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As Britain’s media gears up for the various jubilee celebrations, reporting every royal move, collating lists of trivia (“60 things you never knew and probably didn’t need to know about the Queen” and so on) they face a real credibility problem. Last year was the same, with the royal wedding prompting journalists to compete with each other to come up with the most trite and inane commentary, or the most ludicrous or unbelievable ‘fact’ about the monarchy. This year already promises to be just as bad, if not worse.
That’s why Republic has called on broadcasters especially, but journalists generally, to take extra care that they report the Queen’s diamond jubilee “impartially, objectively and with real journalistic scepticism”. The nation’s relationship with the monarchy has changed completely since the 1977 jubilee and is utterly unrecognisable from the days of the Queen’s coronation. Yet much of our media seems to want to will the British people back, in true Canute fashion, to their more royalist past, rather than reflect on the real public response to all this PR-led fanfare.
The monarchy is a highly contested and controversial institution. At least a quarter of Britons believe we’d be better off without it, more than half want an end to its state funding and two thirds want the royal household opened up to more scrutiny. Last year some 79 per cent said they weren’t interested in the wedding and a Guardian ICM poll showed an increase in support for abolition in the run up to the wedding. Those viewpoints should be represented alongside the enthusiasm of monarchists and the indifference of many more.
When it comes to broadcast journalists there is a clear legal obligation to report in an impartial manner. Along with colleagues from Republic I met with BBC executives last year after accusing the corporation of ‘abandoning journalistic integrity’ in its coverage of the royal wedding. Unfortunately it seems the Beeb has not learnt any lessons, falling again into the habit of celebrating, not reporting the jubilee.
But it’s not just legally obliged journalists that should be careful with their reporting, and I’ve called on all media outlets to present republican viewpoints alongside those of monarchists and, most importantly, to challenge and question the claims of Palace aides. Failure to do so not only fails the public by providing a one-sided picture of what’s going on, it threatens the credibility of our media.
To highlight the point there are a number of assertions widely repeated by the media at the time of the royal wedding which were subsequently debunked. These include:
– The royal wedding would be a ‘shot in the arm’ for the economy. (The Office for National Statistics announced in July that it actually had a negative effect on economic growth. At the time we reminded the media of the CBI’s calculation that an extra public holiday would wipe £6bn off the economy.)
– ‘Two billion people’ would watch the wedding on television. (Official figures revealed the real number was a fraction of this estimate, which was shown to be virtually impossible.)
– ‘Millions’ would hold street parties. (Republic’s own freedom of information research revealed that only one in three councils received a single application for a street party, and three quarters received five applications or fewer.)
– The wedding would lead to a ‘major boost’ to Britain’s tourism industry. (Another freedom of information investigation by Republic revealed that royal events actually have a negative impact on inbound tourism.)
The publicly-funded Palace PR machine is already in overdrive and it must not go unchallenged. All too often the spin and half-truths coming from royal aides are just accepted as fact. Yet those ‘facts’ are so far from the truth and so obviously manufactured for PR purposes that journalists would be doing the public a disservice by reporting them ad nauseum rather than challenging this very obvious spin-doctoring. There is, after all, a very good reason for the intense PR campaign being run by the palace: they know the public are fast losing interest in the royals, and that as the Queen nears the end of her life any residual affection for her is unlikely to transfer to her son and heir.
The BBC has an obligation to report impartially yet it fails hands down when it comes to its royal reporting, and many other journalists are all too eager to follow suit. The result is an undemocratic institution that is able to co-opt almost the entire media output of this country to its own advantage and a media that is failing to report the true story of a changing public attitude toward royalty and monarchy.
Graham Smith is chief executive officer of Republic
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