Russia, China and the future of the BBC

The BBC has just announced the appointment of Steve Rosenberg as the first BBC News Russia editor. As Jonathan Munro, Interim Director of BBC News, rightly wrote, Rosenberg is “an expert in his field, and a passionate advocate of impartial reporting and analysis form Moscow and beyond”. He became a producer in the BBCs Moscow bureau in 1997 and in 2003 he became the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, a post he has held, with a break in Berlin (2006-10) ever since.

I am delighted for Rosenberg. He’s a still point in the changing world of the BBC’s European coverage and anyone who saw his interview with Alexander Lukashenko, the President of Belarus and Putin’s closest ally, will know how courageous he is. It was one of the best interviews with a tyrant I have ever seen.

So why do you sense that there’s a “but” coming? Several reasons none of which have anything to do with Rosenberg’s professionalism. First, why has BBC News only just appointed its first ever Russia editor? This is extraordinary. Not during the Cold War? Nor during the dramatic 1970s with the war in Afghanistan and the disaster at Chernobyl? Not in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up and the Communist regime fell? Nor during the early Putin years or when Putin started his attacks on Ukraine?

Second, until Sarah Rainsford (another fine BBC reporter) was expelled from Russia, the BBC had two TV reporters covering the whole of Russia. Consider how many reporters they have to cover the Westminster bubble. There needs to be a shift in the priorities at BBC News. The world isn’t what it was. It’s changing fast and those two authoritarian superpowers, Russia and China, are key players in these changes.

This brings me to a third point: China. Who is the BBC’ s China editor ? Carrie Gracie was appointed BBC News’ first [sic] editor for China, based in Beijing, in December 2013, but resigned at the end of December 2017/beginning of January 2018 over a pay dispute. Since then the post has not been filled, though John Sudworth and Stephen McDonell have been reporting on China for the last few years. Again, these have been extraordinary years in China, just as they have been in Russia. China has emerged as an economic superpower and has clashed with America, there have been fierce pro-democracy riots in Hong Kong, the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan and a growing entente with Russia.

Once again, there is a worrying disparity between where the big international stories are and the BBC resources available to cover them. Hence the importance of John Simpson and Lyse Doucet for BBC News, who are both hugely popular broadcasters, tremendously experienced (Simpson, now 77, has been a reporter for the BBC since 1970 and Doucet, now 63, has been with the BBC since the 1980s). But they are essentially troubleshooters, flown in to cover big international stories, usually wars, wherever they break out. Both have featured in the BBC’s Ukraine coverage. But both would readily admit they are not regional experts.

The world is changing and some of the most interesting intellectuals and historians have been quick to point out that there has been a dramatic shift in power from the liberal West to the authoritarian giants in Russia and China. This is the biggest story in our world today. But though the BBC has done a terrific job providing the resources and back-up for its superbly professional reporters in Ukraine, it has not done as good a job providing the deep background and preparing viewers and listeners for the extraordinary events of the past few weeks. The BBC’s attention was elsewhere. To be precise, it was on garden parties and Westminster flim-flam.

That’s fine (or at least the BBC would say it is) until the world changes, as it has done twice in the past two years with the Covid pandemic and now Ukraine, both of which have been essentially international stories which seemed to come from nowhere. Of course, they didn’t. We now realise there has been a fascinating back-story to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, dating back to the invasion of Crimea, 1991, the Stalin years or the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (choose your historian). We also should know by now there have been a series of devastating international pandemics since the 1980s at least, which have a deeply disturbing history.

Of course, leading figures at BBC News will say they haven’t got the financial resources they had twenty years ago. Regional editors aren’t cheap: Carrie Gracie was on £135,000 and left because she did not feel that was sufficient recognition; Jeremy Bowen was on £150-200,000 as Middle East Editor; and Jon Sopel was paid somewhere between £200-250,000 as North America editor. But then to run a bureau, you are on call to feed the ever-growing maw of a 24/7 rolling news channel. The BBC has the ambition to be a world leader in international news, but doesn’t have the financial resources.

That is a critical issue. But the more interesting question is whether the BBC has the intellectual ambition to run the pre-eminent international news service. Human interest stories arguably meet the needs of British viewers and listeners. At its best BBC coverage provides more: experienced international journalists on Dateline London , the interviews on HARDtalk and other good programmes on the BBC News Channel. But what about an international audience?

The really interesting opinion pieces on Ukraine have come from leading historians like Timothy J. Snyder, Anne Applebaum and Adam Tooze, not from pieces to camera from Clive Myrie and Jeremy Bowen. Of course, that’s not the job of TV and radio reporters. They are there to capture the drama of the bombing of a maternity hospital or the tragic choices facing families as they decide whether to flee and who might have to be left behind. And the BBC’s reporters do that very well. But whether with Wuhan or Ukraine, it’s always a question of finding the right balance, between analysis and human interest, between the drama of the immediate moment and the larger context.

Off the record, BBC executives will say, and have said for some years, that this is really about the licence fee and the Tory barbarians at the gate. True in part. But they will not acknowledge that they may get this balance wrong, especially on the big stories. Their instincts, again and again, are to fly in Fergal Keane and Clive Myrie to do what they always do superbly well. But as we try our hardest to make sense of what’s happening in Ukraine and our fast-changing world, is that enough?

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