BBC integrity? How about this: my latest piece for DIPLOMAT on my encounters with the media down the ages:

In Moscow in late 1993 I was in the Embassy watching the live BBC TV coverage of the attempted Red/Brown coup against President Yeltsin. We could hear sporadic gunfire. At the height of the crisis the BBC reporter in Moscow proclaimed to the planet “This is an uprising of the people of Russia against President Yeltsin!”

This judgement was irresponsibly untrue. We in the Embassy were busy calling everyone we knew across Russia to get first-hand reactions. Many Russians were hardly aware of the drama unfolding in their capital, or were uninterested in its outcome. We told London that the BBC was talking drivel. We were right. Yeltsin survived.

I later asked the main BBC TV Moscow correspondent about this outlandish statement by his colleague. He shrugged. “That’s what you have do say to get good ratings.”

I grasped for the first time that frontline BBC news reporting was giving up on keeping facts, analysis and comment firmly distinct. It was giving up on integrity.

In 1996 I went from Russia to Sarajevo as UK Ambassador, tasked with supporting Bosnia’s reconstruction after the war. The BBC radio Today programme asked me for an interview. I agreed with the FCO in London and with Today that I would talk only about the international reconstruction effort, not the politics of the Bosnia process. That wider subject was for ministers in London.

Imagine my horror when the first question to me down the telephone, broadcast live to millions of middle-class Britishers scoffing their breakfast, was roughly this: “Well, the Bosnia peace process is an obvious failure, isn’t it?”

The BBC producers had lied to me! But so what? I had a micro-moment to focus myself and respond sensibly. I was trapped. It was hopeless to try to avoid answering the question, or to say that it had been agreed that I would not be asked about pointed policy issues.

The moral of these stories for diplomatic dealings with journalists? Print journalists and TV/radio journalists are completely different phenomena.

With print journalists you never have any real control over what they say you said. Their job is to sell newspapers. They need a ‘story’. You may have no idea where anything you say fits into that emerging story. Their story may change for them too as events unfold or they talk to someone else. Usually they record you faithfully and fairly (enough). Sometimes you get burned. But unless you have been catastrophically stupid or indiscreet, it all goes well enough.

With print journalists you need to establish the rules. Ask directly before the interview gets going how they plan to refer to you. It’s no use trying to agree the rules after the interview/conversation. Horse? Bolted…

… TV/radio work is completely different. You are there as you. It’s next to impossible to agree in advance any ‘rules’, or to expect them to be respected if you do agree them. The presenters don’t have time to care about you or their relationship with you. They have one ear listening to you. The other ear is listening through headphones to the producer teeing up the next slot.

TV/radio presenters are happy if you talk coherently in more or less answering their questions. It’s even better for them if you say or do something idiotic or intemperate. They are skilled in pushing back mercilessly to show off to their viewers/listeners.

Let’s leave the last word to Lord Curzon: “The journalist whose main duty is speed is likely sometimes to get an advantage over the diplomatist whose main object is accuracy.”

Is that still true? Is there any real difference these days between a journalist with a laptop and a diplomat with a laptop?

Diplomacy at the coal-face. Read the whole thing.