Nadine Dorries fought back tears. Speaking in the British House of Commons, the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport thanked British journalists who are “risking their lives” to report live from the war zone in Ukraine. Her voice breaking, she thanked “all those journalists who work for the BBC, ITV and other news channels who are risking their lives to bring us unbiased and accurate news from a war zone”. She wanted to “express my heartfelt thanks and my admiration” to them.
It was a remarkable performance in several respects. On the one hand, there was the obvious emotion that one rarely sees in the House of Commons, especially from Conservative MPs. Above all, however, the speech represented a media-political U-turn. Just last month, she announced the abolition of the BBC broadcasting license fee by 2027. The minister had identified most British broadcasters, but especially the BBC, as a journalistic enemy that needed to be fought because of their critical reporting on the behavior of Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the corona pandemic.
The journalist Matt Frei provides an impressive example of tough interviewing from the Ukraine
It was the intensified continuation of one that had long been pursued by Dorries’ Tory party politics of undermining public reporting. The fact that Dorries now praised the “impartiality” of the same broadcasters was mainly due to the fact that the Russian government is no longer the focus of media attention, but rather their own.
One of the most impressive recent examples of tough interviewing has been Channel 4 journalist Matt Frei’s conversations with Russian academics and politicians who support and justify Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Born in Essen, the son of a Deutschlandfunk correspondent who has lived in Great Britain since he was 10, he worked for the BBC for a long time, including as a Washington correspondent. He has been with the public service Channel 4 since 2011; since the beginning of the Russian invasion he has been reporting directly from Ukraine.
Channel 4 News reporter Matt Frei reports from Ukraine.
(Photo: Screenshot/Youtube/Channel4)
In his conversation last Monday with Putin apologist Dmitri Suslov, whom the German media has repeatedly quoted as the “America expert from the Moscow School of Economics,” he asked: “Do you seriously believe that these are Ukrainian missiles? who kill Ukrainian civilians?” Suslov replied that he had seen no evidence that Russian missiles had destroyed “Ukrainian objects”.
During the three-minute conversation, Frei kept asking what the Russians want in Ukraine, emphasizing that all the Ukrainians he spoke to personally wanted the invaders out of the country. Suslow argues that Iraqis would also have liked to see the Americans leave their country in 2003. “So the sins of the Americans justify the sins of the Russians?” Frei asks. “Yes, of course they do!” replies Suslow very loudly.
The BBC is now distributing instructions on how to receive its messages on the dark web in Russia and Ukraine
In another interview with former politician and diplomat Nataliya Narochnitskaya, Frei says, “They may have an Afghanistan right on their doorstep, and we know how that ended with the fall of the so-called Soviet empire. How does that end here?” “It will have the same happy ending as Nazi Germany, and we will withdraw as soon as this noble and honest goal has been achieved,” says Narochniskaya. But it is undoubtedly a “drama” for everyone involved. “It might be a drama for you in your office in Moscow,” Frei replies before ending the interview. “It’s far worse for the people who are being killed here in Ukraine.”
Channel 4 was systematically boycotted by the Tories for a while because it reported the most critical of all British channels about Brexit and corruption within the ruling party. That brand of fearless journalism has now been lauded by Nadine Dorries, who until recently was unaware that the station is not publicly funded but that her own ministry is its public sponsor.
The extent to which the BBC in particular is still trusted as an independent news provider can be seen from the fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to record hits on the station’s Russian- and Ukrainian-language news pages. The BBC’s Russian website has more than tripled its previous weekly average, reaching 10.7 million people over the past week, the BBC said on Wednesday. The Russian invasion live page was the most visited page of any non-English language BBC World Service with 5.3 million hits. Visits to the BBC’s Ukrainian-language website have more than doubled since the start of the year, reaching 3.9 million last week. In English, the number of visitors to bbc.com in Russia increased by 252 percent to 423,000 last week.
This Friday, media regulator Roskomnadzor severely restricted access to BBC online services in Russia, according to Globalcheck, a service that monitors internet censorship in CIS countries. The BBC responded to this move by beginning to broadcast English-language news for four hours a day on two additional shortwave frequencies in Ukraine and parts of Russia. She also published one instructionshow to find their news offering on the dark web.
The BBC logo at the entrance to the broadcaster in London.
(Photo: Vuk Valcic via www.imago-images.de/imago images/ZUMA Wire)
Following Nadine Dorries’ speech, Scottish National Party MP Christine Jardin asked the Minister whether she would take the praise just given into account when making decisions about the BBC’s future funding. “I’ve always said the BBC is a big British global brand and needs to be protected,” Dorries replied. “We need to review the funding model to protect the BBC and do what is best for the BBC, including the World Service.”
That, too, represented an astonishing change of heart. Most recently, in addition to the medium-term abolition of the license fee, it also announced that it would soon be frozen. Price-adjusted, this would be tantamount to a budget cut and lead to a massive reduction in reporting and potentially to layoffs at the broadcaster. Whether the minister’s current ostentatious affection for the domestic broadcasters will hold up remains to be seen when they turn their attention back to Boris Johnson’s government policies.