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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 1:05 pm Post subject: interesting read about bias at the bbc by an ex employee |
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| Quote: | As an ex-BBC employee (not in the news section mind) I can tell you that the BBC, as an institution, is prone to a lot of the same pressures that the corporate media sector are. It isn't quite the tax funded utopia it's made out to be in a lot of commentary. Finance plays a big role and you have to keep in mind that it has been on the run up to a Charter renewal. You simply have to remember what the C stands for. Particularly in the context of a market-led society/economy.
As early as 2001 (to the best of my personal knowledge) senior managers at the BBC were already making strategic decisions to influence the, possibly crippling, decisions the DCMS might have made about license fees and so on in 2006.
I'm a little wary of supporting some of the assertions made above about complicity. Some suggesting a conscious choice in supporting governmental policy. The people at the BBC, for the most part, are simply trying to do the best job they can, providing the best information they can.
These people are, for the most part, just members of public too. The fact that many of them are probably not aware of the origins of the PR industry, or quite how insidious it is, may lead them to be uncritical of the information they recieve from other institutional sources. They live and work under the same social and cultural assumptions that a large section of the country do.
How do you deal with this? Would it be unfair to make every editorial staff member write an essay on Bernays before commiting anything else to headed Corporation paper? Make them do an investigative piece into something like the nature of reserve banking or Production-Sharing Agreements? Something a little out of the mainstream and more than a little controvertial? As a part of the interview process perhaps?
I'm willing to bet that you're much more likely to find your average BBC employee reading Heat magazine than some Adam Smith or a Proudhon text.
BBC journalism can be relatively lazy (genuine BBC, not sourced second hand from Reuters, AP, etc, though those can be even more ridiculous). Certainly that which appears on the internet tends to be an appalling regurgitation of quotes from individuals with vested interests in the issue at hand (or their corporate PR cronies). That is to say, it is about as far from objective as possible.
One thing that does amaze me is that the BBC does not roll out its own archive footage to demonstrate hypocrisy in politician's behaviour or rhetoric.
I'm sure they could make a beautiful video montage (with datestamps) of all the changes in direction over the justification for the invasion of Iraq. (Though you'd probably struggle to find much on the changes between dollar and euro for oil trading.)
Then again, that would require dedicated individuals doing the research who are very well informed on the topic at hand and not just putting together 'content' (oh how I despise that word) which is relatively compelling between meetings, lunch, dinner, picking up the kids and so on.
It has also stunned me how quickly BBC television news coverage accepts and integrates rhetoric and metaphor unquestioningly into their reporting language. For instance, vilifying 'terrorism' and sanctioning 'Shock and Awe' when they could even be considered the same thing.
At home, as of last December, I've disconnected the aerial from my television. I find there to be little of any interest in the schedules. The radio news reporting and subsequent discussion seems of a much higher quality. Besides which, I'm really sick of being told how much I should make my living space look like an Ikea showroom or how we're going to help Bob the lawyer pick one of three £350000 houses so he can jump on the buy-to-let bandwagon.
I might have kept it plugged in if the BBC's political coverage were actually worthwhile. You have Michael Portillo as a political commentator and you don't challenge him aggressively over every 'defence' policy issue? He only resigned from BAE last year because it'd make his bias too obvious to keep him on the BBC payroll.
I quit my post at Aunty Beeb and now lecture on the media at a University. I find it fascinating that there's been so little coverage of issues that are of interest in my new career. Such as the recent student riots in Athens or the fact that the method of Higher Education funding has changed and now depends on participation in assessment (further discouraging academic rigour in favour of getting paid).
Whilst I think it's wrong to picture the BBC as governmental co-conspirators, it's very fair to accuse the institution of bias, particularly over matters of such import as going to war. The BBC cannot afford to upset politicians because the politicians are the ones signing off on the licence fee, it can't afford to upset the public too much because they validate its existance through viewing figures and, when all is said and done, the BBC is composed of a lot of individuals keeping their heads down, trying to get by.
Both Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky have already been mentioned. There's a great clip from an old BBC interview ('The Big Idea') that has been uploaded repeatedly on Google Video where Marr asks "How can you know that I'm self censoring?". Chomsky's response pretty much sums up the big problems with BBC journalistic bias. Worth a watch if you haven't seen it already. |
this was a post from a blog http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/03/bbcs_iraq_coverage_biased_or_balanced.html
you can watch the chomsky marr interview here http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4827358238697503
worth watching if you've not seen it  |
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