'Deep Liberal Bias' on Immigration

[vandamme]

BBC's 'deep liberal bias' prevented it from reflecting public views on immigration, says former corporation news director.

A 'deep liberal bias' in the BBC prevented it from accurately reflecting public views on immigration, according to a new report.

The review, by television executive Stuart Prebble, said the corporation had been 'slow' to catch up with public opinion on subjects including immigration and the rise of support for the UK leaving the European Union.

It said former director of BBC News Helen Boaden 'accepts that when she came into her role in September 2004 there had been a problem in the BBC’s coverage of immigration.

She was aware, she told us, of a "deep liberal bias" in the way that the BBC approached the topic'.

The review also heard evidence from former Today programme reporter Robin Aitken, author of a book on perceived left-wing bias in the BBC, who said the corporation was damaged by a 'fundamental niceness' and reluctance to give offence that stopped it covering a subject such as immigration properly.

The report, which was commissioned by the BBC Trust, states: 'The BBC was slow to reflect the weight of concern in the wider community about issues arising from immigration.

'It remains the case that the agenda of debate is probably too driven by the views of politicians.

'However, overall the breadth of opinion reflected by the BBC on this subject is broad and impressive, and no persuasive evidence was found that significant areas of opinion are not given due weight today.'

It also said the BBC was 'slow to give appropriate prominence to the growing weight of opinion opposing UK membership of the EU, but in more recent times has achieved a better balance'.
BIAS AT THE BEEB: EXTRACTS FROM INDEPENDENT REPORT

Former BBC News chief aware of 'deep liberal bias' in its approach to topic of immigration
BBC 'slow to give appropriate prominence' to growing opposition to UK membership of the European Union
Coverage damaged by 'fundamental niceness' and reluctance to cause offence
Agenda of debate is still 'probably too driven by views of politicians'

Mr Prebble, a former ITV boss, warned of the dangers of the BBC gathering too many of its journalists in its new Broadcasting House in London’s West End.

'A large group of people working together are in danger of becoming more homogenous in their thinking, not less, and so less able to see when the output reflects a narrow outlook,' he said.

BBC Trust member David Liddiment said: 'Ensuring that a wide range of views are seen and heard on the BBC is at the heart of the BBC’s enviable reputation for impartial journalism, and I am grateful to Stuart Prebble for his independent assessment of the BBC’s progress.

'Our impartiality reviews are an important inducement for the Executive to question itself, in this case on its breadth of opinion, to ensure it is doing all it can to achieve what licence fee-payers expect, and that it is constantly alert to changing public opinion.

'We deliberately chose some complex and controversial subject areas for the review in immigration, religion, and the EU, and our generally positive findings are testament to programme-makers across the corporation. It is clear that there is more to do and we will look to the Executive to deliver on this.'

Mr Prebble said part of the problem with covering immigration was the BBC had too closely followed the Westminster agenda and for many years mainstream politicians had been reluctant to discuss the issue.

But he said that in more recent times it had 'reflected a wide and more suitable range of opinions on the subject' and had 'caught up considerably' with public opinion.

Mr Liddiment said the review, which comes five years after a similar exercise, cost £175,000.

In a 2010 interview with the New Statesman, the then director-general Mark Thompson said the BBC had been guilty of a 'massive bias to the left' in the past.

He said staff had been 'quite mystified' by the rise of Margaret Thatcher but now there was 'less overt tribalism' among its journalists.

A BBC spokeswoman said: 'We are pleased our coverage has been deemed 'remarkable' and 'impressive'.

'Stuart Prebble has concluded, overall, that our coverage of immigration is "broad and impressive", that on the EU we offer "a wide and comprehensive range of information and viewpoints" and that the BBC's coverage of religion is "comprehensive and impressive".

He also states that the overwhelming number of journalists within the BBC leave their personal politics at home.

'However, the report provides some interesting insights. We agree it is always vital to guard against unconscious bias or "group think" and will continue to do so and we've committed to a number of actions to improve our coverage even further.'

[Teddy Bear]

Hey Van, you beat me to it

I saw a similar article on this theme in The Telegraph and was going to post it. It's heartening to see that there already over 1500 comments posted on both sources, and few of them complimentary to the BBC.

Fact is this review tells us nothing that we didn't know already, and back in 2010 Mark Thompson admitted to this particular bias.

If anything these 'findings' appear to try and mitigate the BBC's absolute guilt of terrible propaganda and subsequent damage to this country with their coverage of this issue.

Examples like The review also heard evidence that the BBC is hamstrung by a "fundamental niceness" and reluctance to give offence.
The BBC was far from 'nice' and didn't mind giving offence to anybody who disagreed with this open door policy, especially admitting those who had no affinity to our society.

"The BBC was slow to reflect the weight of concern in the wider community about issues arising from immigration. It remains the case that the agenda of debate is probably too driven by the views of politicians.

This is so disingenuous, like saying the tail wags the dog. There is no doubt that the policy was Labour led for their own purposes, but little has been done by the present government to redress it. It also doesn't mention that the BBC benefits financially by its promotion of the EU, besides any other motive.

It also goes on to say that recent coverage of these issues has been better, well I for one have seen no evidence of that.

Here's more of this 'crock'.

"However, overall the breadth of opinion reflected by the BBC on this subject is broad and impressive, and no persuasive evidence was found that significant areas of opinion are not given due weight today."

It also said the BBC was "slow to give appropriate prominence to the growing weight of opinion opposing UK membership of the EU, but in more recent times has achieved a better balance".

The review also identified problems with so many BBC journalists working in a big building and reinforcing each other's prejudices.
"A large group of people working together are in danger of becoming more homogenous in their thinking, not less, and so less able to see when the output reflects a narrow outlook," he said.
The BBC Trust said it takes seriously the challenge of being "constantly alert to changing public opinion".

David Liddiment, BBC Trust member, said: "We deliberately chose some complex and controversial subject areas for the review in immigration, religion, and the EU, and our generally positive findings are testament to programme-makers across the corporation. It is clear that there is more to do and we will look to the executive to deliver on this."

A spokesman for the BBC said: "We are pleased our coverage has been deemed 'remarkable' and 'impressive'."

"Stuart Prebble has concluded, overall, that our coverage of immigration is 'broad and impressive', that on the EU we offer 'a wide and comprehensive range of information and viewpoints' and that the BBC’s coverage of religion is 'comprehensive and impressive.' He also states that the overwhelming number of journalists within the BBC leave their personal politics at home.

"However the report provides some interesting insights. We agree it is always vital to guard against unconscious bias or 'group think' and will continue to do so and we’ve committed to a number of actions to improve our coverage even further."

[Teddy Bear]

Toby Young at The Telegraph also questions the purpose of this 'review'. It appears more and more that it's solely for the BBC to show it's brainwashed public, (who were aware already of its propaganda on the subject), that it was biased, but only for the best of reasons, and it's all better now.

CRAP!

BBC pays £175,000 to discover it has a 'liberal bias' on immigration

By Toby Young

I'm not a BBC-hater, but I did have to stifle a laugh on reading the following headline: "BBC has deep liberal bias, executive admits." No, really? Are you sure? In other news, Vatican City resident is revealed to be a Romanist and Ursus arctos defecates in piney area.

Apparently, the BBC Trust commissioned a report to look into whether the corporation was fulfilling its obligation to provide "breadth and diversity of opinion" on issues like Europe and immigration. Answer: No! (You can pick your jaw up off the floor now.) It conducted fewer interviews with Ukip members last year than it did in 2007 and has been "slow" to reflect growing public concern over mass immigration, the report concluded. The cost of arriving at these startling revelations was £175,000. Ah well. Probably cheaper than making the Director General's official car-door opener redundant. No, wait. He still works there.

The BBC could have saved itself some money and just bought a copy of the Daily Mail. In November of last year, it reported that the outgoing Africa editor of the BBC World Service thinks people who vote Conservative are "lower then vermin". Four years ago, the paper revealed that the BBC's controller of drama Ben Stephenson wanted material that was more "left of centre" – the BBC's drama output being insufficiently Left-wing in his opinion. This is not a view shared by Peter Sissons, according to an article by him in the Mail in 2011. "At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left," he wrote.

Alternatively, they could read Guilty Men, Peter Oborne and Francis Weaver's essay for the Centre for Policy Studies, in which they expose the full extent of the BBC's bias over the single currency – it was fanatically pro, obviously – or just visit this website which documents the daily instances of the BBC's out-and-out Left-wingery.

I'd like to add one bugbear of mine to this list. When is the BBC going to invite a Right-wing comedian to appear on Question Time? No episode is complete without some trendy, right-on comic attacking the government. Why not invite some right-of-centre entertainers as well? Better yet, have a few scientists on instead. In the past two-and-a-half years, Question Time has featured more reality show contestants than scientists, according to this graph. If I have to watch ex-Socialist Workers' Party member Mark Steel droning on about the "Tory cuts" one more time I think I might throw a brick at the television.

[Teddy Bear]

This article in the Daily mail really hits the nail on the head in regard to this scandalous betrayal of the country by the BBC.

Complacency at the heart of BBC bias

By Daily Mail Comment

With their habitual complacency, BBC chiefs have greeted the fifth and latest review of the Corporation’s impartiality with a fanfare of self-congratulation.

‘We are pleased our coverage has been deemed “remarkable” and “impressive”,’ declares a spokesman.

‘Our generally positive findings are testament to our programme-makers,’ says David Liddiment of the BBC Trust, which commissioned the £175,000 study.

He goes on to praise the BBC’s ‘enviable reputation for impartial journalism’.

Forgive us for asking, but have these people actually read the report?

If they had, they would know that its author, former ITV executive Stuart Prebble, has laid hugely damaging charges against BBC journalists.

Indeed, on the two most vital issues of our time – mass immigration and the EU – even this self-proclaimed ‘liberal progressive’ finds they failed in their duty of balance.

On immigration, he quotes former BBC news director Helen Boaden as admitting a ‘deep liberal bias’ prevented it from accurately reflecting the public’s views.

On the EU, Mr Prebble found the BBC was ‘slow to give appropriate prominence to the growing weight of opinion opposing UK membership’.

He also condemns gathering too many journalists in New Broadcasting House, warning that large numbers working together start thinking the same way.

So far, so perceptive. But where this report fails badly, like so many of its predecessors, is in suggesting that the BBC has put most of its bias behind it.

To understand that this couldn’t be further from the truth, Mr Prebble need only have listened to Sarah Montague on yesterday’s Today programme, laying into the Health Secretary’s patently sensible plans to charge foreign visitors for using the NHS. Or to the sneering, snide, blustering Evan Davis interview with the Chancellor last week.

Indeed, the BBC remains institutionally biased against Tory efforts to balance Britain’s books.

Without fail, it sides with the public sector against private enterprise, environmentalists against industrialists, atheists against Christians, feminists against the traditional family…

Yet whenever the BBC admits its one-sidedness – as when director general Mark Thompson confessed in 2010 that the Corporation had been guilty of ‘massive bias to the Left’ – it always claims to have mended its ways.

Will any action be taken this time? The BBC’s complacency and the incompetence of its dripping wet chairman Chris Patten are the only answers you need.

[Teddy Bear]

Nigel Farage is probably the man who is most aware of how BBC coverage of this topic has affected the country and voices his opinion in this Telegraph article.

Nigel Farage: The bloated BBC bullies those who disagree with its liberal bias
The BBC's response to a report that identifies its liberal bias is utterly shameful, writes Nigel Farage.

By Nigel Farage

So, the BBC has published its latest mea culpa. What won't surprise you is that the corporation thinks it does a pretty good job. Sure, there may have been criticisms about its abject failure to report the rise of Euroscepticism or reflect the public's concerns about immigration in the past. But now the BBC is, it tells us, “pleased our coverage has been deemed 'remarkable' and 'impressive'".

It is hard to conceive of such a self-satisfied, self-deceiving response to a report, costing £175,000, which clearly shows that in the past the BBC was – just maybe – a touch slow on the uptake on how British public opinion has shifted.

There is plenty of breast-beating, but always with a time stamp. Back in the day there was a ”deep liberal bias”. Today? Well of course not.

This report isn't the first, either. In January 2005, the Wilson report said the BBC “suffers from certain forms of cultural bias” that led to “a reluctance to question pro-EU assumptions”. It also referenced the infamous “institutional mindset”.

It sounds so depressingly familiar – again and again, we read of the same old tropes. I acknowledge that there has been a significant improvement in the quantity of coverage of those with an anti-EU point of view. But there are still many occasions when the BBC will say to me, “Well, if you can’t do it Nigel, then we won’t cover it”, despite being offered perfectly able and competent replacements. I have become a BBC totem in some ways (just think of all those Question Time appearances). But, and this is the point, I am not the Eurosceptic movement. I am merely one man, and the broad mass of the population is hardly represented by me. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows those who wish to leave the EU are the majority, yet if were to judge by the BBC, you would get the impression it was just me. I am the get-out clause. “Well we had Nigel on,” they will trumpet.

And that is just on the European Union. When it comes to Immigration the bias is even clearer. They cover themselves with this idea that they are nice, and other people who differ, who believe that migration has gone too far, are in some way nasty. Is it nasty to think that the sheer volume of people arriving on our shores and impacting upon our services, jobs and wages is wrong?

Is it nasty to think that people should have been consulted before their communities were altered out of all recognition? Is it really unpleasant to worry that next year London alone will be shy of 100,000 primary school places and we are expecting to build homes on 1,500 square miles of countryside due in a large part, according to the Government, to inward migrant flows? Maybe so if, like the average BBC executive, your experience of migration is a cheap au pair, cleaner, and a fascinating little restaurant down the road, but that is not the experience of this country’s majority.

And the bias in coverage isn’t just in the amount of time spent on different points of view. It’s the way in which the subjects are addressed. Those with an opposing view to the BBC mindset are harried and bullied on air, whilst others are often smooched through their interviews. And of course it isn’t just in news coverage. In popular drama, those who oppose mass migration are bigots, stupid, physically ugly; those on the other side are sensitive, beautiful, intelligent. It goes on and on.

The problem is now, as it has been for decades, a simple one, and one acknowledged in this report: the BBC draws its staff by and large from a single well. This is illustrated perhaps best by the recent publication of figures detailing the corporation's purchase of newspapers. In 2011-12 it bought 68,307 copies of the Guardian, 59,490 of the Times and 57,763 of the Telegraph and not forgetting 50,398 copies of The Independent. Which, given that the Telegraph outsells the Guardian by more 2 to 1 nationally, rather gives the game away.

That the great euro panjandrum and paradigm of the bloated elite, Lord Patten, sits atop the pile and is the one who has in the final reckoning to rule as to whether the BBC is impartial rather says it all.
And just don’t get me started on how the corporation covers the great debate on Energy, Climate Change and the Environment.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Ukip

[Teddy Bear]

Damian Thompson at The Telegraph picks up on similar points that I noted when this report was made public, and more.

The BBC is edging closer to criminality
By Damian Thompson

On Wednesday, a news story was published online that began as follows: “The BBC reflects a 'remarkable and impressive’ range of voices in its coverage of religion, immigration and Europe, an independent review for the BBC Trust has found.”

I’m sorry? Would this be the same report, commissioned by the BBC Trust, that uncovered “deep liberal bias” on the subject of immigration? Yup. But that doesn’t feature in the news story, which includes a sub-heading “No liberal bias”.

Let me explain. The news story is in Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine. As a piece of journalism, it’s so laughably twisted as to be useless: the phrase “deep liberal bias”, a quote from none other than the BBC’s former director of news Helen Boaden, is nowhere to be found. But it has cleared up a question in my mind.

I used to think that, when the BBC denied liberal bias, it was so blind to reality that it believed its own fantasies. The Ariel article, however, methodically airbrushes anything in the report that might embarrass the BBC. The result is a premeditated failure to tell the truth; a lie in all but name.

This is the year in which the terms of the debate about the BBC have subtly shifted. Accusations of bias and waste have sharpened into questions about trickery and corruption.

The Ariel article was not the only dishonest response to the trust’s report. “We are pleased our coverage has been deemed 'remarkable’ and 'impressive’,” said a BBC spokesman. And it’s true, those words were in there: the author, former ITV executive Stuart Prebble, is a liberal who often gives the corporation the benefit of the doubt.

But he didn’t conceal the fact that the groupthink of BBC journalists had led them to misrepresent public opinion. The concealment came instead from the Beeb, whose deep unaccountability has nurtured a culture of deceit unrivalled by any government department.

For example, the crazy move to Salford – encouraged by Labour in the hope that it would migrate metropolitan liberal voters into marginal northern seats – has cost £1 billion for a new headquarters and £24 million in staff relocation costs. That’s bad enough – but the really telling detail is that the BBC signed off ridiculous expense claims connected to the move without asking to see receipts.

This week we learnt that Roly Keating, former director of the BBC archive, returned his £375,000 payoff after the National Audit Office told him that the payment breached the corporation’s own guidelines. Quite what those guidelines are isn’t clear; what we do know is that, bizarrely, the BBC paid Keating a vast sum after he voluntarily left his job to work for the British Library.

One of the sillier lines put about by the BBC is that it’s been too ready to allow its coverage of immigration and Europe to be dictated by politicians. The truth is that Auntie is the dominatrix in this relationship, whipping into line any MPs who say the wrong thing on its programmes. There are times when the Beeb behaves like a powerful unelected political party it its own right – while simultaneously gorging on public money like a government department that doesn’t have to answer to ministers.

The Keating affair tells us the Beeb’s folie de grandeur is taking it closer and closer to the boundaries of criminality. Indeed, it may already have crossed it. In a funny way, I hope it has. We need a proper scandal to reveal the rottenness at the heart of the BBC; only then can we begin the desperately overdue business of breaking it up.

[steevo]

This is the year in which the terms of the debate about the BBC have subtly shifted. Accusations of bias and waste have sharpened into questions about trickery and corruption.

He's right on, but it is remarkable this awareness is just now being understood as raw fact. Sophisticated institutionalized propaganda -devious agenda-driven self-serving ideology- holds true for many, many years. Frankly I can remember listening to short wave BBC in the early 90s and coming to the same conclusion. Deliberate yet effectively subtle leftist manipulation. Understood and intentional. Of course I already came to that conclusion about most of our own media going back to the early 80s.

The simple and aggravating truth is there has never been anything really ignorant, naive, unintentional. Nada!

And only now I believe is there a smidgen of hope because they can be exposed at the heart of their reality.

[Teddy Bear]

I think it's not by chance that George Orwell was inspired to write 1984 after working for the BBC. Clearly the 'Ministry of Thought' was visible to him back then.

[Teddy Bear]

I think you'll like this article a lot Steevo, because it highlights what you wrote, and also as it's written by a fellow American, though living in the UK for a long time, Janet Daley.

The damaging 'neutrality’ at the BBC’s core
When the fairness rule was finally revoked in the US, a thousand flowers bloomed

By Janet Daley

The BBC has had a very bad week – not quite as bad as Ed Miliband’s but one that was similarly infused with a sense of inevitable decline and collapse. Both the national broadcaster and the Labour Party endured public scandals which, it seemed by Friday, might end with criminal prosecutions. But a more interesting parallel was that two citadels of the Left-liberal establishment had reached a similar crisis of identity: could they continue to be self-referring, incestuous organisations, prey to the machinations of insiders and increasingly cut off from most people’s view of the world?

The police may or may not end up bringing charges against BBC executives for handing out over-generous severance payments to departing managers: the legal case sounds a bit tenuous. But even if this never goes to court, the moral embarrassment is grotesque at a time when justifying the licence fee seems to rely almost entirely on public sentiment.

In fact, discovering that the BBC was throwing gargantuan amounts of money at employees so that they would leave quietly was probably less damaging than the second public relations disaster of the week. The news that will have infuriated more members of the public than even the cosy bounteousness of the Beeb Club toward its own members was the one about its “liberal bias”, or rather “deep liberal bias” as the former director of news, Helen Boaden, was bravely prepared to call it.

Of course, this was a retrospective admission of guilt – the Deep Liberal Bias in question having prevailed in 2004 – which makes it a bit less courageous. But hey, it’s a start. What would it take for a BBC executive to admit to a current example of prejudiced coverage: like the one that is going on right now over, say, welfare cuts or that perennial favourite, the EU? The answer of course, is that no one at the BBC can acknowledge the biases of the moment because they cannot see them. Or at least, they cannot see them as prejudices.

I promise you that this is true: most of the people who are responsible for the remarkably narrow BBC world view do not see themselves as conveying opinions at all. So far as they are concerned, the parameters within which they present the issues of the day are simply the limits of reason. If you believe that welfare benefits should be cut even more drastically than the Government is now proposing, or that this country would be better off out of the EU, you are either wicked or plain crazy. Just as people who saw mass immigration as a threat in 2004 were either mad or bad.

Except that now we admit that they weren’t – and that by refusing to allow them airtime, we were actually failing to address a legitimate concern etc, etc. This is at the heart of what is wrong with the BBC conception of neutrality: that it defines at any given moment, according to its own assumptions, what counts as sane, acceptable public discourse. Arguments that transgress those boundaries can be ruled out of the realm of civilised discussion. And that is much more dangerous than a frank partisan preference for one party or another.

But there is another less well-rehearsed problem with “neutrality”. If you are supposedly unaligned – have no open allegiance to any particular side – then you may attack a political position or policy from any angle or from all of them at once. How many times have you heard a star interviewer interrogate a minister apparently from one perspective – from the Left, say (“Why are you taking resources away from…?”) – only to swing round five minutes later and attack him from the opposite direction (“Shouldn’t you be contemplating even further reductions…?”) In any real-life debate, this would be known as “shifting your ground” or having it both ways. It puts the interviewee in the impossible position of having to defend himself against completely contradictory charges. The interrogator has the permanent advantage of being, by the ordinary standards of reasonable argument, unscrupulous: he can use the politician’s own initial statements against him simply by turning the logic of his attack on its head.

The end effect of this is to discredit the whole business of electoral politics. Every politician is inadequate, every policy is doomed to fail, and every voter is invited to despair of the democratic process. No minister or Opposition spokesman can ever live up to the ideal model which the “neutral” broadcasting interview posits: that is, one who has an answer to every potential criticism from any conceivable standpoint. That, paradoxically, tends to push enraged voters more toward marginal “outsiders” (like Nigel Farage) whom the BBC considers beneath its notice – until they become so popular that it can no longer ignore them whereupon they are either pulled into the same discrediting merry-go-round as the established politicians or they are exposed as lacking enough substance to be credible. More dangerously, it can force alienated people away from the ballot box altogether, and into the streets.

Where does this leave us? The BBC is now in serious trouble. A sensible step would be to accept that it is just one more broadcaster in an enormous market place of alternatives. That means cutting back what it does (and what it charges) to a core of services that commercial rivals are less likely to offer. But the larger question is what we do about the spurious notion of “neutrality” which is required by law in all broadcast news and current affairs. The United States used to have similar legislation: known as the “fairness” rule, it decreed that airtime for a spokesman on any issue had to be balanced by a spokesman for the other side.

The effect was exactly the same: a Left-liberal consensus dominated all of the mass media networks’ presentation of political issues. When the fairness rule was finally revoked, a thousand flowers bloomed: talk radio exploded on to the scene, as did the famous cable news channels such as Fox News (on the Right) and MSNBC (on the Left) which were blatantly partisan and enormously vibrant.

American politics is altogether too febrile and vituperative for the sedately smug BBC – which regards the US phenomenon as nothing more than a “Right-wing free-for-all” (direct quote). But this liberation of opinion and red-blooded argument has brought the hegemony of the elites to an end. It means that groups of voters who once felt marginalised to the point of invisibility have rejoined a robust national debate and are now engaged, big time, with the democratic process. (US voter turnout, which was once shockingly low by European standards, is now generally higher than in Britain.)

And for all the fear of Right-wing influence, it was in the era of the radio talk show that America elected its most Left-wing president in a generation. Maybe allowing the voices that alarm you to be heard is not such a bad thing.

[steevo]

I do like it. I'm not so sure if I fully agree with her but that's not a requisite nor a belief in myself as the authority. How deep the darkness of willful intent goes can be a matter of subjective interpretation.

...the license fee seems to rely almost entirely on public sentiment. This is true and inspires hope.

But I think and, I think unfortunately, the fate of the BBC will rely on the determination of UK media on the right. A character test of values and conviction with a select few who have influence. They need to recognize this as a mission, too much is at stake for the future of Britain. They cannot shy away from a negative partisan perception they are at war.

[Teddy Bear]

I'm not holding my breath. For the time being I don't think enough people realize just how insidious and negative the BBC truly is to the values and needed culture of our society.

[Teddy Bear]

An excellent article at The Telegraph by Charles Moore that also examines the findings by Prebble, as well as the prevalent mindset among BBC staff.

Why does the impartial BBC not tell the story of the great majority?
Our self-righteous national broadcaster is woefully detached from voters’ real lives

By Charles Moore

Stuart Prebble, ex-BBC, has this month produced a report for the BBC Trust on “Breadth of Opinion Reflected in the BBC’s Output”. Explaining his approach, he says that most attacks on the impartiality of the BBC are “based on the notion that it is largely run by a group with similar backgrounds and attitudes, loosely describable as 'liberal progressives’ – and, of course, I am one”.

Why “of course”? Is it unimaginable that the BBC would commission anyone other than one of their own sort to write a report on their own impartiality? Well, yes, perhaps it is.

But Mr Prebble goes on to reassure the doubters. “… in common with the overwhelming number of journalists within the BBC…, I leave my personal politics at home when I go to work”.

What does it mean to leave one’s “personal politics” at home? It might be relatively easy to put aside a particular party allegiance at work, but what is the point of forming knowledgeable views about politics, holding a job as a broadcaster in the political sphere, and then ignoring one’s own views? It is like a doctor saying “I never take my medical views to the surgery”. It is comical.

It also raises a question. If the place of “personal politics” is to be kept firmly in the home like the Eastern European au pairs on whom so many media power couples depend, why is that most of the people behaving in this way are, to use Mr Prebble’s terminology, “liberal progressives”? If personal politics are irrelevant, why do people with the same personal politics keep getting chosen to work for the BBC?

The answer, I suggest, is that one of the most important elements in the creed of “liberal progressives” is that they are fair and open-minded, and the rest of us aren’t. With beautiful, circular logic, it follows that the only people who can be trusted to ensure that there is a proper breadth of opinion in BBC coverage are liberal progressives. Mr Prebble’s considered finding is that impartiality “runs through the BBC veins like Blackpool through a stick of rock”. Of course it does: the place is run by liberal progressives! QED.

This in turn means that anyone who lacks liberal progressive opinions cannot be employed by the BBC. This is not because their opinions cannot be aired – everyone, says Mr Prebble, almost no matter how bonkers, must be allowed his or her shout in what BBC jargon calls the “wagon wheel” of opinion – but because the people who hold such opinions cannot be relied upon to be impartial. If I, for instance, applied for a job in the BBC, and they knew that I was anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-hunting, climate-change-sceptical, and pro-Israel, they wouldn’t say “Oh, we can’t employ someone with such disgusting views”. They would say, “Charles has his own agenda, and therefore would undermine our impartiality”. I might not leave my repulsive opinions at home; I might bring them in to work, like someone who turns up at the office with his dirty laundry spilling out of his briefcase.

To be fair to Mr Prebble, he does note occasions where the BBC has failed to reflect breadth of opinion. He points out, for example, that not everyone in the United States who opposes gun control can be described as a “gun nut”. And he does gently reprove the impartiality section of the BBC’s College of Journalism website for including lots of clips from a former BBC environment correspondent “entirely devoted to sustaining the case that climate change is 'settled science’”. He says it “might have been helpful” to have added “a line or two” that climate change “dissenters (or even sceptics) should still occasionally be heard”. This, in an organisation wholly opposed to corporal punishment, is as close as we are ever going to get to a rap on the knuckles.

But if I am correct that the BBC is self-righteous – in the exact sense that it identifies its corporate identity with righteousness – it follows that “breadth of opinion” is not the key concept that needs examining here. It is relatively easy to rustle up people on both sides (or even four or five sides) of an argument. The BBC often tries conscientiously to do this.

It is other aspects of the programmes that need to be examined. The first question is, “Who is in the dock?” In almost all major stories, you can tell very quickly who this is. On the Today programme yesterday, for example, it was reported that the Government has decided to delay any action to ban cigarette brand packaging. The official view was duly represented by a Tory backbencher, Mark Field. The banning enthusiasts were represented by Harpal Kumar, the chief executive of the charity Cancer Research UK. Mr Kumar made some pretty extreme assertions, such as that the tobacco industry was “entirely dependent on recruiting children” to addiction. This was unchallenged by James Naughtie.

But when Mr Field made bold to suggest that the health lobby – and not just the tobacco lobby – was itself powerful and well-funded, you could almost hear Naughtie’s lips pursing, and he moved in to correct Mr Field. Mr Field’s claim was “an extraordinary comment”, said Mr Kumar. It was clear who had been convicted of being “inappropriate”.

My objection is not that Mr Field was made to squirm. It was that Mr Kumar was not, and that his kind never is. Charities and pressure groups, in the BBC’s approach to life, are to be trusted, because they do not make profits. People who do, are not.

The even more important question is, “What makes a story?” In the BBC’s view, some form of institutional validation is almost always required. The story must arise from a government report, a court judgment, a statement by the Royal College of this and the National Union of that. In religion – a subject specifically covered by Mr Prebble’s report – it cannot think about belief or prayer, but about Bishops’ Conferences, General Synods and Councils of Mosques. In politics, it can handle the indescribably dreary game of lobby journalism, but not the relation of politics to what voters need or feel.

This is because the BBC is itself a vast institution, so it is happiest speaking to other institutions, like mastodon bellowing to mastodon across the primeval swamp. Its absolute favourite is the device by which the big cheese from the big body in question – the Government, the CBI, Unite – comes on, says his bit and then departs, leaving omniscient persons like Nick Robinson, Robert Peston or Stephanie Flanders to explain to us idiots what he was really talking about.

In its great scheme of things, the BBC knows how to report clearly defined victims – pensioners cheated by PPI, formerly abused children, “whistleblowers”. What it cannot understand is the position of the great majority of the people watching it – that they pay tax, and they keep paying more of it. Seldom do they see the story in a tax rise, in energy bills or planning delays, in their own stupefying executive pay-offs. Seldom do they expose the rise in the national debt or investigate why it is that, despite “cuts” every day, government spending still grows bigger all the time. The one entity, in short, in which the BBC feels permanently uninterested is the individual citizen.

It is not surprising that the BBC takes him for granted, because it can. It takes his money by law, and without his consent, in the form of the licence fee. Until this ends, the BBC will, with the finest impartiality, refuse to tell his story.

[Teddy Bear]

A few things are apparent to me in this article by Sir Andrew Green, founder of Migration Watch.
Firstly he offers intelligent reasoning and evidence for his views.
He doesn't jump to conclusions and tries to be fair, to all sides of the debate.
He sees the BBC as a main force for preventing what should be very necessary debate on the issue.

It’s about time we talked about immigration . . .

Michael Fallon was forced to retract his talk of being 'swamped’ by migrants, but Andrew Green believes a debate about the impact on our society is essential

By Andrew Green

Immigration, it seems, is still a minefield. The Defence Secretary had only to use the word “swamped” at the weekend for the usual suspects to descend on him like a ton of bricks. No 10 suggested that he could have chosen his words better, politicians on both sides of the House condemned his use of language, and the newspapers were filled with opprobrium. Michael Fallon, as might be expected, duly withdrew his remarks.

Now, however, David Blunkett – who suffered a similar fate in 2002 when he was the home secretary – has come riding to the rescue, praising Mr Fallon for his candour. This is welcome news: for the danger is that a debate about language will close down a legitimate, indeed essential, conversation about the impact that current levels of immigration are having on our society.

For us to have that conversation, and for it to be constructive, we need to follow three essential guidelines: stick to the facts; don’t demonise your opponents; and, above all, don’t condescend to the public.

At MigrationWatch, it has always been our belief that the only way to navigate the choppy seas of the immigration debate is to stick to the facts. That is how we have reached our current position at the forefront of the debate, despite being a small and largely voluntary organisation.

Some facts are, of course, disputed. But the broad picture is fairly clear. Although the business lobby and academia focus on the economic benefits of immigration, the reality is that their case is surprisingly weak, particularly at the current massive levels.

The most thorough economic analysis was conducted by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs in 2008. The panel included two former chancellors of the Exchequer, a former governor of the Bank of England, an eminent labour market economist and a former head of the Financial Services Authority. You would think that, between them, they might know a thing or two. They concluded, evidently somewhat to their surprise, that “we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the government, business and many others, that net migration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population”.

When the government’s Migration Advisory Committee came to look at the report, it did not seriously challenge the conclusions; it simply noted that much of the benefit went to the immigrants themselves. Nevertheless, the immigration lobby has remained in denial.
Of course, there are a number of economic benefits that do not lend themselves to calculation – for example, the benefit to Britain of new ideas, new energy and the development of worldwide links. Indeed, nobody disputes the importance of immigration in an open economy and society. The issue is entirely one of scale, and that is where any sensible debate must lie.

Since the previous government took power in 1997, nearly five million migrants have entered Britain. The proportion of our population who are foreign-born has almost doubled since 1991, to more than 13 per cent. And if immigration is allowed to continue at present levels, the population will increase by 12 million in the next 20 years. This will have huge practical and social consequences, which must be openly discussed.

Sadly, the BBC – the main and most influential source of news for the British public – has consistently failed in its duty to inform the public about immigration, in terms of both the immediate as well as the long-term impacts. Breezy admissions of this from outgoing director-generals distract from what has clearly been a failure of duty. You could argue that any serious discussion of this topic would be made for radio and hopeless on television. But never in the 13 years since MigrationWatch was founded have I heard a radio programme set out the case against mass immigration. Instead, the process of selection, whether conscious or otherwise, has ensured that the case in favour of immigration permeates the BBC’s output.

I recall that one of its executives told a newspaper: “We were slow on the story. We probably didn’t like what he was saying…”

This brings me to my second guideline: don’t demonise your opponents. We have certainly experienced that. We were welcomed, in 2002, by an editorial in The Independent that described us “as a nasty little group which deserves to fail”. And we are not out of the woods yet. A particularly vitriolic article in the London Evening Standard of October 22 was clearly designed to insinuate that my motives are racist. That kind of writing does nothing for the debate, nor the author.

A third useful guideline is to avoid condescending to the public. They may not have the latest statistics on the tip of their tongues, but they know that immigration has got out of hand. Furthermore, they feel that previous governments have not told the truth – and that the present Coalition, despite its promises, is unlikely to achieve its target of reducing net migration to 100,000 people a year.

It is very unfortunate that the public should have such a negative view of the performance of successive governments on a matter of real importance to their future. It is sometimes implied that the voters are really rather foolish on this issue, and that opposition to the present scale of immigration is less among those who have actual experience of it. But an opinion poll that MigrationWatch recently conducted found this to be quite wrong – only 11 per cent of the public thought that immigration had improved their local community. In fact, three times as many felt that immigration had changed their community for the worse.

London is normally held up as a model for the positive power of immigration. In our poll, 73 per cent of those in the capital felt that it had had a great deal or a fair amount of impact in their area – much higher than any other region. Similarly, more people in London felt that immigration had changed their community than anywhere else. But the numbers saying their area had changed for the worse outnumbered those who felt it had changed it for the better by more than 2 to 1. The balance of opinion was similarly negative in every other region apart from Scotland. And it’s not just one poll: similar results were found by Searchlight, an organisation that describes itself as “anti-fascist”, in its own survey three years ago.

There are those who suggest that Britain has coped successfully with many waves of immigration in the past. They are, however, in denial about the sheer scale of the influx that we now face. They are also being condescending to the public, many of whom, as our poll shows, have made up their own minds on the basis of their own experience and are tired of being patted on the head by politicians.

It is only fair to say that Theresa May has avoided this bear trap. The Home Secretary has been firm, almost implacable, on substance, while being measured in her language. This has to be the right approach – but we also have to recognise that it will take at least another five years, and probably 10, to restore some kind of order into the chaos which has developed in our immigration system. So this Government, indeed any government, must make serious and effective efforts to get immigration under control, before the strains in our society become a real cause of concern.