| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
|
 Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 9:13 pm Post subject: Bias at the BBC |
 |
|
|
|
from the morning star
| Quote: | ROBERT GRIFFITHS carries out his own survey to expose the level of bias operating in Britain's monopoly-owned mass media.
LOW turnouts in the May 3 elections attracted the usual complaints from pundits and politicians about "voter apathy."
Unfavourable comparisons were drawn with the French presidential elections, where electors proved themselves twice as enthusiastic about casting their vote.
But is this really a question of apathetic and irresponsible citizens here in Britain?
The "culture of contentment" thesis advanced by new Labour's more disingenuous apologists claims that no-show electors are far too busy enjoying the good life to toddle off to the polling station.
Yet the abstention levels in Scotland and Wales were consistently between 10 and 45 per cent higher in working-class constituencies. It would seem that life is best in the terraced streets and council estates inhabited by that half of the population which owns 1 per cent of Britain's wealth.
Apathetic? In the period leading up to polling day, we witnessed hundreds of thousands of civil servants and other workers taking industrial action, thousands of protestors lobbying Parliament against stolen pension funds and disappearing post offices and countless marches and demonstrations against NHS cuts and closures.
When given the chance and prepared to appear "apathetic," people themselves told the media why they were unlikely to vote - they didn't trust professional politicians and saw little or no difference between the parties - or, at least, between those parties which were given the giant's share of media coverage.
Significantly, parties perceived to stand outside the so-called middle-ground consensus, where they were able to project their message on a large scale and with some frequency, tended to poll reasonably well. This was true of the SNP and Plaid Cymru and, in England especially, the Greens.
Although campaigners halted their advance in many areas, the BNP fascists also benefitted from an aura of anti-Establishment notoriety, notably in parts of Wales where they played heavily on local concerns about the impact of migrant labour.
But it is the pro-market, pro-business, pro-privatisation, pro-globalisation, pro-US alliance consensus between the main political parties which has done most to turn people off "establishment" politics.
The egoism, careerism, self-importance, opportunism, greed and hypocrisy of so many professional politicians - not unconnected with their role in a business-dominated political system - merely adds disgust to the alienation felt by millions of non-electors.
Another factor is the prevalence of electoral systems which ensure that the majority of votes cast have no direct bearing on the outcome, as smaller parties are mostly kept out of our elected chambers even though they represent a distinct political outlook or trend.
Large sections of the mass media are complicit in this state of affairs, not least by their refusal to report the very real politics by which ordinary people struggle for a better life and a fairer society or to take alternative, anti-Establishment ideas and policies seriously.
Instead, they treat politics as though it were confined to the institutions of state and the comings and goings of the career professionals, both elected and unelected, who have commandeered "politics" as their own exclusive job description.
The BBC uses its enormous influence to reinforce this whole approach, rather than deploying its unique status and considerable resources to question or break from it.
Those "flagship" programmes which are supposedly dedicated to promoting political discussion and debate are, in truth, among the most rigorous enforcers of the Establishment consensus.
Perhaps the most notorious instance of this is the weekly BBC Radio 4 programme Any Questions?, where a panel of four invited guests responds to audiences brought together in community venues across Britain.
An analysis of the 384 speakers who appeared on 96 shows over the course of 2005 and 2006 reveals the scale of the political bias at work.
Panellists clearly identifiable with the Conservative Party comprised 36 per cent of all party representatives on the platform, despite the fact that the Tories won only 32 per cent of the votes and 31 per cent of the seats at the 2005 general election.
Labour Party panellists accounted for 34 per cent of party-aligned guests on the programme, although Labour received 35 per cent of the votes and 55 per cent of the seats.
The SNP and Plaid Cymru were under-represented, their spokespersons appearing only three times - fewer than the four visiting US diplomats, academics and business leaders, three of whom were Bush enthusiasts.
Of the non-party guests, twice as many consistently right-wing speakers appeared as left-wing ones.
Rabid press columnist Peter Hitchens made an unequalled three appearances, closely followed by most of Britain's leading hard-right pundits, like Kelvin MacKenzie, Simon Heffer, Ann Leslie, Anne McElvoy and Melanie Phillips.
To reach 18, the left list had to be stretched to include such erratic liberals as Johann Hari, Bea Campbell and Will Self, as well as John Pilger and Tariq Ali.
On 32 occasions, Tory and right-wing guests occupied at least half of the panel places. Labour and left-wing panellists made up half of the platform on only 14 occasions.
With three-quarters of all Labour Party guests backing new Labour's policies of war, privatisation and growing inequality, genuinely left-wing panellists comprised half the platform on only one occasion out of 96.
Absent from all panels on all occasions were representatives of mass or popular movements which engage in non-Establishment politics. In particular, the blanket BBC ban on such articulate leaders of the peace movement as Kate Hudson, Andrew Murray and Lindsey German - who have, after all, organised the biggest demonstrations in British history - has remained intact.
Over a two-year period, the only trade union guests were T&G deputy general secretary Jack Dromey and Beverly Malone, general secretary of the no-strike Royal College of Nursing, while big business was represented on at least nine occasions, usually by such right-wing figures as Ruth Lea, Adair Turner and Digby Jones.
Such an unrepresentative pattern of guests, combined with a preponderance of venues in grammar or public schools, universities, religious centres and southern shire halls, had the desired results.
So, for example, the panel never discussed employment or trade union rights, pensions, equal pay or public ownership in place of privatisation, concentrating instead on issues of party leadership, presentation and spin, education and - usually at the same time - terrorism and the Muslim community.
British government foreign policy was unavoidable, although even then the programme's producers contrived a panel which, a week before the national Stop the War demonstration in September 2005, unanimously rejected any withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. Mind you, it was equally divided on the weekend of the demonstration itself - that's "balance," you see.
It reminded me of the time in November 1983 when, with 54 per cent of people opposed the imminent arrival of cruise missiles in Britain according to a Sunday Times opinion poll, the Any Questions? panel declared itself unanimously in favour.
Naturally, the 2005 and 2006 panels supported ID cards and fox-hunting, while SNP leader Alex Salmond joined all the other speakers in opposing any windfall tax on oil company super-profits.
Almost a quarter of the guests were either non-controversial and non-partisan - many of them senior quango members or broadcasters - or criticised aspects of new Labour, particularly its foreign policy, without taking clear right or left-wing positions on most issues.
In this latter category were former Tory supporters such as Max Hastings, Simon Jenkins and AN Wilson, as well as liberals or ex-Labourites like Sami Chakrabati, Anthony Howard and Christine Odone.
With the centre and the right over-represented and the non-Labour left largely shut out, it is little surprise that Any Questions? - like its television equivalent Question Time - serves up a tedious grey sludge in which debate is so often reduced to the personal, the trivial and the routine.
Most of the panellists reside within the ruling-class consensus and so have to scratch around to invent or magnify any differences between them.
No wonder a large proportion of our population has turned away from official "politics" in droves, denied the opportunity to see, hear or read of any alternative in the state and monopoly-owned mass media.
During the 1945-51 Labour government, the party's general secretary Morgan Phillips protested against the pro-Conservative bias of Any Questions? in terms of its speakers and programme venues.
My survey indicates the extent to which that bias in the BBC, 60 years on, is an institutionalised one. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
|
Couchtripper - 2005-2015
|
