Post by Teddy Bear on Nov 14, 2006 16:59:47 GMT
Brilliant article from Tom Leonard at The Telegraph that just about sums up the BBC. It's worth clicking on the link and also reading the readers comments posted after this article.
The BBC's commitment to bias is no laughing matter
By Tom Leonard
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/10/2006
It's fair to say the message is finally getting through: the BBC has a problem with impartiality. The row over BBC bias has been rumbling on longer than war in Sudan and always seemed just as unresolvable. The format was always the same: take a bunch of Left-leaning, liberal-minded television executives and a bunch of Right-leaning politics wonks with obsessions about BBC reporting of the Middle East, the EU and the Tory party. Then they hit each other over the head with rolled up, heavily underlined copies of programme transcripts from Newsnight or Today.
And this is a battle that the BBC has become very adept at fighting. Every time the clamour of bias on some particularly hard news issue, such as Israel, Iraq, or Brussels, gets too loud, the corporation commissions some research that finds no bias, or – next best – evidence of bias on both sides.
But no matter how much BBC bosses swear blind there is no problem, the issue refuses to go away. Why? Because for many licence-payers, the BBC's skewed assumptions about what the world is about and how its inhabitants should think is the most annoying thing about it – more annoying than dumbing down, than the universal licence fee, than Jonathan Ross's £18 million pay packet. More annoying even than Natasha Kaplinsky. And particularly infuriating when the BBC denies it outright, as did Michael Grade, the BBC chairman, in an article published a few days before a governors' impartiality summit a month ago.
Not that he'd already made up his own mind or anything. Anyway, embarrassingly, it emerged (through leaked minutes that were rather harder to elicit from the corporation than Mr Grade's article) that even some of his most senior journalists disagreed. Andrew Marr, hardly one of the BBC's token Right-wingers, declared that the BBC "is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people". It has, he added, "a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias." The meeting also heard that the BBC was patronising its audiences and constrained by an intolerant version of politically correct liberalism.
The bandwagon is gathering momentum. Yesterday it emerged that a BBC executive, Ann Davies, has questioned whether the corporation should "help break the constraints of the PC police" after audience research found it was out of step with much of mainstream public opinion. Another BBC boss, Richard Klein, commissioning editor for documentaries, told staff it was "pathetic" for the BBC to pride itself on being "of the people".
They're all spot on. It's high time the debate moved on from narrow notions of political bias. Far harder for the BBC to gainsay is that it has a liberal cultural bias, one that envelops pretty much all programmes, not just news and current affairs. If you want to find the most solid evidence of partiality, look at the BBC's entertainment output – its dramas, comedies and arts programmes. This is where its guard is down, where the BBC editorial police are not watching out for "balance" weak points. And it's also where, arguably, the partiality is far more subversive.
I wouldn't know where to start in tackling the political correctness of BBC drama, but I think the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves would go to Spooks, BBC1's flagship series about impossibly right-on MI5 agents. The series was originally praised (by the BBC) for its accuracy about the real work of the Security Service. So what did it kick off with on the first episode? A pro-life extremist bomber out to cause mayhem. Come on, you must know about them! No? Well, what about episode two, which tackled the equally pressing issue of racist extremists in league with Right-wing politicians plotting mass murder of immigrants? I lost interest in Spooks, but tuned in again a few weeks ago for the start of the fifth series. It was about homegrown al-Qa'eda terrorists taking over the Saudi embassy and murdering innocent people. Except that they weren't British Muslims at all, but undercover Israeli agents. Once again, the villains are a million miles away from the ones you might expect, and top-heavy with the forces of reaction.
The forces of reaction are conversely under-represented in pretty much every BBC panel show that I can think of. I'm not suggesting it has to bring back Jim Davidson, but are there any Right-wing funny men on the BBC? Meanwhile, any Guardian columnist who doesn't have a regular gig on the BBC needs, frankly, to change agents. That newspaper – or the Independent, if they're desperate – is the default button for BBC researchers phoning round for a studio guest.
The death, earlier this year, of Linda Smith, a regular on Radio 4's The News Quiz, and the subsequent glowing tributes to her caustic Left-wing wit from fellow panellists drove home the point that most of them were either serving or former Guardian columnists.
Of course, they poke fun at the Government but – as with so much BBC criticism – it's almost always from a Left-wing perspective. Over on BBC2, producers of the arts discussion show Newsnight Review achieve similar success in striking a balance among their regular guests.
Anyone who could even be vaguely described as Right-of-centre is a rarity. Inevitably, this sets the terms of the debate. And so, as happened in the summer, when a panellist described George W. Bush as a warmongering moron, nobody so much as stirred in dissent. When, a month later, Newsnight tackled the controversy over Ken Loach's allegedly sympathetic film about the IRA, they interviewed two film critics. They were from the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, and, sure enough, they agreed what a great director he was.
Sometimes, even the BBC notices the bias. Not long ago, I watched a three-man media debate on Newsnight in which two were Guardian writers. The other was captioned with his previous job on another newspaper.
But does this all matter as much as accusing the Government of "sexing up" a dossier on WMD? Yes, more so. In embedding a liberal agenda in programmes where people's bias antennae may not be so finely tuned, the effect is more insidious. The rocks of the BBC's cultural assumptions are starting to fall apart somewhat: witness its second thoughts on its commitment to multi-culturalism. More reassessments will follow and the BBC, if it has any sense, should welcome them.
As it wrestles with the inevitable decline of its audience in the digital age, impartiality is that rare problem for the BBC – it's one that it can actually do something about.