They could say no because they were unconvinced that the very strict criteria for launching such an appeal had been met by the 15 aid agencies asking for the appeal under the umbrella of the Disasters Emergency Committee. My memory from being involved in DEC appeals whilst Head of Press at CAFOD was that such appeals could only take place when the agencies could prove that the humanitarian need was huge, that there wasn’t enough money in their coffers to meet that need, and that they had strong evidence that the funds raised could translate into real aid delivered to the right people on the ground. The latter was one of the reasons initially given by Caroline Thomson and was bewildering to those of us who know the agencies would never have submitted a request for a televised appeal unless they could guarantee delivery on the ground. Bizarrely even this potentially good reason was promptly withdrawn.

Another good reason would have been that the Humanitarian aid sector is becoming increasingly political. While I was at CAFOD there was a battle afoot between those who wanted to stick with the traditional Red Cross model of neutral, humanitarian aid based on need and others who favoured a more political approach which linked relief to good governance, peace-keeping and other more political goals. My understanding however is that the unconditional humanitarian wing have triumphed so far and anyway this potentially good reason to say no wasn’t even mentioned by the BBC.

So no good reasons and lots of bad ones.

I agree with Mark Thompson that BBC news journalism must be impartial and I love the fact that reporters discuss and dissect every aspect of this at great length in news rooms. But this decision should never have had anything to do with journalistic impartiality. These DEC appeals are effectively free adverts for a charity appeal negotiated many years ago in a unique deal with newspapers and broadcasters for use only at times of exceptional humanitarian disaster. The fact that they are carried in newspapers or at the very end of the news does not make them journalism and to my knowledge no-one watching Stephen Fry or Fiona Shaw popping up in a clearly badged DEC appeal has ever mistook this for an extension of the news. The BBC news must be governed by journalistic rules about impartiality. DEC appeals are governed by an entirely different set of criteria and the two should never have been merged in the way they have this week. So the impartiality argument is a bad one

In an extension of the bad impartiality argument BBC bosses say that BBC can’t proceed because of controversy over the conflict which triggered the appeal. Well if that’s the case the BBC should be honest and announce a review of all humanitarian appeals which result from conflicts – ruling out many of the biggest DEC appeals of recent years.

And in one of the worst arguments of all, Thompson argued on the Today programme that impartiality applies to whole of the BBC’s output not just news, prompting my friend to say he looks forward to the dramatisation of Mein Kampf to balance the recent success of Anne Franks’s Diaries.

The other bad argument was that a BBC report recently criticised the corporation for undermining its independence by joining forces with today’s populist campaigns. If that means I don’t have to watch any more all day concerts interspersed with celebrities who have flown in from LA to tell us about their recycling habit I for one will rejoice. But again DEC appeal adverts which have taken the same format for many years have no link to such campaigning. And if you think I’m getting overly negative here – just don’t even get me started on the line that the Beeb may reconsider running the appeal some time down the line when the political conflict has died down!!!

The widespread anger at the BBC’s decision has allowed the bosses to retrospectively cast this as an example of the corporation taking a strong brave and principled stance on a tough issue. I can’t tell you how much I would love to believe that. I spend a large amount of my life with BBC journalists and the one thing they do not report in the post-Hutton and post Sachs-Gate BBC is a culture of bold and brave decision making. This decision was made by a defensive BBC management who have lost their way and are consumed by uncertainty and self doubt about how to deal with criticism of impartial reporting. There are many good reasons to say no to DEC appeals. I am still waiting to hear one from the BBC.

Fiona Fox

Director, Science Media Centre

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