Why BBC1's head should roll over this royal row

12 April 2012

When the row broke over the misleading BBC television trailer for its programme about the Queen I smiled at the chorus of press disapproval. It seemed wholly disproportionate to the "crime".

The BBC seemed to be hung out to dry, yet again, for a small matter. It was the innocent victim of an error of judgment by an independent producer. I was therefore convinced that the knee-jerk demands for the resignation of the BBC1's controller, Peter Fincham, were inappropriate.

He had not lied, as some critics suggested. He had been fooled.

As a reporter who had attended the press launch pointed out, when Fincham introduced the promotional tape which showed the Queen grumpily objecting to instructions from the photographer Annie Leibovitz, he appeared as amazed as everyone else at the scene which showed the Queen walking out in a huff.

Once the truth emerged about the chronology of the footage having been manipulated, for which RDF Media has since apologised, he certainly appeared to have acted with all due speed.

So my sympathies for Fincham remained consistent as he carried out his round of TV and radio interviews in order to damp down the increasingly hysterical criticism.

However, I did think he was rather inarticulate, failing to argue his case with the usual aplomb I associate with senior BBC executives.

Indeed, he was so hesitant that I missed a salient point during his interview on Friday's Today programme when John Humphrys asked him when he knew about the mistake.

"Later that day," he replied, adding: "It came to my attention well after the presentation on Wednesday morning." In fact, I understand that he discovered the awful truth at 7pm, some nine hours after journalists had seen the footage.

At this point he made a ridiculous error of judgment. Instead of immediately issuing a statement to the press he allowed himself to enter into a lengthy negotiation with the Palace.

For a senior figure in the media industry, that was a daft decision. If he had made a public announcement at once it would surely have gone a long way to mitigating the anti-BBC stories that appeared in papers on Thursday morning.

For an ordinary member of the public to make that mistake is understandable. For a supposedly media-savvy man working in Britain's biggest media organisation it amounted to dereliction of duty. He had fiddled while the headline writers were doing their worst.

By contrast, the Palace garnered all the sympathy.

Think back to what he had done.

He had shown that footage to a group of journalists with the specific aim of generating as much publicity as possible for a BBC programme.

Yet, in spite of being aware that those journalists were being briefed by the Palace about how the footage had been wrongly spliced in order to provide a false impression of events, he kept silent.

Did he not say to himself at any stage, "we're wasting time here. Let's just get our side of this across as soon as possible before those papers go to press"? How could he sleep that night knowing the truth? Fincham's failure was not one of principle but one of practice and, it should be said, extraordinary naivete. In the world of 24/7 media, that was as bad an error as it was possible to make. His procrastination is the reason he should resign.

That may appear unfair, but the role of a senior executive is to act in a clear-headed fashion when confronted by unforeseen events.

Instead, faced with a crisis, Fincham mishandled it.

Has the BBC learned nothing in the wake of the affair that led to the "resignation" of its previous director-general, Greg Dyke? It was his heat-of-the-moment response to Alastair Campbell's complaint about the disputed Andrew Gilligan broadcast speaking out in support of his programme-makers without having first carried out a proper inquiry that led to his downfall.

My advice to Dyke's successor, Mark Thompson, is to ensure that his senior staff, all his staff, know how to deal with the media. What an irony. Therefore, to make his point, pour encourager les autres, his first sad task must be to accept Fincham's resignation.

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