Output details

Archive on 4: When Reporters Cross the Line (Broadcast on Sat, 3 Dec 2011, 20:00 on BBC Radio 4)

The BBC Radio Four programme ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’ was transmitted on Saturday 3rd December 2011 in the ‘Archive on Four’ slot at 20.00.This programme was written and presented by Stewart Purvis and based on research he had undertaken with Jeff Hulbert, Honorary Research Fellow at City University London. It asked where the notion of ‘impartiality’ reporting came from and how it was first implemented. It then explored the line which divides impartial content from opinion and propaganda and how it has been drawn and redefined over the past 80 years. It highlighted that the statutory requirement for impartial journalism was imposed on ITV before the BBC. Through rare archive audio, described as ‘extraordinary’ in a Sunday Times preview, files in the BBC written archive and the National Archives and interviews with distinguished correspondents it charted developments from pre-wartime censorship and disputes between broadcasters and Government to more authored styles of reporting including Martin Bell’s ‘journalism of attachment’.

The programme was the distillation of research from 83 BBC sound files, 282 documents in the BBC Written Archives, National Archives and Churchill College Cambridge and 15 video files in the ITN Archive. (Many more details available.) Purvis also conducted interviews with Frederick Forsyth, Martin Bell, Sandy Gall and Michael Buerk and extracts - mostly challenges by Purvis as to whether they had ‘crossed the line’ - were included in the programme.

The audio also included a previously untransmitted attack on Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy in 1938 by an M.P., Harold Nicolson. He was invited by a newsreel to record his views at the height of the Munich crisis but the film was never shown in any cinema. Stewart Purvis and Jeff Herbert, archivist, discovered it in ITN’s film archives where a number of newsreels are stored.