I’ve been trying to think of a way to show that often, when someone attacks the BBC or other broadcasters for not being impartial it’s really because it’s saying something they don’t want to hear and would rather have their own views reflected back at them.
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) August 30, 2020
Well, here we are. pic.twitter.com/hnotwEtIgY
Louis Goodall has recently tweeted about proposed new TV news channels which are seeking to launch in response to perceived bias at the BBC. Goodall responds by arguing that critics are conflating scrutiny with partiality. The BBC has to hold everyone to account and is accused of bias by people who do not like to have their views challenged. In this he echoing John Simpson’s oft repeated opinion that if both sides of an argument are attacking the BBC it must be doing something right.
The problem is that the BBC news and current affairs output is biased, albeit not deliberately, in that it reflects the opinions of its senior editors and producers, many of whom are drawn from a narrow layer of society, one that coincidentally also provides many of our senior politicians and print journalists along with other scions of the establishment. As Tom Mills argues, “the BBC, which is now increasingly – and correctly – seen as an Establishment organisation; and probably unfairly as pro-Tory.”
This establishment bias is not a deliberate attempt to impose a specific agenda as we see in the more openly partisan print media. Instead it is about shared values by people who went to the same schools and universities, and bump into each other at dinner parties or at the opera. And these values are not necessarily bad: socially liberal when it comes to race or gender, pro democracy and the rule of law, having faith in our institutions, etc.
There is another side. Most of our journalists and commentators will have grown up in an era that was shaped by Margaret Thatcher’s pursuit of free market solutions and the diminution of the power of state.
[Except, of course in two special cases. When organised labour resists the impact of the market on workers’ livelihoods the full force of the state will be used to defeat it, as with the Great Miners Strike of 1984/1985. And when the free market threatens the banks and the major corporations the full force of the state will be used to save them, as happened after the Great Crash of 2008. In extremis it always seems that we get socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.]
Politics aside(!) the Thatcherite project has become the consensus over the last 40 years. Globalisation, free movement of capital and financial deregulation have raised productivity, improved living standards, encouraged innovation. What’s not to like? Plenty as it happens: the growth of tyranny around the world, destructive wars, nationalism as epitomised by Brexit in the UK and Trump in the USA, two nations that are supposed to represent the best in liberal democracy. Not to mention the impending ecological disaster of Climate Catastrophe. There is no Planet B.
The result in the UK has been increasing polarisation and fracturing of society. Steve Richards in “The Rise of the Outsiders. How mainstream politics lost its way” charted this process in 2017. I think we need a similar volume on how mainstream media lost its way. And that includes the BBC. Because all these media professionals learned their trade during the long period of relative stability that followed the defeat of the left, symbolised by but by no means restricted to Thatcher’s battles with the trade unions. And during that period consensus politics meant that the differences between Labour and Tory narrowed under Blair. We had two establishment parties battling it out for dominance and a pro establishment media that could examine both without fear or favour.
This took a different shape depending on the media. Following a series of sex scandals involving prominent Tory politicians we had the debacle of our exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism which, if memory serves, provoked this headline from the Sun. NOW WE’VE ALL BEEN SCREWED BY THE GOVERNMENT! Murdoch’s media empire, frustrated by the growing paralysis in the Tory Party because of civil war over Europe was moving towards Blair’s New Labour. Murdoch’s support was a necessary corrective to the overwhelmingly pro Tory bias in the rest of the print media and it served Labour well in the landslide victory in 1997. It is instructive because it demonstrates how far Labour had shifted when even Kinnock, who had ruthlessly battled the left within the party, had been excoriated in the Sun in Major’s surprise general election victory in 1992
Then in 2008 the world economy tanked. All around the world respected financial institutions had been selling each other junk bonds branded as gold standard, triple A securities. It was a house of cards and when it collapsed it threatened to take capitalism down with it. This led directly to the rise of the outsiders. Some were populist charlatans. Others were more principled advocates for social justice. All provided challenge to the system and to its apologists within the media.
The print media, mainly owned by billionaire tax exiles, swung behind the Tories and blamed Labour for precipitating the near collapse of capitalism by spending too much “taxpayers money.” As if! The Labour Party, in its own peculiar take on Stockholm syndrome, took the rap and never challenged this absolute calumny. It lost the general election in 2010 and after its electoral disaster in 2015 compounded the error by abstaining over welfare cuts on the advice of interim leader, Harriet Harman.
Then, miracle of miracles, Labour had a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, one of the outsiders. And this provided the challenge that I think the BBC failed to meet. To be honest Corbyn was rubbish in the beginning. He should have tried to make the media his friends instead of treating them like his enemies. Calling for Article 50 straight after the referendum was daft. But he was new. He only stood because he never expected to win. He had just wanted to let whichever New Labour clone who won know that there was still a left inside the Labour Party.
The establishment view, which, I suggest, was the majority view within the PLP during Corbyyn’s leadership, is that socialism is a relic from the past. The only curiosity it arouses is along the lines of, “Are you still here? You are so last century!” This is in marked contrast to the reaction to the disrupters from the right: Bannon, Trump, Farage et al. Nigel Farage must hold the record for appearances on Question Time. Why do I get the impression that left wing challenges to the establishment consensus are dismissed as an historical irrelevance, while right wing challenges are taken seriously and given significant airtime? Could it be that the establishment figures who dominate our media feel challenged by socialism but see right wing ideology as a curiosity to be indulged because it presents no threat to them and might even serve some purpose if we lefties prove too troublesome?
Whatever. All I know is that as a once religious listener to the Today Programme I can no longer stomach it. I hear government spokespersons invited to explain their government’s policies while opposition spokespersons are challenged to defend their position. I fear that the BBC is slipping from a position of public service broadcaster to state broadcaster and that fills me with dismay.
I finish with this. If you are a serious public service broadcaster ask yourself this. If I merely report on what the government is doing while investigating what the opposition is saying maybe I should give my head a wobble.