Interview: Former ITN boss, now Guernsey resident, John Hardie
John Hardie, a former chief executive of ITN, is now settled in Guernsey. He spoke to Matt Fallaize about his background and his views of current media producers...
This interview was delayed by Gary Lineker. Specifically, by a Gary Lineker tweet. The infamous one, in March last year, in which the Match Of The Day host accused the government of announcing an ‘immeasurably cruel’ immigration policy ‘in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s’.
At the BBC, and in the wild social media sphere which permanently surrounds the BBC, all hell broke loose. With the corporation’s impartiality on the line and amid demands for the director-general’s resignation, Lineker was temporarily removed from our screens, sparking a mass boycott from other presenters and pundits, and forcing hours of sports coverage off air. The tabloids and qualities led with the row for days and even Rishi Sunak considered the issue important enough – or distracting enough, perhaps – to weigh in with his opinion.
The BBC did what all good organisations do when they don’t know what else to do and commissioned a review. And who should they call on to lead the review but the man I wanted to interview, John Hardie, which meant that for months he was willing but unable to speak publicly.
‘I’ve made the joke maybe too many times that I was the only person in London who had never worked for the BBC,’ says John, when we eventually talk, a safe distance away from his review into social media use by BBC freelancers outside news and current affairs.
The real reason John got the gig, when the BBC needed to calm down a national storm and retain credibility, was his stellar reputation in British broadcasting, earned chiefly during nine years leading ITN from the brink of extinction, according to newspaper reports at the time, once again into a highly successful producer of news programmes for major UK television networks, as well as films, documentaries and sports broadcasts around the world.
His recommendations, widely applauded and now adopted, included that presenters of flagship BBC shows should be allowed to express political views, but must refrain from campaigning for political causes or parties. ‘Moreover, I recommended that the BBC should be a champion of civility in public discourse,’ he says. ‘A large part of the problem with social media is it’s a cesspit. Some people try to engage properly with an issue which is complicated and others hound them and attack them personally.’
His review for the BBC involved 83 interviews, including with some of the biggest names in broadcasting and every director-general since 1992, and put him back into a world he used to inhabit daily, before he left ITN in 2019 and moved to Guernsey with his wife, Nicola, and two sons, having previously taken holidays and then a timeshare in the island.
‘We holidayed in Guernsey because of the physical beauty that nature created, but we’ve settled here because of the quality of life that Guernsey people have created. It’s a really perfect blend of a wonderful environment, a quality of life with the best social resources, and safety, which is hugely different from other places.
‘Speaking as a relative newcomer, I tend to advise other newcomers to Guernsey not to be in a hurry to pontificate too much to people here about how they should run things, kind of evoking their success on the mainland – “I was this, I was that, I’ve looked at this issue for many minutes and let me tell you how you should run this island of yours”. It’s great if newcomers want to engage with the island and be economically active, but perhaps don’t be too certain of yourself, and respect where there are differences.’
Guernsey could scarcely be more different from the Glasgow council estate on which John grew up, the youngest of six children. ‘I never like to boast about my upbringing, but the truth is that it was rated to be one of the most deprived estates in western Europe. I thought it was absolutely fine – we had just moved from a two-bedroom tenement into a four-bedroom semi with a garden.’ He went to the same primary school as one of Britain’s greatest ever footballers, Kenny Dalglish, and then the local comprehensive. John was one of five out of 300 in his year group to go to university, in his case Glasgow – ‘on a full grant, which made all the difference’. He spent as much time as he could working on the university’s student-run television station, and running it in his final year, in which other students included Steven Moffat, the writer of the 2005 revival of Doctor Who and creator of the crime drama series Sherlock, and Hamish Barber, the creator of Location, Location, Location.
Television was even harder to break into in the early 1980s than it is today, and so John went into commerce and marketing. He spent 14 years at Procter & Gamble and ended up running the European arm of its cosmetics group, including famous brands like Old Spice, Max Factor and Oil of Olay. But he always hankered after television. In 1997, he took a senior role at ITV, and four years later started running Walt Disney’s television business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
‘Our success was driven by shows we made like High School Musical and a sitcom I had a lot to do with commissioning called Hannah Montana, which brought the world Miley Cyrus. I’m afraid I didn’t find Miley Cyrus – my colleagues in the States did. That was a terrific period of time and the business was growing rapidly. My next step would probably have been to move to Los Angeles, but the family didn’t want that.’
Instead, in 2009, John went to run ITN, which was then in such a financial mess, primarily because of an enormous deficit in its pension fund, that his early days there included meetings with insolvency experts. ‘We just had to work our way through it, changing a number of things along the way, including improving our service, which allowed us to negotiate better margins with the companies we supplied. The biggest thing we did was to create a company within a company, called ITN Productions, which moved us from being purely a news business into a fully-fledged TV content producer, initially of current affairs and documentaries and eventually entertainment and sports.’ In 2009, ITN Productions produced nine hours of television. In 2018, it produced 500 hours. ITN’s turnaround under John’s leadership culminated in Oscar nominations for current affairs documentaries. Its growth has continued and today it is putting out 1,000 hours a year.
For ITN’s daily productions of news for ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five, John was effectively editor-in-chief. ‘I wasn’t editing the content of the programmes. I was overseeing anything that was a big issue. Do we have journalists in war zones and what are their hazards? What are the legal issues around things we’re producing, from copyright to accusations against billionaires and undercover reporting. Television is heavily regulated and we always had to be mindful of the rules we were under.’ John oversaw large teams led by well-known TV personalities such as Jon Snow, Tom Bradby, Mary Nightingale, Julie Etchingham, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Lindsey Hilsum and John Irvine. ‘When I think of brilliant international correspondents like Lindsey and John, I don’t think only of them but also of the superb crew out there with them. We tried to celebrate people behind the camera as much as the wonderful, high-profile people on screen.’
During John’s time at ITN, red zones – areas of the world where reporters could be in serious danger – included the Arab Spring and civil wars in Syria and Iraq. ITN had staff detained, arrested and abducted. It had a whole team arrested in Sudan. ‘Our instinct was to tell the whole world about this injustice. But when you’re faced with that, the important thing is getting your people out alive and well. We had to use the proper channels and work with government sources in the UK and US. Once your people are released, you can then tell the story.’
Perhaps the best-known story told by ITN, in John’s final year there, and broadcast on Channel Four News, uncovered parts of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the disgraced British data company was found to have collected personal data belonging to tens of millions of Facebook users to benefit political campaigns, including Donald Trump’s for the US presidency in 2016. ‘That investigation eventually put the company out of business and led to Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the US Congress. Many people had been saying there were questionable practices at Facebook, with companies scraping data and using it for political ends. Channel Four News really got under the skin of the whole thing with a sting operation which set a lot of dominoes in motion. What laid behind that was months and months of work which was quite high risk. Secret filming is harder in broadcast television because we can’t do what’s called a fishing trip.’
John is sceptical about predictions of the demise of what is sometimes called legacy media – the mass media institutions which dominated the pre-internet age. ‘When I was in my old job, I can’t tell you how many times people came and told me that we were obsolete and would soon die. I took part in debates with people saying we were past it and the big news brands of the future would be Vice – what happened to Vice? – and BuzzFeed, which closed down its UK office. So many digital native news sources have come and gone. Where have the big recent news stories broken? Partygate was initially the Daily Mail and then ITV News. January 6 [when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol] was Robert Moore and his ITV News crew, who got into Capitol Hill.’
Trust in news sources is the key, he says, pointing to a recent survey which showed the most trusted news source in the UK was the Financial Times, followed by ITV, Channel Four and BBC. ‘If you get a big news story with serious allegations from one of the trusted, regulated broadcasters, people are still much more likely to believe that the thing has happened, and so the impact is still there, and it percolates through the other news sources. Of course, in entertainment, people are now getting things more on an on-demand basis, and social media has undoubtedly transformed breaking news.’
John is relaxed about that, partly because he thinks the established media need to focus on quality rather than speed anyway. ‘The bigger risk is about accuracy. The danger, especially for a young newsroom, is the desire to be first, to beat the BBC or Sky or whoever. But speed is often the enemy of quality. Some people are in a rush to be first for no good, sound, commercial reason and not really for any good editorial reason. I don’t think people are choosing news services because they are one minute faster than others. It’s to do with quality and trust and accuracy. Taking the time to get it right may go against the grain of the digital native, who wants to get something out there immediately, but I think pride in being first can be the enemy of great journalism. Worshipping speed is natural in the digital age, but it’s probably a false god.’
Although John now enjoys a slightly quieter pace of life living in Guernsey, there is one challenge in the media he would still like to crack. ‘I still have an ambition to run my own company. What I have tried to do with the backing of investors and private equity companies is what’s called buy and build, where you buy small television production companies and integrate them and create something whole. I’ve come pretty close in the past few years. The pandemic did not help in that regard. That has been my dream which I haven’t quite managed to pull off yet, but we’ll see what happens.’