“FOLLOW the money” is supposed to be a top journalism tip: it was key to journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposing the Watergate conspiracy, bringing down US president Richard Nixon.

“Following the money” is a central technique to what almost every journalist sees as among the best examples of their trade.

So it’s both worrying and a bit sad that the BBC actively doesn’t want you to follow the money. It often doesn’t want you to know the money even exists, let alone tell you who is paying it to who.

For example, back in September Radio 4 Today was looking for “analysis” of US withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

It invited General Jack Keane on as an unquestioned expert on Afghanistan to claim the US “did accomplish its mission in Afghanistan for 20 years” until Joe Biden had ruined it all with the “most serious foreign policy and national security blunders the United States has made in maybe 40 or 50 years.” 

Keane assured Radio 4 that Biden could have maintained troops and CIA bases in Afghanistan. The BBC did not ask Keane how the US could keep bases in Afghanistan without further fighting, even though the 20-year war had already killed some 241,000 people, including around 6,000 US personnel.  

Keane’s commentary fitted Today’s tendency to ignore why the Afghan occupation was a house of cards which every nation was abandoning and pretend the “humiliation” was just due to a mistake at the end.

The BBC introduced Keane as “a former vice-chief of staff of the United States army.”

You might remember that in September, I pointed Keane actually left the army in 2003, but is currently the chairman of AM General, the Indiana-based company that makes the Humvee — the military truck which was a core vehicle in the Afghan and Iraq occupations. 

In 2017 AM General got a $417 million contract to supply more Humvees for Afghanistan.

It’s no surprise Keane is keen on US military bases in hostile territory. It’s how his company makes its money.

Had the Today programme told listeners that the guy saying the US could have easily stayed in Afghanistan was a former George Bush adviser who now ran the Humvee firm, they would have taken him a lot less seriously.

I contacted the BBC to ask why it hid this fact. They consulted “senior members of the programme team” and concluded: “We don’t consider that listing other positions that General Keane has held would have caused our listeners to think of his views differently, particularly when his views were at one with those of several other former US senior military figures rather than being particularly unusual because some of the other factors you mention.”

In their reply, they could not bring themselves to mention the Humvee firm he runs — they even implied it is a position Keane “has held” rather than, in fact, currently holds. 

They did not want listeners to “follow the money” because they don’t seem to think running an arms firm has any effect on ex-general’s mentality.

Hiding commentators’ actual jobs is pretty common on the BBC. So on November 11 Alastair Campbell was a BBC1 Question Time panellist. 

He was introduced as “writer, strategist, mental health campaigner and former No 10 director of communications for Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell.” 

The programme extensively discussed the then-hot topic, the MPs’ “second jobs” scandal. 

Campbell has been trying to reinvent himself as an “anti-corruption” champion and he focused very heavily on the Tories’ personal moral failings, saying they had not met the Nolan Principles of “honesty, openness, objectivity, accountability and leadership.”

But corporations using their financial muscle to distort politics through lobbying, “second jobs” and the “revolving door” is a structural issue, not just a Tory issue. 

That’s an issue Campbell was unlikely to address because he has a “second job” — or perhaps even a “first job,” as I suspect it pays more than being a TV pundit — as “senior adviser” to lobbying firm Portland Communications. 

Campbell joined Portland in 2012, a firm which was set up by former Blair adviser Tim Allen in 2001. Portland describes Campbell’s job as “a senior part-time role.” 

The lobbyists’ register shows current Portland clients include those that have appeared in the current “sleaze” scandal or are otherwise controversial companies seeking political influence: they include Mitie, a Tory-linked privatiser that has many Covid contracts, Trump-friendly tech firm Palantir, drug firm Pfizer, gambling giant Flutter, polluter Southern Water and arms giant BAE Systems.  

Even though much of the programme was about “second jobs” and lobbying, the BBC would not say Campbell had a second job with a lobbyist. 

For all his talk of Nolan Principles, Campbell himself did not have enough “openness” or “transparency” to volunteer the truth about his other jobs, even as he was discussing MPs’ other jobs.

I asked the BBC why they kept Campbell’s Portland job secret. 

It responded, rather tersely: “We raised your concerns about how we introduced Alastair Campbell with the programme’s senior editors. We believe we identified Mr Campbell accurately and adequately. We regret you took a different view.”

They aren’t just breaking a key journalistic principle, they are also breaking BBC editorial guidelines. These guidelines say that to “avoid misleading the audience,” the BBC “should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities and think tanks) are unbiased. 

“Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context.”

But in the Keane and Campbell cases, and many, many others, the BBC actively avoids talking about the “affiliations” and “funding” of their pundits. 

The BBC very much doesn’t want viewers to “follow the money.” It doesn’t want its audience to think about why its favoured commenters say what they say — it just wants a smooth wall of Establishment punditry to fill the schedules, and if that means avoiding looking too deeply into who pays who for what, if that means not really doing “journalism,” then so be it.