Time to save the BBC?

There is little doubt that over the past two years the BBC have enraged those on the left with their coverage of the Labour Party. This reached a new peak with this week’s Panorama “investigation” by former Sun journalist John Ware.  For many on the left the bias of the BBC has reached proportions that are now beyond redemption. According to many the only option is a mass boycott of the BBC coupled with a campaign to remove public subsidy via the licence fee for what has become a propaganda tool working for the Conservative Party.

At times, perhaps especially so in the past month or so, it has felt as if the Labour Party membership have found themselves in a war with both MPs from their own party and the massed ranks of the mass media. And, as Senator Hiram Johnson, famously said in 1917, “When war comes, the first casualty is truth.” The relationship between propaganda and journalism is indeed a tangled web, and whilst we should not see every news report that is critical of Labour as  Tory propaganda we do need to understand the processes behind them.

This week I tweeted a response from BBC Political Correspondent, Chris Mason in which he made a number of claims. Most importantly when asked why a report into anti-semitism that exonerated Jeremy Corbyn would not feature on BBC News, he replied that it was not newsworthy. Whilst that is debatable in itself, he continued “don’t bother with the threats”, although no threat of any kind had been issued. In the same tweet he continued “they just make independent journalists more determined to carry on reporting without fear or favour.”

In a follow-up tweet he enlarged on his original assertion that it was not newsworthy by adding “the long-standing views of one journalist are not newsworthy”, and continued to talk about being threatened.

The journalist in question was Gideon Levy, a veteran Israeli journalist who was speaking at Palestine Expo at London’s Olympia exhibition centre.  He was tweeted by pro-Palestine activist/journalist Sarah Wilkinson (@sarahwilkinsonbc). The Palestine Expo is an annual event celebrating Palestinian art and culture and, according to the organisers, this year was attended by over 10,000 visitors . The BBC had extensive coverage of the event. Sorry, my mistake, the BBC entirely ignored the event, as did ITV and SkyNews. Indeed, it turns out that Chris Mason was right it simply was not newsworthy.

This begs the question of what exactly is deemed newsworthy. One place to start is with the idea of framing. This is the technique used by journalists to place news items as part of a wider narrative. A few years ago I worked on a project looking at the framing of the Kosovo war. We examined the way in which news organisations tended to privilege certain actors. In the case of the Kosovo war this led to an emphasis on governmental and military sources. Those opposed to the war were rarely the focus of news stories and when they were they were often treated as deviant actors.

So, when Chris Mason asserts that a story is not newsworthy what he means is that it does not fit the frame which his organisation has determined. This framing must then bring into question the idea that journalists are “independent”. Journalists, even relatively senior ones, are subject to managerial influence. No journalist, for example, who made it their business to promote Jeremy Corbyn would be likely to rise through the ranks. Promotion, and the perks that accompany it, are part of a process. Independence is only ever going to be permitted within the pre-determined narrative framework.

MRC Report found bias in 2016

None of this should surprise supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who are routinely described as deviant, hostile and threatening. Having said that, it is not just Corbyn supporters who think the media has a bias. The Media Reform Coalition found that on both the BBC and ITV twice as much time was given to critics of Corbyn than to his defenders.  In July 2016, over 100 senior academics from British universities signed a letter to The Guardian which stated “The leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has been subject to the most savage campaign of falsehood and misrepresentation..”

Does this, then, support the notion that the BBC (and other news organisations) are inherently biased? The answer is slightly more complex than we might, on the surface, suppose. In a recent Twitter exchange somebody pointed out that both the left and right consider the BBC biased, therefore they must be doing something right. The argument is that if the left think the BBC is right wing and the right think it is left wing, then clearly it cannot be biased, because it could not be biased simultaneously against the left and the right. The problem is that this logic assumes that there are only two political positions and between them is common sense. Of course, for those who reject left and right and worse see them as essentially the same, this is a very appealing proposition. For so-called “centrists” this is appealing because it places them firmly in the common sense camp.

This is why Chris Mason can believe that in rejecting views outside the mainstream he is still “reporting without fear or favour”. Journalists, particularly TV journalists do not like being accused of bias. They like to think that they are the voice of the average person, asking the questions the public want asked. The American Press Institute puts this succinctly in its guidelines for journalists.

Many people, they argue, use facts but journalism is different because “journalism involves the conscious, systematic application of a discipline of verification to produce a functional truth...”  This presupposes that it is only journalists who can do this but fails to acknowledge that they cannot simply leave their own preconceptions at the door when they enter the newsroom. Journalists, like all of us, have values and opinions. They believe that they are being objective. But their values are shaped by the prevailing culture as much as anybody else’s. They have a World view and a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that, as much as they deny their existence, shape their work.

Importantly it is not only what is reported that is important, but what is omitted. 

As Phillip Knightley says in his brilliant book ‘The First Casualty’ omissions play an important role in maintaining a consensus. He gives the example of the reporting of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and notes that, “Hardly any of the reforms introduced by the Bolsheviks were reported...Nothing was reported of any projects ofsocialization, nothing of the nationalisation of the land, nothing even of the reform of the calendar..” In other words, the media have form for selective reporting, it did not start in 2016 with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

When Chris Mason says that the views of Gideon Levy are not newsworthy that is not just a journalistic assessment, but one based on his framing of the story. It is not just bias but the dominance of a particular World view which, we should presume, is shared by the majority of his journalistic colleagues and, more importantly, those who employ them. According to research by the Sutton Trust in 2006 journalists were far more likely to be privately educated and to have attended Oxbridge than the general population. A demographic which is strangely similar to the figures for Conservative 

MP’s 45% of whom are privately educated. Given this common background it is hardly surprising that journalists feel more comfortable with the Tories than with Labour.

It may be too simplistic to say that a private education creates a particular world view, but it also serves as a proxy for a privileged upbringing. What passes for common sense assumes that the centre ground is somehow the natural political home of most people, and that by exposing “extreme” views that the public will have the same disdain for them as those reporting them. To some extent, this explains both their antipathy to Jeremy Corbyn and their fascination with “colourful” characters such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

Potential BBC journalists?

This belief that journalists, rather than political activists, represent the ordinary voter is part of what the late Christopher Hitchens called the “we fallacy”. This is the assumption that the media speak for us so that they can confidently say “we” to mean all right-thinking people, for which read all right-leaning people. As Hitchens points out the manufacture of consent (a phrase coined by Noam Chomsky) is achieved by creating a false consensus between the mass communications industry and the general population. Of course it is not entirely one-way but as Hitchens points out the mass communications industry is, “an area of contestation in which the ruling class naturally holds most of the cards.”

It is this adherence to the centre ground which leads many to call the BBC biased, and to argue for the ending of the licence fee. Whilst, promoting a particular view of the World is biased, it is not a bias against Labour specifically. It is that the set of values that journalists and BBC management hold to be self-evidently true, are threatened by a party that is on course to break the neo-liberal consensus.

I am told that in continuing to support the licence fee (whilst wanting it to be free to those who cannot afford to pay) I am supporting this same World view. However, I find it odd that socialists do not oppose the introduction of the free market into the BBC with the same vigour they oppose privatisation elsewhere. There are undoubtedly things at the BBC that could be improved, and I would hope that a future Labour Government would look at the narrow range of views considered newsworthy, and give guidance to the effect that framing the news as a conflict between neo-liberalism and its challengers, whilst never giving sufficient time to opponents of neo-liberalism is not impartiality. But, if the licence fee is removed then without public subsidy from elsewhere the BBC will either disintegrate entirely or become a part of a multimedia corporation.

It is the framing of the news in favour of a privileged section of the community that is at the root of the BBC’s institutionalised bias. It is because the framing is conducted according to common sense assumptions shared by many journalists and Conservatives that it is increasingly difficult for Labour to get a fair hearing. It is also why certain groups remain entirely marginalised in the mainstream media. 

BBC News Report on Gaza

The Palestinians, for example, are reported primarily as a problem to be solved, and even when they are victims of Israeli aggression we are reminded that the Palestinians themselves are aggressors. This report from March 2019 is typical. After telling us that 190 Palestinians have been killed in the past year, we are then told “Last summer an Israeli soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian gunman.” The justification for the Israeli shootings is then given, but none for the Palestinian. The implication here is that Israel kills to protect its citizens and Palestinians pre-empt this by killing a single Israeli soldier. To be clear here, I am not suggesting that Palestinians are right to kill Israelis or that they should kill more, but if the reporting is supposed to be impartial why am I not given any rationale for the killing of the Israeli, but I am told that Israel defends the killing of 190 people in terms of the safety of its citizens.

I share the frustration of many on the left with the BBC in particular, but news organisations more generally. But, I am loathe to accept that the BBC - our BBC - cannot be saved. For all it’s faults the BBC is still an integral part of British culture. It extends way beyond the news to entertainment, sport and music. From BBC1 to Radio 4 and to the World Service.  Left to the vagaries of the free market much of what is good about the BBC, including many programmes that would never get made commercially, will be lost forever. If it were to become a subscription service many people, those who perhaps rely on it most, will no longer be able to access it. I think we should, as socialists, defend an institution that is dedicated to providing entertainment free at the point of use and without the incessant interruptions of commercials.

The BBC was "reorganised" by David Cameron so that its management was more reflective of business (for which read more sympathetic to the Tory Party). This has undoubtedly made the BBC more servile than at any point in its history. This is not to underestimate, however, the deeply held establishment values it has always espoused. I have still not forgiven them for their misinformation over Orgreave during the Miners Strike. But not everybody who works for the BBC is right-wing. I imagine a BBC that is genuinely impartial, prepared to at least debate with those who propose a different type of economic order and which is prepared to make programmes that both entertain and question. 

Whilst the BBC has never been “ours” as such (the Reithian ethic on which it was founded takes a particularly paternalistic view of the working class), it is closer to most of us than our irritation with Chris Mason or Laura Kuensberg might allow us to admit. For most people, particularly of my generation, the BBC in one way or another formed the soundtrack to our lives. I would like to see a BBC which genuinely reflected British society and the full range of opinions within it. Perhaps that is naive, but saving the BBC seems to me a better option than abandoning it as a lost cause as so many on the left seem wont to do.