As an organisation the BBC has encountered much criticism in recent years, to the extent that there are questions over its very existence and Sunday perhaps demonstrated one of the reasons some would like to see its authority undermined.
We live in a world where sheer
weight of numbers means spin doctors, particularly but by no means exclusively in the world of politics, have the upper hand on journalists most of the time, controlling the delivery of messages
and agendas.
However, using the sort of format that makes ‘America’s Game: The Super Bowl Champions’ some of the finest documentary viewing in sport with its combination of talking heads and insightful footage, the BBC showed exactly why it has the capacity to represent value for the vast sums of public money that are injected into it with its definitive account of one of the ugliest episodes in recent British history.
‘Hillsborough’ graphically recounted the events of 1989 in a way that brought home the scale of the tragedy of a day on which 96 people failed to return home from a day out, as never before.
We have become used to ever bigger numbers in terms of terrorist atrocities or climate provoked calamities so seeing one individual after another relaying their memories of that day and its aftermath, knowing as we watched that there would be no Hollywood-style salvation for any of them, was educative, compelling and utterly essential. However what was most important of all was the intensity of the examination of the cover-up that happened thereafter.
It is hard to imagine that anyone who watched that programme would have the slightest doubt about the need to bring charges against those who oversaw the process of undermining grieving families by seeking to create a narrative that was focused upon the drunkenness of Liverpool fans through the interviewing methods and the ‘review and alteration’ process applied to the records of the day’s events by the police themselves.
The hurt of decent bobbies was as clear as that of the victims’ families as they recounted how they had come to learn what had been done by their superiors and what was inescapable was the clear evidence of where the directive for that approach was conceived.
Initially those reporting on proceedings seemed to have a pretty good handle on what had happened and even after senior policemen looked to save their own skins by making claims that were untrue, The Taylor Report offered an account that placed the blame where it should.
It was the desire of politicians to protect those senior policemen who
had frozen and indulged in a blame game rather than take the remedial action that might have saved many lives, which took this from tragedy to something deeply sinister and indicative of the attitudes prevalent in government at that time.
In reflecting on that we must consider who we regard as being truly culpable when state-sponsored crimes are committed in other domains, whether it is the soldier on the ground, his commanding officer, the military strategist or the commander-in-chief.
It was plain in the course of Sunday’s programme that whether their leadership was given through direct command or through implied instruction, the way this was handled was decreed by a woman who was accorded a state funeral three years ago and her lackeys.
Some will choose – not least because of the current political environment in Scottish politics when those few among us who revere the Thatcher legacy are celebrating having achieved a lower share of the popular vote than anything she achieved at general elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987 – to view these observations as themselves being opportunistic and politically motivated.
In anticipating that, it is hard to believe how short memories seem to be, particularly among supposedly left-leaning individuals who seem to have placed Unionism ahead of other ideals in terms of their political priorities last week. While watching ‘Hillsborough’
it was impossible not to wonder how many of them had made the correlation between those responsible for these manipulations of ‘the truth’ and the modern day and reflected on their own actions three days earlier.
That, though, is genuinely a side issue in the wider context of a world in which the collective resources ava ilable to journalists to investigate the establishment in all walks of life are, compared with what is available to those seeking to ensure that those establishments are protected, a fraction of what they were in 1989.
For a long-time critic of aspects of the BBC, in particular the narrow and tokenistic nature of its coverage of Scottish sport, this was a vital and perhaps overdue reminder of why it remains a vital component in the type of society we claim to want to live in.
The establishment must continue to be placed under proper scrutiny then held to account when necessary and the BBC is one of the few organisations with the resources required to do that properly.
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