Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

BBC Blowing It

I've mostly stayed out of the BBC fracas, but if true, this is pretty damning. The Wall Street Journal says that another reporter at the BBC, who testified before the House of Commons that she felt pressured by management to modify her coverage of the Kelly affair in order to corroborate Andrew Gilligan, has released a tape that seems to belie Gilligan's central claims:

Ms. Watts released a tape of her last conversation with Dr. Kelly, who makes clear that he is not in a position to assert that Mr. Campbell inserted anything into the intelligence report. Ms. Watts said of her conversations with Dr. Kelly, "He didn't say to me that the dossier was transformed in the last week and he certainly didn't say that the 45-minute claim was inserted either by Alastair Campbell or by anyone else in government. In fact, he denied specifically that Alastair Campbell was involved in the conversation on May 30 ... he was very clear to me that the claim was in the original intelligence."

But I don't think that it's quite right to report this as a question of bias. Andrew Gilligan may be biased, but he was also a reporter looking for a sensational story to advance his career; if indeed he lied, I don't see that bias is a more powerful motive than fame. And the BBC is hardly the first institution to close ranks and stonewall when confronted with allegations of wrongdoing.

I think there's a more valuable libertarian point here: the problem with the BBC is not that it leans left. It is that because it is funded by a mandatory tax, which British television owners have to pay regardless of whether they watch it, the BBC is fundamentally unaccountable. There is, of course, an oversight board -- but such regulatory boards, over time, come to be captive of the institutions they regulate for a number of reasons described here. Because there is no market discipline -- and their charter renewal is comfortably far away -- the BBC can afford to stonewall. The New York Times didn't clean house after Jayson Blair because they thought it would be fun, or even the right thing to do (clearly Pinch didn't think it was the right thing to do, or he'd have done it immediately). No, Pinch fired Howell Raines because the other shareholders, worried about what the scandal would do to the long-term value of their stock, forced him to. Just as companies have been changing their accounting for stock options long before regulatory changes were proposed, because they wanted to secure the goodwill of the market. It is easy to forget, in these politicized days, just how good the markets generally are at keeping executives accountable.

Posted by Jane Galt at August 14, 2003 6:07 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links