployed and therefore in need of something to do with the rest of his life.

Yet Harding is also the right person for the job.

Even though there were capable and totally blameless internal candidates such as Peter Horrocks, director of BBC Global News, this time it simply had to be someone with a fresh approach from outside the BBC anthill.

The Pollard report, with its stinging criticisms of a dysfunctional news management given to silo habitats made that inevitable. And it’s not often that you just happen to have a freshly fired editor of The Times hanging around.

Apart from the obvious advantage of availability, Harding has a lot going for him. He is an experienced journalist not just on The Times but the Financial Times. He has an international outlook and speaks Mandarin and Japanese as well as, naturally, French and German.

Some say he was a bit too cerebral for Murdoch, but being on the bright side might not be too much of a handicap at the BBC.

Harding should be aware, if he is not already, that he will be in charge of around 3,000 journalists – any one of whom can drop him in the poo without warning at any hour of the day or night.

This week was a relatively quiet one with only Ding Dong – The Witch is Dead and John Sweeney disturbing the equilibrium of the place.

The danger with the BBC is that a “small” issue on either radio or television can be instantly fanned into a conflagration by the press and an army of tweeters.

Harding will face another problem and it is so serious that he should consult immediately with one who has trod the same path before him – Ian Hargreaves, the former deputy editor of the Financial Times, who became BBC director of news and current affairs under John Birt. Hargreaves too came entirely from a newspaper background.

The job drove Hargreaves nuts. He had never seen anything like it. At meetings Hargreaves would reach consensus with his executives and it was decided exactly what was to be done. Everyone agreed. And then they all went their merry way just as before. Unless you really jumped up and down nothing, but nothing happened.

Harding must be made aware of the danger signs that come when everyone agrees with him.

He might take a leaf out of the management book of former Granada chief executive Charles Allen.
Allen set aside Friday afternoons for ambush calls on his executives checking on the progress made on what they had previously agreed to do.

Nobody knows why Harding was fired as editor of The Times – probably including himself. You can take your pick from a collection that includes: falling circulation, not enough managerial dynamism, too vigorous coverage of the failing of News International after the Milly Dowler revelations, too liberal in support for gay marriage and perhaps opposition to greater integration between The Times and Sunday Times.

Whatever the reason there is one large question mark over Harding’s editorship of The Times: his failure to take the MPs’ expenses scandal and run with it.

It could have been that Harding was overruled by his then boss James Murdoch, although it is more likely that Harding himself was fastidious about the fact that the information had clearly been stolen and was being offered for financial gain.

Either way, The Times ceded the scoop of the decade to its great rival The Daily Telegraph.

In a way, such a failure might not be a barrier to success at the BBC. After all, BBC chairman Lord Patten admitted that the Corporation could never have taken the expenses scandal on board precisely because the information was purloined and sold for £100,000.

There is also a small piece of personal evidence of a major character flaw – the terrible allegation of being a phoney football fan.

When safely in China for the FT, Harding claimed to be a QPR supporter. Back in London, and offered a ticket to actually go and see his team, it was as if major surgery was being proposed. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

That aside, between now and August when he takes over, Harding will be able to get plenty of practice on mock exam papers with plenty of tricky questions…

When faced with Ding Dong – The Witch is Dead riding high in the charts in the week of Baroness Thatcher’s death Do You:

(a) Ignore controversy and run charts as they were
(b) Ban song entirely
(c) Play a five second clip and do a news report

The correct answer is (a) because interfering with the integrity of the charts is a very bad idea and as with all censorship merely draws huge attention to the issue you were trying to duck. Plan (c) is particularly bad – worse even than outright censorship – it is an arch attempt at a compromise which is clunky and attracts only much merited derision. Must have been good for the ratings though.

Is it right to hide a three-person reporting team amongst a bunch of LSE students on a potentially dangerous trip to North Korea even if some rather perfunctory, though disputed, information was given in advance? Answer: Yes or No.

If either Yes or No:

(a) Should you pull the programme on grounds that deception – on LSE students – was involved in its making?

(b) Go ahead with the programme as scheduled while claiming that the journalism involved was important enough to justify endangering lives?

(c) Go ahead with the Panorama edition but be rather more conciliatory and perhaps even apologetic about the issues involved?

The correct answer of course is (c). The programme was interesting but scarcely worth putting anyone’s liberty, if not lives, at risk. Of course it is interesting to see hospitals without patients and bottling plants without bottling. Yet most interesting part of the programme was the interviews with former residents of North Korea filmed in complete safety in South Korea.

Having filmed the thing and taken the risks it would have been bizarre not to show it. Lessons, however, should be learned about what constitutes informed consent and for the BBC to have a care about how the activities might affect others – such as academics legitimately visiting dangerous places.

Meanwhile, between now and August, James Harding can settle down to watch The Wizard of Oz and learn Korean in case those two exam questions come up again.