South African journalists may have forgotten the name of Andrew Gilligan, but he’s alive and well, visiting the country this week as a guest of the Rhodes journalism school.
He’s the former BBC journalist who reported last year that the British government, led by Alistair Campbell — spokesperson for Prime Minister Tony Blair — had ”sexed up” its Iraq intelligence dossier to bend public opinion to attacking Baghdad.
Gilligan’s report, based on an interview with scientist David Kelly, set off a series of seismic waves that few, if any, other journalists are ever likely to notch up:
- Following the broadcast, the government ”outed” Kelly as his source.
- The pressure proved too much for the scientist, who then committed suicide.
- This tragedy saw the government appoint the Hutton Commission of Inquiry.
- The result was a controversial report released in January that badly browbeat the Beeb for Gilligan’s report.
- In short order, the chairperson of the BBC board of governors then resigned, followed the next day by the director general, and the day after by Gilligan himself.
- British public opinion backed the autonomy of the BBC, and eventually Campbell had to go.
So what does Gilligan make of all this now?
Speaking in Cape Town this week, he frankly admitted that part of his original report was incorrect and he expressed regret. Here’s the tantaliser: he added there is a bigger thing he is ashamed of, which predates the ”sexed-up dossier”.
To recap some detail of the story:
In his infamous broadcast — a live, early-morning Q-and-A from his home with the anchor in the studio — Gilligan correctly attributed to his anonymous source (Kelly) the view that the intelligence community was unhappy with Downing Street massaging its info for political ends.
The prime example he said his source had cited was how the original intelligence had specified that Iraq may have had capacity to launch battlefield chemical weapons in 45 minutes.
In the Campbellised-document subsequently released by the Blair government, this information was hyped to imply that Baghdad did in fact have the capacity. Worse, it was left ambiguously open for readers to assume this capacity was long-range (strategic) — as distinct from tactical weaponry deployed on a short-range battleground. In other words, that Saddam Hussein could threaten the United Kingdom directly from Iraq.
(The dossier produced exactly this misinterpretation in the headlines in the Evening Standard — a slant all too convenient for the war case.)
In his broadcast, Gilligan had also said that the British government knew this rendition of the 45-minute information was false. In his early-morning bid to piece the story together, his mistake was to misattribute this (otherwise correct) judgement to his source. This bit was, however, his own logical deduction.
It was this blatant impugnment of the integrity of the Downing Street that provoked Campbell into escalating his attack on the BBC. The chink in the reporter’s journalism became a portal for a full-out attack on the broadcaster. Baghdad had been beaten (so it seemed), now the BBC needed to be brought into line.
Led by Campbell, pro-war elements in the government railed against the fact that no one at the BBC had pre-vetted Gilligan’s remarks. Their draconian demand was that everything henceforth should be scripted and checked before going out to the public.
It seemed for a moment as if the mighty BBC might become his majesty’s government’s voice. That this did not happen is, in part, thanks to the better sense of the British government not to try to push home its advantage. And probably, Blair beginning to realise that Campbell and Hutton had gone too far.
Since these events, the gist of Gilligan’s report has been vindicated several times. Even Blair has admitted the intelligence was wrong (though he blames the intelligence services for this, rather than his right-hand man for having manipulated their information).
So what does Gilligan regret more than his misattribution error? It is other information that he did attribute — correctly, but without scrutiny. As he elaborated to the Cape Town journalists, he said he was guilty of reporting without interrogation claims by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon. This kind of journalism means ”you then become the spokesperson of the spokesperson”, he said.
In Gilligan’s view, this kind of journalism is easy to do because it is politically ”safe”. It is simply a variety of ”he said, she said”, which does not cause a stir, because it does not establish when a person is misrepresenting something.
Giving the contemporary example of the US presidential contest, Gilligan said the media have reported the Republicans’ challenge to Democratic candidate John Kerry’s war record, and then Kerry campaign’s rebuttal. Missing is independent journalistic scrutiny of the different versions. The actual truth of the matter remains elusive.
As Gilligan spoke, the problems he raised resonated almost audibly among his audience:
For a start, although apologies are few, we too make serious journalistic mistakes. In its haste to pin down its story about Bulelani Ngcuka being a spy, City Press last year went beyond the allegations of their sources. While Mo Shaik’s report said the African National Congress had concluded Ngcuka was probably Agent RS452, the headline in the paper made no such qualification.
The same story represents a classic case of the dangers of ”he said, she said” reporting. It was the paper becoming uncritical spokesperson for a character who, by his own admission, carried the flag of Deputy President Jacob Zuma (a man with good reason to sink Ngcuka). No real scrutiny was done of the allegations.
Finally, there is the murky world of the politics-intelligence interface with media as the go-between. South African journalists last year were largely out of their depth in the spy claims story, such that the media ended up as a football between fierce political foes seeking to score goals in regard to public opinion.
There is another, almost ironic, parallel with Gilligan’s experience. The Evening Standard, which uncritically punted the 45-minute claim as if it were fact, is now his new employer. In South Africa, Wally Mbhele, the erstwhile City Press deputy deeply implicated in publishing the Ngcuka spy story, is now a senior staffer at the Sunday Times, the paper that refused to publish the smear.
And former Sunday Times editor Mathatha Tsedu, who resisted the pestering of Ranjeni Munusamy to publish the unverified claims, is now editor of the City Press.
It’s highly probable that British journalists could find the experiences of Mbhele and Tsedu as salutary as Gilligan’s is to South Africans.