I thought I'd just drop a transcript of this here. Sometimes, I glean more by reading than listening.
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But now on BBC Radio 4, here’s Roger Bolton, with Feedback.
RB:. What makes the BBC special? In the view of this listener, it’s the willingness to bite the hand that feeds it, which is what the podcast “Nolan investigates” has just done.
Listener: “I praise the BBC for this much-needed investigation in their name which is absolutely in accord with its traditional principles and values of impartial reporting in the public interest.”
RB: In Feedback this week, I’ll be talking to Stephen Nolan and his colleague David Thompson about their investigation into the Corporation’s relationship with the LGBTQ+ lobby group, Stonewall, and asking why the BBC doesn’t seem to want to answer their questions. And talking about impartial reporting, the Secretary of State Nadine Dorries thinks there’s a lack of it at the BBC. But is impartiality in the eye of the beholder? I’ll be examining some new proposals with a member of the BBC’s Executive Committee.
[trailer teasers for the next two segment of the programme]
RB: The broadcaster Stephen Nolan likes controversy and doesn’t duck a fight. But his latest investigation has been partly into his own employer. The ten-part BBC podcast ‘Nolan Investigates’ looked at the influence of the lobby group Stonewall, which is a LGBTQ+ rights charity. He asked whether the BBC and other organisations such as the Scottish and Welsh governments, and the media regulator Ofcom, have become too close to Stonewall, and in effect allowed it to unduly influence their policies in controversial areas, such as the right of people to self-declare their own gender - which is a position that isn’t supported by UK law.
Unusually, despite frequent invitations, both Stonewall and the BBC declined to be interviewed for the podcast. This is a flavour of the investigation –
[Unknown female voice]: “Cis” is a word used by, again, you know, one side of this particular political campaign, to put, make women sort of a subset – biological women, a subset of ‘woman’ as a, as a, as an identity, OK, and people on the other side of this argument really object to that, they find that word ‘cis’ incredibly offensive.
SN: Does the BBC now use the term ‘cis’?
[UFV]: Uh, I’ve seen it in our editorial, yes – I’ve seen it on our website – I’ve seen it on our website.
SN: Are we using it because Stonewall have told us to?
(Talking over each other)
[UFV]: You know sometimes …
DT: Maybe we could find out from the BBC with Freedom of Information, this is presumably …
Listener 1: Mary Owen, Lancashire. I want to register my appreciation of the superb investigative journalism, by Stephen Nolan and David Thompson. Their rigour and focus reveal the complexity of processes that have been conducted behind closed doors. They conveyed genuine curiosity, and by sharing their conversations, where they unpacked and made sense of their discoveries, they provided clarification for the listener.
Listener 2: Alex from Dudley. I would like to commend Nolan for investigating a powerful lobby group with influence with so many companies and public sector organisations, whose present PR strategy seems to consist of declining most interviews, whilst denouncing even their mildest critics, or anyone who understands basic biology, or is exclusively same-sex attracted, as bigots. I am particularly impressed that Nolan was allowed to investigate the BBC itself.
Listener 3: Abigail Hogg. It is brave of the BBC to broadcast this podcast, because it does not show the BBC in a good light in places. But it is public service broadcasting at its best, and please do not bow to people who say that the podcast is transphobic. You’re giving people who subscribe to Gender Ideology the chance to speak. And if what they say does not stand up to scrutiny, that is their problem.
Listener 4: Gez Grove. I find it particularly disappointing, the failure of the BBC, over all ten episodes, to put up a single interviewee to defend its position on a serious matter of investigative journalism, commissioned by the BBC itself. I am also saddened by its decision not to broadcast the series on its leading news and current affairs radio station, BBC Radio 4, when this is clearly a podcast that has much to contribute about some of the leading social and political issues of the day.
RB: Well I’m delighted to be joined by journalist Stephen Nolan, and his assistant editor David Thompson. Steven Nolan, I would have expected quite a lot of criticism, and we appear only to have praise. Does that surprise you?
SN: It surprises me big time yeah, and there has been criticism but, but David and I are gobsmacked by the amount of praise that we’ve got. Nolan Show in Northern Ireland we nearly on a daily basis deal with very very controversial material, that’s the nature of Northern Ireland, and we’re used to getting a lot of complaints, we’ve never seen this amount of praise.
RB: Presumably, you have had some negative criticism. What’s the nature of that criticism?
SN: Well the nature of it is that there are some people who feel that if you ask questions about Stonewall, then you are ‘anti-gay’, and that’s how they’re trying to frame it. Or we are ‘anti Gay Rights’, and that is ludicrous. Stonewall is a, a lobby group, and therefore it is completely within the standard practice of any journalist to ask a question of a lobby group that is interacting with public institutions to the extent that we saw they are; and by the way – and David, you’ve a strong view on this - Stonewall do not speak, they are an effective lobby group, they have many supporters, but all gay people don’t think the same.
DT: Well absolutely, one of the really interesting consequences of the podcast was the number, dozens of people from within the BBC, almost all women, who contacted us to say ‘Thank you for doing the podcast, I felt that I couldn’t raise some of these issues, I couldn’t report on some of these issues.’ And many of those people are from within the LGBT community. So the idea that Stonewall are somehow the arbiters of what is good and what is bad for LGBT people is questionable.
SN: I’m just hungry as a broadcaster, as an interviewer, to have someone in the BBC in front of me, and for me to ask them that obvious simple question which is – “A lobby group were setting a league table, and the BBC were trying to climb up it – why does the BBC give a hoot how high or how low it is, up a political lobby group’s league table?”
If people are listening to the podcast and criticising it, fair enough. Where we get slightly frustrated is those people who haven’t listened to the podcast, and they’re just kneejerking into questioning our journalism, because we’re asking questions of Stonewall. Stonewall are not this elite group beyond questioning – they can’t be. No organisation, or no individual, should be.
RB: The podcast, because you’ve got ten of them in this instance, the length of the podcast is not as tightly controlled as it would be on the broadcast network – ‘Sorry you’ve got twenty seven 30 that’s it, off you go’. But you have the room to explain things that you don’t have on broadcast radio.
DT: Yes, because on the podcast we were able to go into lots of detail about the different gender identities, about the debate on sex and gender in a way that you wouldn’t have had time to on the radio. And by doing it in the podcast format, we could take our time and step through all of the thigs are quite complicated and need a lot of time for people to get their head around.
SN: Our goal here Roger was not just informing people about some of the detail. It was trying to break down the fear factor of talking about this at all. So there is no doubt that people have been frightened even making a contribution into this debate, and a public service broadcaster needs to jump right into the middle of that territory if that ever happens, where there are contentious issues, there are issues which are contested. And if people are frightened of speaking about them, then the BBC needs to facilitate them speaking about them. And we just thought we should put our heads above the parapet and do that.
RB: It’s not just about talk about the issues, it’s finding the language with which to talk about them, because the language is so contested, so just using terms which are so heavily contested must have been a bit of a minefield for you, wasn’t it?
SN: Totally. I didn’t know what half of it meant, and I was learning as I went along and there’s one of the episodes in this podcast where some of the people, you know, the editor of Pink News – is he the editor David or the CEO? – [DT confirms CEO] – he wasn’t able to tell us what some of these terms meant, and I think that there is a lack of basic knowledge among the wider population – how can they contribute? Some of them are frightened, and some of them don’t understand the language.
RB: This is quite extraordinary, you investigate the links between Stonewall and the BBC, and Stonewall won’t talk to you – OK maybe you expect that, but then the BBC won’t talk to you about that. Did you expect such, what I would think of as an extraordinary response from your employers?
SN: Well – you see, I would differentiate, I don’t think it’s relevant that they are our employers. What I think is relevant is that they are a major institution in the UK. I do think that it’s important for the BBC to answer those questions. That’s why we’ve asked them, and the fact that they haven’t answered the questions doesn’t make the questions go away.
RB: What would you say was the key question you would have wanted to ask them, if they had put themselves up for interview?
DT: We wanted to know, did Stonewall have an influence on the BBC’s editorial, that was the key question throughout the podcast. It was what we sought to find out through Freedom of Information. The BBC blocked that request, and we wanted then to speak to some of the people who’d been involved in these decisions. And no-one was available.
SN: So what were the conversations between the BBC and Stonewall? Why are licence-fee payers not allowed to know what those questions were, what those discussions were, and what came out of those discussions?
RB: Is that because you feel that the BBC has effectively copied into its policies Stonewall policy, and Stonewall policy in a number of these areas is contested?
SN: There is a suggestion, there is a question, as to whether that happened or not, and all we’re trying to do and we were adamant about this, and I think this speaks to the BBC’s impartiality, I do not think it is in conflict with the BBC’s impartiality. The podcast that we made was enabled by the BBC, was funded by the BBC, we were given the freedom to make it, but what we are doing here is treating the BBC like we would treat any other organisation. And we’re a pretty robust couple of journalists. If a government body says ‘no comment’ to us, we push and push, y’know, we appeal FoIs, we are not used to taking no for an answer.
RB: Our thanks to Steven Nolan and David Thompson. And in response to that interview, the BBC provided us with this statement
“BBC acts independently in all aspects of our operations, from HR policy to editorial guidelines and content. We aim to be industry-leading on workforce inclusion and take advice from a range of external organisations. However, we make the final decision on any BBC policies or practices ourselves. We do not take legal advice from Stonewall and we do not subscribe to Stonewall’s campaigning. The charity simply provides advice that we are able to consider.”
RB: And ‘Nolan Investigates’ can be found on the podcast page at BBC Sounds. And, please do let us know your thoughts about that, or anything else to do with BBC radio and podcasts. ….