Post by Teddy Bear on Jun 13, 2012 22:35:27 GMT
In an excellent article by Ed West at the Telegraph, he observes how BBC uses its dramas to convey surreptitiously the messages that fit its agenda.
The BBC's Left-wing bias isn't in its news coverage; it's in everything else that it does
By Ed West
From time to time people in the conservative media allege that the BBC is not entirely fair in its news output. I think it would be fair to say that some time ago I became a registered bore on the subject (and you only have to read my stuff – imagine living with me).
And yet a report just published by the New Culture Forum suggests that this is unfair – because BBC news and current affairs output is nothing like as biased as BBC drama, and this is far more insidious.
Dennis Sewell, the author of A Question of Attitude: The BBC and Bias Beyond News, spent more than 22 years working for BBC News, but came to the conclusion that it was wider culture biases in “arts, drama, documentary and religious programmes” that really alienated what he calls “the 32 per cent”, the proportion of definite conservatives in the population.
And drama, like fiction generally, has far more influence than fact. As the author notes of the BBC drama Page Eight, which centred around conspiratorial collusion between spies and politicians, a few days after it screened the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to bring any charges against members of the security and intelligence services.
Sewell points out that while people in the news and current affairs wing of the BBC are conscious of this subject, the corporation “may well have given some staff working in drama and comedy the impression that it is not a consideration they need to keep in the forefront of their minds. These are, however, very often precisely the kinds of programme likely to provoke some viewers to throw things at the television, threaten to stop paying the licence fee and declare the BBC irredeemably biased.”
This has been going on for some time. Back in the 1970s an “improbable” number of BBC drama producers and directors were associated with the Socialist Labour League (later to become the Workers’ Revolutionary Party or WRP), and this was at a time when BBC employees and contractors were subject to vetting by the Security Service (they no longer are).
Sewell cites a number of BBC programmes which have, he feels, been unjustifiably biased. Among them are David Hare’s Page Eight (BBC Two, 2011) in which “Our country’s involvement in rendition and torture is presented within the work as an established fact” which was “written by a well-known Left-wing writer, known to subscribe to various common conspiracy theories about both Iraq and the struggle against Islamism”.
When complaints when made, the BBC responded that "The principle [sic] subject for the drama was to defend the integrity of the security services and to object to their manipulation by politicians for political ends".
As Sewell says:
Then there was Freefall (BBC Two – July 2009), the story of the financial crash, in which “all business is just an amoral racket, isn’t it? It is seen as a zero- sum game, where every transaction has a winner and a loser, a spiv and a mug, screwer and screwed”.
Worst of all, perhaps was Geert Wilders – Europe’s Most Dangerous Man? (BBC Two – February 2011) which “seemed to break many of the rules that the BBC’s own news and current affairs journalists are taught to observe".
The programme also included pro-Wilders contributions from extremists while omitting his many moderate supporters and sympathisers: “A fair analogy might be the BBC broadcasting a profile of Ed Miliband, slanted in a ‘Red Ed’ direction, where the only supportive content – beyond a few vox pops with Labour voters – would be a clip of a Socialist Workers Party activist addressing a ‘Stop the Cuts’ demo, and an interview with a former Baader–Meinhof terrorist. The cynical stratagem of seeking to promote guilt by association is no substitute for balance."
Then there was the notorious Any Questions (BBC Radio 4 – 5 March 2010) broadcast from the East London Mosque, where only a month previously a speaker had called for women who use perfume to be flogged: “The BBC may have walked into an ambush with its eyes shut. The listener at home, however, might have drawn a different conclusion. The whooping, baying crowd in the hall evoked memories of the disgraceful BBC Question Time Special broadcast immediately after 9/11, during which the American ambassador, Philip Lader, struggled to hold back his tears in the face of a brutal Islamist-leftist rent-a-mob.”
Or Bonekickers (July 2008) which featured the beheading of a peaceable Muslim man at the hands of a group of Christian fanatics, which was an unusual re-imagining of a 2007 case where some Islamists in Birmingham had plotted to behead a British Muslim soldier.
Almost as sick was the very first episode of BBC One’s MI5 drama Spooks in 2002, which featured pro-life terrorists, a theme that featured again in the 2009 cop drama Hunter, where anti-abortionists threatened to kill kidnapped children unless the BBC showed a video of a 24-week termination. Never mind that nothing like this has ever occurred in Britain, and even in the US, pro-life violence is exceptionally rare.
Then there was Accused: Frankie’s Story, about British soldiers in Afghanistan, (BBC One – 22 November 2010). Colonel Tim Collins, horrified, said the BBC was stabbing in the back those soldiers serving in the front line, and Sewell says that many troops saw it as "defamatory and stemming from a culpable ignorance".
The corporation has a strategy for dealing with bias – the "wagon wheel" – which in theory ensures that every political view is taken care for, but where are the counter-balancing views? This is most marked in comedy, where “the BBC has never found its PJ O’Rourke, yet it can summon an endless supply of Mark Steels, Jeremy Hardys and Marcus Brigstockes. Have you heard the one about Obama? Of course not. He wouldn't be the butt of a Left-wing comedian’s joke – even when accepting a Nobel Peace prize while fighting two wars.”
BBC folk might be a bit sick of these complaints, but Sewell’s criticism seems to stem from a genuine love for the corporation, which is a pillar of British civilisation and which, in many areas, walks over all competition.
And his solutions are very sensible – no heavy-handed threats, pressure from government or compliance legislation, just a simpler “wider engagement with the centre-Right audience”.
He says: “While the BBC has a natural and instinctive understanding of liberal ideas and values, its grasp of conservative ideas and values is far less assured.”
This mirrors Jonathan Haidt’s ideas about counter-balancing liberal bias in academia; there it has become so extreme that it is actually an uncomfortable, even threatening, environment for conservatives, and one where they are openly mocked. As long as that happens, and such institutions become an echo chamber of runaway liberalism, the BBC will continue to be seen by many as a cultural imperialist in the living room
By Ed West
From time to time people in the conservative media allege that the BBC is not entirely fair in its news output. I think it would be fair to say that some time ago I became a registered bore on the subject (and you only have to read my stuff – imagine living with me).
And yet a report just published by the New Culture Forum suggests that this is unfair – because BBC news and current affairs output is nothing like as biased as BBC drama, and this is far more insidious.
Dennis Sewell, the author of A Question of Attitude: The BBC and Bias Beyond News, spent more than 22 years working for BBC News, but came to the conclusion that it was wider culture biases in “arts, drama, documentary and religious programmes” that really alienated what he calls “the 32 per cent”, the proportion of definite conservatives in the population.
And drama, like fiction generally, has far more influence than fact. As the author notes of the BBC drama Page Eight, which centred around conspiratorial collusion between spies and politicians, a few days after it screened the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to bring any charges against members of the security and intelligence services.
No doubt the BBC reported this in its news outlets, but it is unlikely that these had more than a fraction of the impact on the public mind of David Hare’s drama. For many members of the public, the prejudice they take away with them will be that, of course, there was British complicity in torture, and that the spooks and their political masters were up to their necks in it.
Sewell points out that while people in the news and current affairs wing of the BBC are conscious of this subject, the corporation “may well have given some staff working in drama and comedy the impression that it is not a consideration they need to keep in the forefront of their minds. These are, however, very often precisely the kinds of programme likely to provoke some viewers to throw things at the television, threaten to stop paying the licence fee and declare the BBC irredeemably biased.”
This has been going on for some time. Back in the 1970s an “improbable” number of BBC drama producers and directors were associated with the Socialist Labour League (later to become the Workers’ Revolutionary Party or WRP), and this was at a time when BBC employees and contractors were subject to vetting by the Security Service (they no longer are).
Sewell cites a number of BBC programmes which have, he feels, been unjustifiably biased. Among them are David Hare’s Page Eight (BBC Two, 2011) in which “Our country’s involvement in rendition and torture is presented within the work as an established fact” which was “written by a well-known Left-wing writer, known to subscribe to various common conspiracy theories about both Iraq and the struggle against Islamism”.
When complaints when made, the BBC responded that "The principle [sic] subject for the drama was to defend the integrity of the security services and to object to their manipulation by politicians for political ends".
As Sewell says:
So not ‘just fiction’ at all, but rather almost a kind of ‘journalism by other means’. Which surely takes us straight back into Hutton territory. The phrasing of this reply suggests that the film was agenda- driven or campaigning drama – something the BBC is not supposed to engage in.
Then there was Freefall (BBC Two – July 2009), the story of the financial crash, in which “all business is just an amoral racket, isn’t it? It is seen as a zero- sum game, where every transaction has a winner and a loser, a spiv and a mug, screwer and screwed”.
Worst of all, perhaps was Geert Wilders – Europe’s Most Dangerous Man? (BBC Two – February 2011) which “seemed to break many of the rules that the BBC’s own news and current affairs journalists are taught to observe".
Billed as a profile of the controversial Dutch politician, for much of the time it felt more like a character assassination. A relentless catalogue of smear, insinuation and innuendo, with a good deal of the testimony against Wilders coming out of the mouths of interviewees whose backgrounds, in some cases, do not stand up to even cursory scrutiny. What was worse, their true affiliations had been sanitized by the programme makers.
Martin Smith, identified as an anti-fascist campaigner. What the BBC chose not to vouchsafe was that Smith had been, at the time the interview was conducted, the national organizer of the Socialist Workers Party. Had we been told that Smith was not just the common or garden variety of right-on do-gooder, but a Trotskyite entryist, involved in the political equivalent of a false-flag operation, we might have taken his criticisms of Wilders with a larger pinch of salt. Nor were we told that Smith had, as recently as September 2010, been convicted in the UK of assaulting a police officer – something that might have led the viewer to ponder whether Wilders (who has not been associated with any criminal violence) would even be a candidate for the most dangerous man in this film.
More than once in the film, emphasis was placed on Wilders’ supposed wish to have the Koran banned. At one point, he was accused of wanting to deny access to the text to ‘one and a half billion Muslims’. Wilders has many times explained and clarified his position on this – and indeed is briefly glimpsed in the film, trying to do so at a press conference.
The truth of the matter is that, within the context of a discussion on banning the sale of Mein Kampf in Holland (a measure that was passed into law at the instigation of the Left), Wilders remarked that, if the Left were to be consistent, the logic of its arguments for banning Hitler’s book should lead it also to seek a ban on the Koran, which contains passages that it should find just as odious as the passages in Mein Kampf that were so objectionable.
The programme also included pro-Wilders contributions from extremists while omitting his many moderate supporters and sympathisers: “A fair analogy might be the BBC broadcasting a profile of Ed Miliband, slanted in a ‘Red Ed’ direction, where the only supportive content – beyond a few vox pops with Labour voters – would be a clip of a Socialist Workers Party activist addressing a ‘Stop the Cuts’ demo, and an interview with a former Baader–Meinhof terrorist. The cynical stratagem of seeking to promote guilt by association is no substitute for balance."
Then there was the notorious Any Questions (BBC Radio 4 – 5 March 2010) broadcast from the East London Mosque, where only a month previously a speaker had called for women who use perfume to be flogged: “The BBC may have walked into an ambush with its eyes shut. The listener at home, however, might have drawn a different conclusion. The whooping, baying crowd in the hall evoked memories of the disgraceful BBC Question Time Special broadcast immediately after 9/11, during which the American ambassador, Philip Lader, struggled to hold back his tears in the face of a brutal Islamist-leftist rent-a-mob.”
Or Bonekickers (July 2008) which featured the beheading of a peaceable Muslim man at the hands of a group of Christian fanatics, which was an unusual re-imagining of a 2007 case where some Islamists in Birmingham had plotted to behead a British Muslim soldier.
Almost as sick was the very first episode of BBC One’s MI5 drama Spooks in 2002, which featured pro-life terrorists, a theme that featured again in the 2009 cop drama Hunter, where anti-abortionists threatened to kill kidnapped children unless the BBC showed a video of a 24-week termination. Never mind that nothing like this has ever occurred in Britain, and even in the US, pro-life violence is exceptionally rare.
Then there was Accused: Frankie’s Story, about British soldiers in Afghanistan, (BBC One – 22 November 2010). Colonel Tim Collins, horrified, said the BBC was stabbing in the back those soldiers serving in the front line, and Sewell says that many troops saw it as "defamatory and stemming from a culpable ignorance".
The corporation has a strategy for dealing with bias – the "wagon wheel" – which in theory ensures that every political view is taken care for, but where are the counter-balancing views? This is most marked in comedy, where “the BBC has never found its PJ O’Rourke, yet it can summon an endless supply of Mark Steels, Jeremy Hardys and Marcus Brigstockes. Have you heard the one about Obama? Of course not. He wouldn't be the butt of a Left-wing comedian’s joke – even when accepting a Nobel Peace prize while fighting two wars.”
BBC folk might be a bit sick of these complaints, but Sewell’s criticism seems to stem from a genuine love for the corporation, which is a pillar of British civilisation and which, in many areas, walks over all competition.
And his solutions are very sensible – no heavy-handed threats, pressure from government or compliance legislation, just a simpler “wider engagement with the centre-Right audience”.
He says: “While the BBC has a natural and instinctive understanding of liberal ideas and values, its grasp of conservative ideas and values is far less assured.”
This mirrors Jonathan Haidt’s ideas about counter-balancing liberal bias in academia; there it has become so extreme that it is actually an uncomfortable, even threatening, environment for conservatives, and one where they are openly mocked. As long as that happens, and such institutions become an echo chamber of runaway liberalism, the BBC will continue to be seen by many as a cultural imperialist in the living room