Tuned Out

The first sign that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was readying for a confrontation with journalists came during a speech to the American Bar Association meeting last month in London. Speaking before the gathering of U.S. lawyers, Thatcher said that the media should refrain from giving terrorists publicity. Last week her government pressured the independent British Broadcasting Corp. into canceling a televised documentary on Northern Ireland because it featured an interview with a politician who is allegedly a leader of the Irish Republican Army.

The 45-minute film, titled At the Edge of the Union, is an attempt to depict the divisions in Northern Ireland by profiling two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are Gregory Campbell, 32, a hard-line Protestant member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Martin McGuinness, 35, also an elected deputy, who represents the predominantly Catholic Sinn Fein, the political arm of the I.R.A. Home Secretary Leon Brittan informed the BBC and its board of governors that it would be "contrary to the national interest" to show the program. "What is at issue is not the overall balance of the program," he wrote in a letter to Board Chairman Stuart Young, "but the opportunity [for the terrorists] to boost the morale of their supporters." After a turbulent seven-hour session during which it viewed the film, the board decided to drop the documentary. Said Thatcher: "I'm very pleased." Young, however, denied that the board had succumbed to government pressure.

BBC staffers promptly voted to stage a one-day strike this week to protest the cancellation. The Association of British Editors called the BBC action "a betrayal of its own best traditions." Declared an editorial in the liberal daily Guardian: "The portents for the future are bleak. A Prime Minister or Home Secretary can denounce something they haven't seen and watch the BBC watchdogs slink to the back of their kennels."

The producer of the film, Paul Hamann, who has made seven previous documentaries about Northern Ireland, defended his film as giving "a unique insight" into what is happening in Ulster. Both Campbell and McGuinness, said Hamann, live in constant fear of assassination. They are, he noted, "ostensibly nice people, but there was a 5% unspoken ruthlessness of personality, and when it showed, it was frightening." Each, he said, had his own justification for killing people and a fanaticism that defied rationality.