US newspapers came up trumps on Trump where TV failed …

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/16/us-newspapers-trump-tax-nbc-bbc-roger-mosey

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Top BBC executives past and present naturally think well of the BBC. So Roger Mosey, who might have been Tony Hall’s number two if he hadn’t chosen Selwyn College, Cambridge, instead, holds corporation custom and practice high as the final Trump crunch nears.

“People like me who spent decades in the BBC are used to ideas of impartiality and balance. When there’s a general election in the UK, the stopwatch comes out and … each party is given an arithmetical allocation of airtime. You will hear equally from the Conservatives and Labour, and a specified amount less for the smaller parties,” he tells readers of Varsity. “In the US, this kind of regulation disappeared decades ago; but even so there has traditionally been an attempt at ‘fair’ coverage… ”

Not any longer, Mosey fears. Trump, “a brazen creator of news”, has blown all that apart. “I have, in my time as a journalist, sometimes been dismissive of regulators and what may appear to be a ‘nanny state’ approach to broadcasting in a time of unlimited digital choice. But what has happened in the US this year makes a formidable case for the kind of public broadcasting that remains strong in Europe.”

Up to a point, Master Mosey. It’s undeniable that, on TV especially, Trump has got away with policy murder, and that Fox News has become a macabre joke. But two events in the past few days seem to have decided this whole campaign.

One is the New York Times’s publication of a Trump tax return that reveals why and how he may have paid no federal taxes for 18 years. According to some, the decision to print this return broke American law – straightforwardly, deliberately, but for good purpose. Would the BBC, in the last reaches of an election or referendum campaign, have challenged its own legal advice quite so boldly?

And then there’s the foul tape of locker-room-bantering Trumpism that came out of NBC’s Access Hollywood archive. Who found it? A producer rummaging in cupboards? What did they do with it? Handed it up the corporate chain to top TV execs and their legal eagles. What did they do? They havered and pondered until someone sent a copy to the Washington Post, which promptly put the whole stinking package on its website.

Full marks to the Times and Post. They did what journalists are there for. They reported the news. They changed this election. But TV and its learned friends behaved like huge corporations with something to lose. They sat on their hands too long.

And what – just one more time – would the BBC have done, with fairness, balance and licence-fee retribution lowering large? Was its treatment of the Brexit referendum – in facts or disclosure – anything to write piously home about? The Mail and Express are taking an axe to Broadcasting House these days for noticing that the pound has gone pop. If we are doomed to spend the next two-and-a-half years arguing about what the vote meant, how does that reflect on the sharp focus of the coverage of the time? Fair or just fairly useless?