Source : Toronto Star

The recent turmoil at the British Broadcasting Corp. has not gone unnoticed in the world's entertainment capital.

Hollywood's town crier, Variety, conveyed the news in its usual style, reporting that "BBC director general Greg Dyke 'ankled' Thursday as the pubcaster attempts to find a way out of what is unquestionably its biggest ever internal crisis."

The high drama last week that saw the ouster of both Dyke and BBC chairman Gavyn Davies is the shocking outcome of an epic political struggle between two of Britain's most powerful institutions.

The 82-year-old BBC, greatest of all English-language public broadcasters, was found last week by an official inquiry, conducted by Lord Brian Hutton, to have erred grievously in broadcasting a report last year that accused 10 Downing Street of using "sexed up" intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability to convince skeptical Britons of the need to invade Iraq.

But for media executives in Hollywood, New York and Toronto, the larger story behind Tony Blair's exoneration by Hutton and the BBC's disgrace is what now becomes of the Beeb's remarkable ambitions of global commercial conquest?

Dyke, 56, was the most dynamic public-broadcasting executive Britain has seen in decades. He boosted the BBC's worldwide presence to more than 550 million homes outside the United Kingdom.

In partnerships with allies like Toronto's Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. and U.S.-based Discovery Communications Inc., Dyke launched BBC Canada in 2001, and now pipes the BBC America channel into 35 million U.S. homes.

Dyke also made BBC World's news shows a fixture on more than 200 outlets of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service.

While other converged media enterprises were imploding during Dyke's four-year tenure, BBC Worldwide's revenues have soared to more than $1 billion (U.S.), up from just $650 million when Dyke became director general in 2000.

The BBC now exploits the audience of more than 500 million English-speaking people outside Britain with books, magazines, apparel and other merchandise tied to current BBC hit shows like The Office and Coupling, and such golden oldies as Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous.

More ominously, that burgeoning overseas revenue stream was partly in service to Dyke's parallel effort at home to blunt the threat to the BBC's domestic news service.

In recent years, the Beeb began to take on Britian's commercial ITV network, Rupert Murdoch's Sky News and CNN International with an uncharacteristically aggressive approach to news and commentary.

Much as Canada's National Post set itself up as the "true opposition" to a Chretien regime lacking effectual critics in the Commons, the BBC's flagship radio show Today fancied itself a counterweight to Blair's lopsided majority in Parliament.

Determined to set the agenda of political debate and not merely recount the day's events, Today emulated the sharp-elbowed tactics of Fleet Street renown.

Indeed, Today and other BBC shows turned to Fleet Street for recruits such as Andrew Gilligan, the BBC defence correspondent whose fateful Today report of last May 29 was regarded by an enraged Blair as an attack on his personal integrity.

A more astute strategist than Dyke would have taken far more note of the explosive potential of that report, and the accumulation of enemies far beyond No. 10 who were poised to attack the BBC as it faces its first broadcasting -charter renewal in a decade.

Both Blair and the BBC's private-sector rivals have been fretting about Dyke 's empire-building ways. And the PM was further exercised by what he perceived as an antiwar campaign waged by the broadcaster known to Brits as "Auntie."

Patricia Hodgson, the BBC's own former strategy chief, warned last year that "the BBC is in deep trouble" with its next charter renewal, where ill-wishers are sure to castigate both the BBC's "standard of journalism" in the wake of the May 29 fiasco, and Dyke's stampeding "commercial activities."

Yet Dyke could likely have weathered those threats. He boasted impeccable New Labour credentials, having donated $80,000 to the election campaign that first brought Tony Blair to office in 1997. Blair himself has acknowledged the importance of bolstering the BBC as one of Britain's few international brand names.

Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph last year began its own campaign to reveal the BBC's antiwar biases.

Yet, as revealed in a study by the journalism department at Cardiff University, the Beeb was actually more inclined than its commercial rivals to give prominence to U.K. government and military spokespeople, and downplay Iraqi civilian casualty counts.

And, in a curious twist, the perception among U.S. viewers of the BBC's relative impartiality in war coverage put it on the map stateside, much as the first Persian Gulf war established CNN's indispensability. At one point, Murdoch 's New York Post lauded the BBC's Baghdad reporter, Rageh Omaar, as the Scud Stud of Gulf War II.

Dyke was luxuriating in progress on many fronts. These included the BBC's rating triumphs over ITV, its success in breaking Murdoch's satellite monopoly and the commercial bonanza of Teletubbies.

Dyke even managed to win acclaim as a bean-counter.

At the annual Banff television convention two years ago, Monty Python trouper John Cleese, the comic genius of Fawlty Towers, grumbled to a Globe and Mail reporter that "the official tartan of the BBC is small cheques."

Dyke took that tradition to the next level. He banished consultants from the BBC, and scrapped free cab rides and croissants for staff - a war on "the three Cs," Dyke called it. But Dyke ploughed the proceeds from his austerity campaign into an expanded budget for new programs, and emerged a hero among his front-line troops.

Yet Dyke's progress on so many fronts may have blinded him to the danger he was courting.

Months after No. 10 had made it clear its fight with the BBC over Gilligan's report would leave only one party standing, Dyke was in New York last November to accept an International Emmy for the BBC. Inspired by the witless Michael Moore's star turn at the Oscars, Dyke made the gratuitous observation in his acceptance speech that balanced coverage of the Iraqi conflict was "something which seemed to get lost in American reporting."

That remark, which triggered a firestorm of criticism at an inopportune time, only highlighted Dyke's own lack of judicious handling of the Gilligan affair. It had already been revealed that weeks after the provocative report was broadcast, Dyke had not troubled to review either it or the evidence to support Gilligan's claim - which was non-existent.

In his near-belligerent defiance of No. 10, which went on for months, Dyke and his senior managers had also failed to interview the producers of the Today segment, one of whom, in an e-mail not seen by Dyke, classified the inflammatory report as a "good piece of investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting" - an oxymoron for the ages.

In the end, Dyke lost the confidence of the BBC's board; he did not "ankle," in fact, but was forced to resign. Dyke's position had become untenable, especially in light of the upcoming BBC charter renewal.

Thousands of British journalists, BBCers and others, have taken to the streets across Britain to protest the actions of a vengeful government in suppressing truthful journalism. Dyke himself now warns of a continuing political assault on candid reporting.

True, last week's Lord Hutton report doesn't address the vastly more important question of the veracity of Blair's war rationale. Nor does it delve into the shameful conduct of unnamed government officials who identified as the source for Gilligan's report the weapons expert David Kelly, who committed suicide not long after becoming a public figure.

But Dyke, and British journalism, have been discredited not by a politically motivated Hutton inquiry.

The BBC's humiliation arises from the sloppy work of a single rogue correspondent; the incompetence of supervisors who allowed Gilligan to make one of the most serious allegations ever lodged against a British government in the form of an unvetted, off-the-cuff observation; and senior management who closed ranks, as large organizations tend to do, rather than accept the possibility of internal blundering.

This one crippling episode could undo the much larger legacy of a BBC dynamo who until recently was celebrated by Time, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal as a role model for private-sector media moguls.

Melvyn Bragg, the prolific BBC producer, recalled last week that his friend and colleague Dyke had gloriously transformed the culture and creativity of a BBC that was so demoralized in the late 1990s that it was "hated by its own staff."

But Dyke, at least in Gilligan's case, took loyalty to his employees and confidence in their practices much too far.

If the Pentagon erred in its rush to Baghdad, leaving the rest of Iraq vulnerable to rampant theft, sabotage and vandalism of possible sites of weapons of mass destruction, the one fault in Dyke's management style cited by Bragg is eerily similar.

Said Bragg: "The speed of Greg's advances was like that of an army which simply bypasses some tough castles and needs to go back and sort them out later. "

It's tragically too late for that now, in a case study of corporate governance that must now command the attention of every media enterprise.

© The Toronto Star