Peter Wilby: BBC bias? The joke's on newspaper editors

[luke]

BBC bias? The joke's on newspaper editors

"The British right is trying to pull off the same trick as the American right: to convince the public that key sections of the media are gripped by a leftwing conspiracy"

Impartiality is a good thing to aspire to, but almost impossible to achieve, not least because philosophers don't agree on what it is. According to a BBC Trust report published last week, it "involves a mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance, even-handedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth". The trust assessed the BBC's programmes - drama, comedy, even the weather, as well as news and current affairs - against these criteria and found them sometimes wanting. Which, given the severity of the test and the quantity of the BBC's output (408,415 hours a year), is hardly surprising.

It is impossible to imagine any newspaper conducting a similar self-examination, still less publishing it. Even achieving accuracy, etc, in covering the report proved beyond the press. "BBC report damns its 'culture of bias'", shouted a Sunday Times headline. The phrase "culture of bias" does not appear in the report. The papers reply that the BBC is different because everyone is compelled to pay for it. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not absolve mass circulation newspapers from responsibilities to be, for example, truthful, rigorous and transparent, particularly in news reports. With rare exceptions, their response to any lapse - such as the News of the World phone-tapping affair - is to sweep it rapidly under the carpet.

An even more egregious example of press hypocrisy followed the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark last year. The BBC, frequently accused of cravenly appeasing Muslim sensitivities, reproduced them on Newsnight. No paper would touch them. Again, several British papers have portrayed the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a Soviet-style dictator because he withdrew a licence to broadcast on public airwaves from a channel that supported an attempted coup. (It can still transmit on satellite and cable.) Yet columnists demand the BBC be similarly punished for non-violent promulgation of "political correctness".

The British right, vociferously supported by the Mail, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press, is trying to pull off the same trick as the American right: to convince the public that key sections of the media are gripped by a leftwing conspiracy. The BBC Trust shows the campaign is succeeding. Its report, though nuanced and thoughtful, is itself biased. Its examples of possible lapses from impartiality include the failure to feature more about Ukip in the 2005 election campaign, lack of airtime given to "socially authoritarian" views, uncritical support for the Make Poverty History campaign, general prevalence of "politically correct" views, and over-representation of ethnic minorities. Even support for "saving the planet" is apparently thought controversial. There is brief mention of the generous airtime given to religion but that is treated as unproblematic. The report focuses on a supposed "liberal" bias.

Yet different complaints against the BBC are made by, for example, John Pilger, the Medialens website and the Glasgow Media Group. These allege a bias towards a western, free market view of the world, so that, for example, the corporation fails to tell the whole truth about US and British military interventions. If ever there was an example of a lapse from balance, open-mindedness and rigour, it occurred in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the BBC accepted Saddam had WMDs, despite former UN inspectors saying he had been fully disarmed. None of this is mentioned in the BBC Trust report. Nor is Top Gear which, many would say, glorifies reckless driving and carries anti-green messages.

The report, however, is correct to say that achieving impartiality (or rather the appearance of it) is more complex than it was. Once, it was enough to give the major political parties equal airtime. Now, the parties cluster on a consensual centre ground and the big divisions in public opinion are as much cultural as political: religion, ethnicity, sexuality, abortion, for example. The report argues the BBC should not "close down debate". It should achieve "a balance of opinion across the intellectual spectrum", and should not exclude unfashionable views.

This is surely right, but it is tricky territory. According to a poll last year, more than a third of Britons believe in creationism or intelligent design. Do they count as part of the "intellectual spectrum"? Do the climate change deniers? The Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has accused the BBC of disenfranchising "countless millions" of Britons who don't subscribe to its world view. But the BBC addresses a worldwide audience, in which countless millions would agree with Pilger on most issues rather than with Dacre. Should their views get more airtime?

Impartiality is of its nature elusive. The BBC is one of the few British brands that still commands worldwide admiration, it is a significant export earner and we should all be proud of it. The supposedly patriotic rightwing press is doing it incalculable damage and the journalists and editors responsible should, if I may borrow their own language, hang their heads in shame.

Court curbs are a reflection of trust

We are all familiar with the string of cases in which mothers were wrongly convicted of murdering their babies, largely because of flawed evidence from Sir Roy Meadow. But there is another scandal on a bigger scale. Again on the basis of evidence from Meadow and his followers, thousands of children were taken from their parents, put into care, and sometimes later adopted. These cases were heard in the family courts. We don't know much about them because they were held in secrecy and the evidence against the parents is not open to scrutiny and challenge. Ministers proposed last year to admit the press to the hearings, with safeguards to protect children's anonymity. Now they have changed their minds.

Yet family court cases require more public scrutiny than many of those in the criminal courts. The standard of proof is lower. There are no juries. Judges are not bound by precedent and have considerable discretion as to which "experts" may be called. These are not trivial matters: most parents will feel the loss of a child, forcibly removed by the state, at least as keenly as the loss of liberty.

Far from making family cases more open, ministers propose to tighten and extend the restrictions, extending them from high courts and county courts to the magistrates' courts. But the government could hardly have acted differently. The consultation on its proposals found substantial opposition from young people and children's organisations, as well as from magistrates, judges and lawyers. That is a salutary lesson for the press. It ought to be seen as a guarantor of liberty and justice. Alas, the public clearly believe that, given half a chance, it will invade privacy, sensationalise and distort.

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/jun/25/bbc.comment

[Luther Blissett]

"The Press" is such a big category that we should expect it to contain the full compliment of those who wish to invade privacy, sensationalise and distort, as well as those who wish to intelligently expose the truth.

The problem of "The Press" is like the problem of "Drugs". They are both so damn hard to even think about, because they both talk about too much at once under a single heading.

The law is expected to give freedom to the good guys, and take freedom form the bad, and yet the good and the bad are so close to one another in the press that it's an almost impossible job.

[luke]

Bias and the Beeb
The charge that the broadcasting corporation is left-wing has been repeated so often that it goes almost unchallenged. If anything, Mehdi Hasan argues, it is a bastion of conservatism

For years, I have been puzzled about why arguments over whether the BBC is biased seem to feature only two points of view. The right argues that the BBC is biased in favour of leftists and liberals. In his 2007 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, proclaimed: "It is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism . . . by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of left-wing ideology." The other side responds by pointing to, in the words of Polly Toynbee, doyenne of the liberal left, "the BBC's perpetually self-critical striving for fairness and balance, unique in all the media . . . the only non-partisan voice". The idea that the corporation might be more sympathetic to a conservative view of the world than a liberal one never figures in the discussion.

But should it? In November 2005, a well-known BBC presenter delivered the 14th annual Hayek lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs, in which he called for "a reorientation of British foreign policy away from Europe . . . a radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy; a flat tax . . . the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale not yet contemplated . . . excellence in schools with vouchers for all".

These are views, drawing on the libertarian philosophy of the long-dead Austrian free-marketeer Friedrich Hayek, that are to the right even of the modern Conservative Party. The BBC presenter was Andrew Neil, whose shadow looms large over the corporation's coverage of Westminster. Neil is on air roughly four hours a week, presenting Daily Politics, Straight Talk and This Week - where one of his co-hosts is the former Tory defence secretary Michael Portillo. Neil and Portillo often gang up, ideologically, on the soft Labour lefty Diane Abbott. Here is the legendary BBC "balance" in action.

But this is not about Neil, who has been on the Thatcherite right for decades now, first as editor of the Tory-supporting Sunday Times and now as chief executive of the Tory-supporting Spectator. This is about double standards, and about how the backgrounds of various prominent BBC employees have been curiously unexamined in the row over "bias".

Can you imagine, for example, the hysterical reaction on the right if the BBC's political editor had been unmasked as the former chair of Labour Students? He wasn't - but Nick Robinson was chair of the Young Conservatives, in the mid-1980s, at the height of Thatcherism. Can you imagine the shrieks from the Telegraph and the Mail if the BBC's editor of live programmes had been deputy chair of the Labour Party Young Socialists? He wasn't - but Robbie Gibb was deputy chair of the Federation of Conservative Students in the 1980s, before it was wound up by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Can you imagine the howls from the Conservatives if the BBC's chief political correspondent had left the corporation to work for Ken Livingstone? He didn't - but Guto Harri did become communications director for Boris Johnson within months of resigning from the Beeb.

Much has been made in the right-wing press of the comments by the Telegraph's editor-at-large, Jeff Randall, on the BBC's "liberal" bias - "It's
a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society" - during his four-year stint as the corporation's first business editor. The bigger question is: what on earth was an outspoken free-marketeer doing as the supposedly neutral BBC business editor to begin with? So much for Auntie's "Marxist" attitudes towards business and enterprise.

How about foreign policy? The BBC is constantly accused of anti-Americanism, but three of its most recent correspondents in Washington - Gavin Esler, Matt Frei and Justin Webb - have all since written books documenting their great love and admiration for the United States. Esler even used the pages of Dacre's Daily Mail to eulogise Ronald Reagan after the latter's death, claiming that he "embodied the best of the American spirit". Can you imagine the reaction on the right to a former BBC Moscow correspondent delivering a similar encomium to Leonid Brezhnev in the pages of the Guardian?

On Iraq, right-wing voices such as the Tory MP Michael Gove have accused the BBC of pushing an anti-war agenda - yet empirical analysis has yielded the opposite conclusion. The non-partisan, Bonn-based research institute Media Tenor found that the BBC gave just 2 per cent of its Iraq coverage to anti-war voices. Another study by Cardiff University concluded that the BBC had "displayed the most pro-war agenda of any [British] broadcaster".

Then there is the claim from small-c conservatives such as Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips that they are ignored by the BBC. Is this the
same Hitchens who is a frequent guest on BBC1's Question Time (according to the screen and cinema database IMDB, he has appeared on the show every year since 2000, and twice in 2007)? And the same Phillips who is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze?

So where are the counter-accusations of right-wing bias from the left? The sad truth seems to be that this canard "the BBC is left-wing" has been repeated so often that it has been internalised even by liberals and leftists. How else to explain Andrew Marr's confession of the "innate liberal bias inside the BBC" simply because it is "a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large"?

“The left always feel faintly embarrassed at attempting to promote their own political agenda," says Steven Barnett, professor of communications at Westminster University, "and since the 1980s have consistently failed to bang the drum about the issues on which they might equally be able to pillory the BBC - for example, human rights abuses and the failure to regulate corporate greed." Barnett believes that allegations of bias are a concerted attempt by the right to "discredit any journalism with which they disagree and to promote a political agenda which is more consistent with their own". Liberals such as Marr, he says, feel "slightly guilty about their own liberalism" - unlike those on the right, such as Randall, who feel no such guilt.

Barnett does not believe the BBC is biased "in any particular direction". And yet, from top to bottom, in structure and staffing, in history and ideology, it is a conservative organisation, committed to upholding Establishment values and protecting them from challenge. Take two institutions not normally associated with liberals or left-wingers: the church and the monarchy. Wouldn't a "culturally Marxist" (to use Dacre's phrase) institution have long ago abandoned Thought for the Day and Songs of Praise? In 2008, the BBC broadcast more than 600 hours of religious programming on television and radio, up year on year. And can anyone really disagree with Jeremy Paxman's accusation that the BBC "fawns" over the royal family, behaving more like a "courtier"? The corporation's coverage of the Queen's golden jubilee celebrations and the marriage of Charles and Camilla was stomach-churning both in its excess and in its deference.

The BBC's bias is thus an Establishment bias, a bias towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy. The accusation that the BBC is left-wing and liberal is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission. "The right in America has waged a long and successful battle to brand the news as liberal, and the same is happening here [in relation to the BBC] with the aid of a predominantly right-wing press," says Barnett. "I fear they may have similar success in redefining the centre ground of politics to suit their own political agenda." With a Tory government on the verge of power, it is time for liberals and the left to fight back and force the BBC to acknowledge its real bias.

from http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/bbc-wing-bias-corporation

[luke]

MEDIA ALERT: TRUST IN PROFIT: JAMES MURDOCH, THE BBC AND THE MYTH OF IMPARTIALITY

At the Edinburgh International Television Festival last month, James Murdoch, News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia, attacked the BBC, calling for comprehensive deregulation and warning of the dangers of state interference in the “natural diversity” of the media industry. It was a threat to the provision of “independent news”, Murdoch claimed, that the state-sponsored BBC was able to provide so much online news free of charge.

Murdoch’s speech was the headline event at the Guardian-sponsored festival and the paper duly devoted precious newsprint to an extract:

“There is a land grab going on - and it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling.” (James Murdoch, ‘Put an end to this dumping of free news’, Guardian, August 29, 2009)

Murdoch made a noble plea for press freedom:

“Above all, we must have genuine independence in news media. Independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency. Independence of faction, industrial or political. Independence of subsidy, gift or patronage. [...] people value honest, fearless, and independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.”

Murdoch wrapped up his speech with “an inescapable conclusion”:

“The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”

The lack of self-awareness was stunning. The Murdochs of this world are naturally unable to conceive that corporate sponsorship compromises news reporting, showering pound and dollar-shaped sticks and carrots that inevitably cause journalism to slither in corporate-friendly directions. The speech was widely reported but debate was mostly facile, deflecting attention from the corporate media’s systemic failings; not least those of the BBC itself.


Nuanced Nonsense

The liberal press reacted in a suitably ‘nuanced’ way to Murdoch’s salvo. An Independent editorial had “much sympathy with Mr Murdoch's [...] cri de coeur about the lack of restraints on the BBC's growth, in particular on the internet.” The struggling newspaper bemoaned that:

“As long as the BBC provides what amounts to an all-encompassing news service on the internet within the price of the licence fee, it will be nigh-impossible for anyone else - on the internet or in print - to charge. [...] In highlighting how the BBC's dominance distorts the news market, James Murdoch has done all the British media a favour.” (Leader, ‘The BBC’s unhealthy dominance’, Independent, August 29, 2009)

A Guardian editorial argued that Murdoch had “made some good points”:

“There are aspects of the BBC's size and purpose that should be scrutinised. Regulation should change with the times.”

Fanciful waffle about “media ecosystems” followed:

“What works rather well in the UK is a mixed economy of private and public. Newspapers are lightly regulated, fiercely opinionated and proudly independent. Public-service broadcasters are more heavily regulated in return for their subsidy. It's not a perfect mix, but its (sic) part of the texture of life in the country.” (Leader, ‘An American in Edinburgh’, Guardian, August 31, 2009)

“Not a perfect mix” is an interesting way to describe a media system that is innately, and massively, biased towards power and profit.
Peter Preston, veteran Guardian columnist and former editor, was ‘pragmatic’:

“Forget ‘chilling’ hyperbole about ‘state-sponsored news’ and standard Orwellian allusions: James Murdoch is right - or at least not far wrong. [...] How does a newspaper that wants (nay, needs) to move on to the web and pay for the words it puts there, cope when the BBC dishes them out for free?”

Participating in the controversy his newspaper had concocted, Jonathan Freedland responded to Murdoch in the Guardian:

“The BBC is one of the few British exports to be universally recognised as world class. That's why BBC programmes from The Blue Planet to the Dickens adaptations are snapped up around the globe. They may not be watching Bleak House in Burma or Iran, but they are relying on BBC News for an independent, truthful view of the world.” (Jonathan Freedland, ‘Don't let Murdoch smash this jewel’, Guardian, September 2, 2009)

In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell described the art of thought control called “Newspeak”:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

We are offered a “debate” confined between two false poles: the claim that the BBC is a threat to the “independent news” provided by commercial interests, and the claim that the BBC is a rare source of “independent, truthful” reporting. Modern journalism acts to “narrow the range of thought”, thus serving the powerful interests that control the mass media. It is not Big Brother; but it is certainly a form of “Newspeak”.


We’re Independent And Impartial Because We Say So

The fact that BBC journalists perform as they do without overt external interference is offered as proof of their independence. In 2007, Justin Webb, then the BBC’s North America editor, rejected the charge that he is a propagandist for US power, saying: “Nobody ever tells me what to say about America or the attitude to take towards the United States. And that is the case right across the board in television as well.”

Webb began a radio programme from the Middle East thus:

“June 2005. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flies to Cairo and at the American University makes a speech that will go down in history: ‘For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East; and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”
(Justin Webb, ‘Death to America’, BBC Radio 4 series, part three, first broadcast on April 30, 2007; http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/deathamerica)

Webb told his listeners in all seriousness: “I believe the Bush administration genuinely wanted that speech to be a turning point; a new start.” Nobody had to tell Webb to say these words; he really believed them.

Consider, too, the pronouncements of one BBC correspondent, reporting from Iraq:

"This is not promising soil in which to plant a western-style open society."

And:

"The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights." (Paul Wood, BBC1, News at Ten, December 22, 2005)

When we challenged BBC news director Helen Boaden on whether she thought this version of US–UK intent perhaps compromised the BBC’s commitment to impartial reporting, she replied that such "analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair."

If we are to take Boaden’s comments at face value, she was arguing that Bush and Blair must have been motivated to bring democracy to Iraq, because they said so! In other words, “impartial” reporting means that we should take our leaders’ claims on trust – to challenge the idea that they mean what they are saying is to stray into unprofessional bias.

In 2004, Boaden told one viewer:

“People trust the BBC because they know it is an organisation independent of external influences. We do not take that trust lightly.” (Helen Boaden, email forwarded to Media Lens, December 2, 2004)

And yet the BBC’s senior management is appointed by the government of the day. In 2001, Steve Barnett noted in the Observer that “back in 1980, George Howard, the hunting, shooting and fishing aristocratic pal of Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, was appointed [BBC chairman] because Margaret Thatcher couldn’t abide the thought of distinguished Liberal Mark Bonham-Carter being promoted from vice-chairman.

“Then there was Stuart Young, accountant and brother of one of Thatcher's staunchest cabinet allies, who succeeded Howard in 1983. He was followed in 1986 by Marmaduke Hussey, brother-in-law of another Cabinet Minister who was plucked from the obscurity of a directorship at Rupert Murdoch's Times Newspapers. According to Norman Tebbit, then Tory party chairman, Hussey was appointed ‘to get in there and sort the place out, and in days not months.’ ” (Steve Barnett, ‘Right man, right time, for all the right reasons’, Observer, September 23, 2001)

The same machinations continue to this day. At the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies and his director-general, Greg Dyke, were supporters of, and donors to, the Labour party. Davies’s wife ran Gordon Brown's office; his children served as pageboy and bridesmaid at the Brown wedding. Tony Blair had stayed at Davies’s holiday home. “In other words”, noted columnist Richard Ingrams, “it would be hard to find a better example of a Tony crony.” (Richard Ingrams, ‘We don’t need Tony’s cronies at the BBC,’ Observer, September 23, 2001).

Readers will recall that BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan lost his job, along with Davies and Dyke, after intense government flak in response to Gilligan’s report that the Blair regime had manipulated intelligence over Iraq’s supposed WMD.

Displaying a wilful blindness to all of the above facts, the Observer described the BBC this week as “genuinely independent of government.” (Leader, ‘A bold BBC does not need to be a bigger BBC’, Observer, September 13, 2009)

Consider, too, the establishment links of the members of the BBC Trust whose duty it is to ensure that the BBC upholds its public obligations, including impartiality. One of these worthies is Anthony Fry, formerly of Rothschilds and later the ill-fated Lehman Brothers where he was head of UK operations. Fry boasts on the BBC website:

"Having spent my career in the City as an investment banker, for over a decade specialising in the media industry, it’s a great privilege to bring my commercial understanding of the sector to help the BBC deliver value for licence fee payers in today’s rapidly changing broadcasting environment.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/about/who_we_are/trustees/anthony_fry.shtml)

The Trust consists of twelve safe pairs of hands with extensive backgrounds in large corporate media organisations, advertising, banking, finance and industry. We are to believe that these individuals are independent of the government that appointed them, and of the elite corporate and other vested interests in which they are deeply embedded. We are to believe that they will uphold fair and balanced reporting which displays not a hint of bias towards state ideology or economic orthodoxy in a world of rampant corporate power.

Corporate reporters are required to be oblivious to such simple realities. Thus the Guardian could once again find space to allow Sir Michael Lyons, chair of the BBC Trust, to insist that the broadcaster provides "free, impartial, accurate news". (John Plunkett, ‘Sir Michael Lyons: BBC will not retreat from news’, guardian.co.uk, September 9, 2009, 15.49 BST, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/09/michael-lyons-bbc-no-retreat)

Just days later the Guardian gave free rein to Mark Thompson, BBC director general:

"The absolute first building block keystone of the BBC is delivering impartial, unbiased news.” (Jane Martinson, ‘Mark Thompson: “People want the BBC to step backwards” ’, Guardian, September 14, 2009)

But Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, put it rather differently when he wrote of the establishment in his diary: "They know they can trust us not to be really impartial." (Quoted, David Miller, ‘Media wrongs against humanity’, TruthOut.org, June 24, 2005; http://www.truthout.org/article/david-miller-media-wrongs-against-humanity-witness-statement-including-evidence-media-wrongs)

http://www.medialens.org

[luke]

Dyke in BBC 'conspiracy' claim

The BBC is part of a "conspiracy" preventing the "radical changes" needed to UK democracy, the corporation's former director general has said.

Greg Dyke told a Lib Dem conference meeting he wanted a commission to look into the "whole political system".

But he said: "I fear it will never happen because I fear the political class will stop it."

The BBC said its political coverage was taken extremely seriously and was highly regarded by the public.

Mr Dyke said major changes he had wanted to make to the BBC's coverage of politics had been blocked.

He told the Liberal Vision fringe meeting about the expenses scandal and how it had changed voters' attitudes: "The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system - the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one - are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy."

'Westminster conspiracy'

Mr Dyke, who was forced to stand down as director general in 2004 after the Hutton report into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly, said there had never been a greater separation between the "political class" and the public.

"I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly - the Labour cabinet - who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

"Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don't want anything to change. It's not in their interests."

He said the expenses scandal had been "British democracy's Berlin Wall moment" but he feared the opportunity to change the system was fading away.

He called for an end to "pathetic jeering, shouting and childish behaviour" and the "pomp and ceremony" in Parliament.

'Scared'

An independent commission should look at ideas such as moving the seat of democracy out of Westminster, a fully elected upper chamber with no whipping system, proportional representation, cutting the number of MPs by half, and reforming their pay and expenses, he added.

"It's time to be radical. Our current model was designed for the 18th Century. It doesn't fit 21st Century Britain," he told the meeting.

And he added: "We want more influence over our lives and we are not just prepared to hand it over to this strange bunch of people who stand for Parliament because they have been knocking on people's doors for 10 years."

Speaking afterwards, he referred to an internal review of the BBC's political coverage carried out at the beginning of the decade, to which all political parties were asked to contribute.

He said "there was a lot of pressure from the government of the day not to change anything", adding: "If you are in power what you want is you want to be covered and you don't want anybody else to be covered and they were scared that we were going to stop covering them."

He denied the BBC had caved in to pressure from the government but added: "A lot of the governors were what I call semi-politicians and they liked the present system and.... maybe they were right - it's not the job of the BBC to change the political system and to start questioning the political system.

"I happen to not agree with that but, you know, we didn't get anywhere."

Asked what specific changes he would like to see in the BBC's coverage, he said: "Most of the politicians didn't want a different way of covering politics.

"They wanted their mugs on the telly basically and we might have moved away from that."

He denied his comments were meant as a criticism of BBC journalists in particular, but added: "In the end political journalists live in the same narrow world as politicians do and they don't see a need to change because they think it's the world. They just don't understand that out there it's very different."

In a statement, the BBC said Mr Dyke was "entitled to his views".

It added: "Our news is highly regarded by the public. Anyone looking at the depth and range of our political coverage will know how seriously we take the reporting of politics and political institutions."

from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8265628.stm

[Brown Sauce]

"Our news is highly regarded by the public."

only because they know no different,

"Anyone looking at the depth and range of our political coverage will know how seriously we take the reporting of politics and political institutions."

depth and range doesn't mean being an uncritical mouthpiece for the capitalist/imperialist elite.

[luke]

at least the bbc covered this story, i've search and no none else seems to have picked it up - probably because dyke implicates the whole 'system - the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties' - its not a subject they want to get into

[faceless]

I stopped going to the BBC for anything serious after the Gaza attacks earlier this year.

How Greg Dyke got into the job in the first place if there was such a conspiracy going on is beyond me though!

[Brown Sauce]

they love talking do about themselves Luke.

How many hours of nonsense did they devote to those two tossers earlier in the year, Ross and Brand ?

'Soon as that was over there was something else.

Fills the gaps in the 24 hour rolling "news" bollox, or helps create them.

[luke]

David Miller is the author/co-author/editor of several books including “A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the cutting Edge of Corporate Power” and “TELL ME LIES. Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq.” He is also the co-founder of www.spinwatch.org and www.spinprofiles.org.

In this podcast we discuss the BBC, it’s history and origins, how it has been controlled and manipulated by governments and how all this fits into the wider media context.



http://www.archive.org/download/MichaelGreenwellPodcastTwo/michaelgreenwellpodcasttwo.mp3

from http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/podcast-two/

[luke]

Venezuela and the BBC

Dr. Lee Salter is the leader of the journalism programme at the University of the West of England. He spoke to NLP about his current research into BBC coverage of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

You are currently researching the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela. Why is this an important topic to research? Why does the way in which the BBC covers Venezuela matter?

In the first instance it is not just the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela that is important. Scholars looking at news and journalism have shown concerns about the reporting of foreign affairs for decades now, and have observed patterns of media performance that give cause for serious concern - especially in terms of the way in which the world views of economic and political elites are reflected in news coverage. These concerns were most notoriously reflected in the (usually misunderstood) work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. The BBC has - at least in the rhetoric, which is codified into Producer Guidelines and so on, a crucial duty to report accurately to British audiences. If the BBC fails to do this, not only are there legal questions to be asked, but there are also moral issues to be reflected on: BBC News has a duty to provide accurate information that citizens can use as the basis for participation in democracy.

To my mind the coverage of Venezuela has particular importance mainly because it is a case in which a democratically mandated government faces a plethora of reactionary forces seeking to destabilise and overthrow it. Even the slightest dip into history shows what the rich are capable of, as seen in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil between the 1960s and 1990s. We have already seen in 2002 what the so-called “opposition” will do in Venezuela, and the BBC’s potential complicity in an orchestrated “strategy of tension” (if only through bad reporting) is something that must be considered.

Indeed, right from the start it seems that the BBC had made up its mind about the Venezuelan government - barely a year after its first election victory (and remember that Chavez has been elected several times by far greater margins than any post-war UK government, and all of which were observed by regional and international observers), the BBC published an opinion piece which referred to “Venezuela’s Dictatorship”, in which the author was allowed to make an unopposed analogy between Chavez and Adolf Hitler! So from the outset it was clear there was an agenda to oppose the democratic decision of the Venezuelan people.

How did the BBC cover the failed military coup of 2002?

The news coverage of the 2002 coup still shocks me today when I look over my sample, and it is not just the BBC. All of the UK’s commercial national newspapers carried the same take on the coup - it was very much welcomed. All UK journalists showed a striking disregard for even the most elementary historical knowledge - that coups tend to be preceded by a “strategy of tension” and precipitated by random killings, usually by the middle and upper classes - instead painting the coup as something that was caused by Chavez! The Guardian, for instance, shamefully wrote that Chavez’s “popularity plummeted as he antagonised almost every sector of society and failed to improve the lot of the poor”. Bear in mind that Chavez was first elected with 56% of the vote (beating every post-war UK Prime Minister), his constitution was passed with 72% of the vote, and that he was re-elected in 2000 with 60% of the vote, and the utter lies (for no journalist can be that stupid) published by the Guardian become transparent.

As far as the BBC was concerned, its reporting was equally shameful. Perhaps most shockingly of all the BBC reported the military coup against an elected government with massive popular support as a “return to democracy” and even sub-headed a section of one article as “Restoring Democracy”! One of the themes of the BBC’s reporting, which our research uncovered, was the way in which Chavez seems to come from nowhere, destabilising Venezuela (poverty, inequality and corruption barely get a mention as divisive phenomena), and attacking the “nation”. The coup was reported as a resolution of that division, and it was framed as a kind of national achievement, as if it was a people’s revolution. In complete ignorance of the fact that it was initiated by a corrupt oligarchy the coup was a “Venezuelan coup”, and in the aftermath the BBC would report on what “Venezuela needs”, as if 1. there is a unified interest and 2. people hadn’t already expressed their needs through elections. There was not a mention of the fact that an elected leader had been overthrown, and although in the aftermath it was noted that “the people” were involved in bringing him back to power, the suspicion of Chavez remained. Amazingly most of the reporting on the build-up to elections thereafter presumed Chavez would lose and insinuated that he lacked support.

How has the BBC covered some of the social achievements of the government and popular movements such as decreases in poverty, improvements in literacy and the various social programmes?

Well it hasn’t much, at least in the sample we looked at. There are sporadic mentions of the odd program, but they tend to negate achievements. For example in one of the few articles where there is a mention of social programs, in an article titled “Poll divides Venezuela’s rich and poor” (notice the agent here - it is “the Poll”, rather than decades of corruption, class division and grinding poverty that “divides”), food, health, housing and literacy programs are indeed mentioned. However, the journalist cannot resist ridiculing them: “A few miles away in central Caracas, 15 adults enrolled in a government literacy course watch a video on a large new television” - of course the proposition that the 15 adults are gaining literacy skills is moderated by the fact that they are watching television.

There was a fairly good report on social programmes in 2005, “Venezuela looks to boost social spending”, in which a variety of programmes are discussed in a pretty balanced manner. The achievements are noted, and the problems of implementation discussed fairly. However, the first two paragraphs of the article set a frame in which the achievements are tainted - the first line reads “Venezuela’s populist president”, and then, although he won yet another free and fair election, the BBC plays into the hands of the oligarchy which had boycotted the election in order to discredit the result - “The opportunity comes following his party’s landslide victory ... after opposition parties boycotted the elections and withdrew their candidates”. Now of course it is true that the opposition boycotted the election and there is no question of lying as such. However, in the context of the whole sample, we find that this qualification of Chavez’s legitimacy follows a pattern - each election victory is qualified by his populist appeal, is a bolt from the blue, is a surprise, a shock etc. It is almost never the case that Chavez’s party simply has lots of support and that he fairly wins free elections, which are observed by independent international observers.

Now, part of this bias can be explained by the fact that news generally focuses on the negative. Part of it is the journalists’ natural suspicion of governments. Part of it reflects the fact that many of the social programmes have faced significant problems in implementation. However, in the first instance, the problems are rarely investigated (stemming as they do from a mix of well meaning but inept politicians, corrupt politicians, and an old guard of capable civil servants who don’t want to help the government), and instead, because it is a norm of journalism to simplify complex situations, the problems are reduced to “Chavez”.

How does the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela compare with its coverage of Colombia - the worst human rights abuser in the western hemisphere and a close ally of Washington and London?

This is one of the issues we would like to consider in future, but at the moment, I cannot offer anything other than an impression on this. It is clear that the human rights situation in Colombia is awful - far, far worse than in Venezuela - and there are serious questions to be asked about the legitimacy of elections that take place in any war zone, such as in Colombia, yet such questions are never asked of Colombia with the same veracity as with Venezuela. We have looked briefly at the reporting of “tensions” between Colombia and Venezuela, in which case the presumption of guilt always lies with Venezuela, or rather with Chavez - whether it is the report of a laptop which details his relations with FARC being mysteriously found in a jungle camp, or Chavez making the point that building a US military base on its border is provocative.

Perhaps more interestingly, remember that Chavez has won election after election, most of which have been observed. Regardless of whether one agrees or not with his government’s policies or his conduct as president, it is a simple fact that he does have masses of support and has won elections fairly. There is no other leader on the planet who has such democratic legitimacy yet whose legitimacy is so questioned. Thus, rather than comparing with reporting of Colombia, we might do better to compare with reporting of the British government, the leader of which of course is unelected as PM! Gordon Brown is the Prime Minister simply because his friend (Tony Blair) won the election and then passed the leadership on to him. The most powerful minister in the UK, Peter Mandelson, has not been elected - indeed, he was thrown out of the government twice, once for corruption. However, the legitimacy of the UK government is of course never questioned.

What are the pressures constraining the BBC? Why does an ostensibly public service broadcaster fail to give an accurate picture of Venzuela?

Now this is the $64,000 question! In our research we consider the history, orientation and constitution of the BBC and hypothesise that one of the key constraints on its reporting can be accounted for by its organisational culture - it is essentially a liberal-nationalist organisation. The BBC’s job is to hold a “nation” together, so the underlying presumption in its activity is that there is “a Britain” and Britain is good. Right from the outset, the objective of the BBC was to inculcate a national culture, to “improve” the minds and culture of “a people”, a natural duty of a national broadcaster. However, the concept of the nation in this instance has always been bound to a class perspective - consider, for example, that “regional” (read: class) accents were forbidden until relatively recently. Foolish people consider the BBC to be the instrument of the government. It is not. It is the instrument of the state (regardless of which particular government is in power), which itself is developed around class interest. The BBC was set up to promote this particular class-bound vision.

This nationalist objective is not simple and does change over time. Recently, for example, the drive has been to reflect the diversity of multi-cultural Britain in BBC programming, which is a serious objective. However, this does not loosen liberal nationalism, it merely reconfigures it - now the overarching ideology of Britain is of a tolerant Britain in which there are no class or racial fractures, but just differences that bind “our” national family. Yet still this reconfiguration does nothing to revisit the Whiggish historical outlook of the BBC that we see in its programming. The BBC histories are class-bound, and this classist underpinning is obscured to senior journalists because it is their class. For example, the Sutton Trust’s research shows that the proportion of top journalists who attended private schools has risen over the past twenty years from 49% in 1986 to 54% in 2006, and that the proportion of those who had attended either Oxford or Cambridge university had declined from 56% to 45% in the same period. Of the BBC journalists included in the report, more than half attended Oxford or Cambridge. Their liberal-nationalist tendencies can be observed in outputs such as Paxman’s (Cambridge) The English, Andrew Marr’s (Cambridge) History of Modern Britain and Britain From Above, Peter Snow’s (Oxford) Battlefield Britain, and David Dimbleby’s (Oxford) A Picture of Britain and How We Built Britain. ‘The nation’ and its unity is a common-sensical reference point and the embodiment of a rational order, comprehended through Whig history. As Steve Pope puts it, ‘White middle-class men dominate the national media, and it has to be said that the interests and culture of this group manifest themselves not only in the news agenda but also in how these stories are written’.

So, when white, middle-class journalists arrive in Caracas, their presumptions and expectations are that the natural state, the good state of the nation is to be unified in difference, for the poor and working classes to accept that they are just poor members of a national family who one day, if the nation works together, will be better off. This explains one of our key findings: a preoccupation with “division” of the national family, which cannot be explained by class or poverty, for these are “normal” experiences. They can only be explained by an alien presence who seeks to divide the nation. The alien is of course Chavez. This tendency can be observed throughout the reporting of Venezuela: “Correspondents say Venezuela has been bitterly polarised by more than five years of Mr Chavez”, “Mr Chavez has polarised public opinion in Venezuela”, “Venezuela was polarised by the surprise victory of Mr Chavez”. Indeed, one only needs to glance briefly at even a photograph of Caracas to see that it is “polarised” by poverty, architecture, violence, sanitation, motorways, education, participation and so on.

Similarly even just ten minutes of reading some of the key historians of Venezuela, such as Sylvia and Danopoulis, Ellner and Salas, and Garcia-Guadilla indicates that the history of Venezuela is a history of class division.

Beyond that there are more basic, banal explanations, which I hypothesise here. Caracas is a dangerous city. It is no doubt scary for a well-to-do journalist from a good home, as it were, to be placed in Caracas. This is not to say that the journalists purposely seek out safety, but rather that there are decisions to be made - it would take a significant effort for a white Englishman to seek out accommodation in a barrio. Thus for purposes of safety, mobility, communications, comfort, not to mention to be near good restaurants, bars and cafes, journalists will be expected to live in middle class areas.

Now, when visiting Caracas (or any other Venezuelan city) the first and most striking thing one experiences is the unrelenting vociferousness of the right wing middle classes. Their complaints against Chavez range from the banal to the ridiculous, but they do not go away. When I was there every middle class person I spoke to had the same line - Chavez was the cause of all ills. With no prompting I was the ungrateful recipient of complaints that Chavez is evil because (and I kid you not): he forces people to use energy saving light bulbs, he gives healthcare to the poor, he has lost all the oil, he refuses to repair electrical power stations, he is like Hitler, he is like Le Pen, he wants to turn Venezuela communist, he doesn’t compensate television stations for advertising revenue lost from his broadcast, he forces the whole country to listen to his speeches, he has six distinct psychological disturbances, he is a fucking arsehole and so on… On one occasion a guide in the Andes who had us in his car unleashed an unrelenting diatribe for 4 hours. We were unable to get a word in! To experience this day in, day out cannot but lead one to consider that there must be foundations for such animosity, especially when they seem to be so like “us”, unlike those in the barrios.

The wealthy elite owns the private media, which they use to further vent this animosity, and they have good communication networks, PR companies, social networks and so on. These can be used very effectively for what Herman and Chomsky refer to as “flak”. I have been subject to this myself from a rather unreasonable person for pointing out in an article elsewhere that the BBC’s reporting is inaccurate. It is uncomfortable to receive such flak. The same person proudly boasted that he does he same to the BBC. These people, with money, resources, and lots of time on their hands, scrutinise the BBC’s report and respond rapidly and vociferously to anything they don’t like.

Finally, and we must remember this as a significant aspect of the issue, the Venezuelan government is not very good at all at communicating. The Glasgow Media Group’s work on the BBC’s misreporting Israel and Palestine illustrates how crucial is the communicative capacities of respective parties - the Israeli government simply communicates more effectively than do the Palestinians, which makes it easier for journalists under time and resource constraints to report.

What was your impression of how the Chavez government is viewed in the barrios?

Well the barrios are not homogeneous. In some he has lots of support, but in others there is a fair amount of frustration. Some of the corruption stories are indeed true, and there are many instances of money going missing from the Bolivarian Missions and other social projects. Generally, where the government’s plans are being implemented effectively, he has support, but in places where money has been syphoned by corrupt politicians and functionaries, there is no visible improvement for the people, and therefore declining support.

In fact, the nature of political machinations is another area where most reporting falls down - it tends not to allow sufficient complexity to fully illustrate the situation.

What are some concrete first step reforms that would help to improve BBC reporting?

Well in the first instance, I’d say that the Chavez administration has to take the first step. Not by brow-beating, but by addressing some of its own shortcomings with a better and more pervasive media strategy, not just with news organisations, but also more directly with citizens around the world. The most important thing to consider about media coverage is that it is intimately connected to actual events (and non events of course). Thus, when a mayor Chavez does not like is elected, it is simply not good politics to take his power away. When Chavez announces socialist principles, he must ensure they they are not merely words but they must be large scale actions, to which journalists are invited. When friends of Chavez are caught stealing or throwing lavish parties they can’t afford, it must be dealt with immediately and thoroughly - the media will take the story, so the government must engage them on it.

There’s a moment in the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised where Chavez complains to his ministers that they are not communicating their achievements. They are still not doing so. Indeed, given the international interest in Venezuela, one might expect that, anti-imperialism aside, the government would include English translations of its news services. Anything that makes it easier for lazy journalists to find and process information immediately alters there coverage.

As far as the BBC goes, I would expect that better communication from the government would help. However, there is also a need for its managers to take responsibility for reporting. The research we have done has uncovered a systematic bias and has identified key problems in the reporting - the way they see Venezuelan history, which goes against most historical accounts, the “background” they give to Chavez’s rise, and a number of simply outrageous reports (such as “Venezuela’s Dictatorship” mentioned earlier). These are simply and straightforwardly violations of the BBC’s own standards on accuracy and must be challenged.

Then there are sourcing routines. There are plenty of people working for Bolivarian Missions who the BBC journalists could speak to about what they do. I expect BBC journalists are naturally suspicious of the veracity of statements of Bolivarian supporters, which is understandable. However, they appear to be far less sceptical of representatives of the opposition groups - some of which have past involvement in all sorts of crimes and abuses. So in this instance there needs to be an equality of treatment. However, before that there needs to be more attention to quantitative balance. During the coup, for example, the sourcing was outrageous - indeed, the reporters should have been disciplined for their sourcing. A coup overthrows a democratically elected government, yet the voters whose government is being abolished, whose democratic rights have been eliminated, were nowhere to be seen in the BBC’s reporting (which relied on Chavez’s daughter, government ministers and “Cuba” for information). Only a journalist who is an idiot or who is intentionally skewing information would fail to ask an ordinary voter, a beneficiary of the Missions, members of Bolivarian circles, or simply walk around the huge demonstrations in favour of Chavez.

The framework underpinning the reporting must be revised and the recognition of class schisms that divided Venezuela a long, long time before Chavez arrived must be on the agenda. “Venezuelans” have always been divided, its just that for decades it was those who owned the media and other forms of social and cultural capital who benefited from this, keeping the vast majority - the poor - quiet. BBC journalists must show more awareness of these class dynamics, and must give some consideration to an accurate historical dimension through which sense can be made. Otherwise they just amplify the propaganda of Chavez’s anti-democratic opponents.

Though it is not becoming of reporters to reflect complexity, it would be an important development for journalists to get a sense of the complexity of the Bolivarian movement. For example it is not the case that “Chavez” is simply to blame for a lack of movement of Bolivarian Missions. There are indeed a large number of factors which a decent journalist would always bear in mind: for instance the lockouts from 2002-4 that crippled the economy. This was a repeat of the forms of “strategy of tension” that have been played out before elsewhere in Latin America. Thus, when someone comes out with “look, Chavez has crippled the economy!”, the journalist should be wise enough to investigate real causes (including the mistakes of the government). A good journalist might look at the constitution of the government and functionaries. There are competent functionaries who could implement policies but choose not to because they oppose the project (analogous here to the British Civil Service, whose conservatism Thatcher was so aware of). There are incompetent functionaries and ministers, brought in as Chavez’s people, and who have a good attitude but not the experience or knowledge to do what they need. And then there are the corrupt bastards who simply steal money. All these factors, and more, affect government performance, and should be thown into the mix to reflect the complexity of the situation, as would happen, say, when the BBC reports President Obama’s struggle over healthcare in the US.

Can you suggest any particularly good sources on Venezuela for those looking for alternatives to mainstream reporting?

Well it is not easy! There is Venezuela Analysis, which has some interesting articles written by some very competent people. However, this is most certainly pro-government, so must be considered part of a balanced diet. Vheadline is probably the best source of information, for it has perhaps a little less depth that Venezuela Analysis but has perhaps more balance. The English language section of El Universal is a useful resource, for those interested in understanding what the right-wing is thinking. Given the propensity of English speaking Venezuelans to be rather hysterical (even a Venezuelan student at my own university tried to claim that there has been no water or electricity in the city of Merida for 4 months - fortunately I had just got back from there and was able to correct her), insightful blogs are few and far between. One of the few that I find useful is A Gringa Diary, which reports from Merida.

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