For years, I have been puzzled about why arguments over whether the BBC is biased seem to feature only two points of view. The right argues that the BBC is biased in favour of leftists and liberals. In his 2007 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture, Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, proclaimed: “It is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism . . . by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of left-wing ideology.” The other side responds by pointing to, in the words of Polly Toynbee, doyenne of the liberal left, “the BBC’s perpetually self-critical striving for fairness and balance, unique in all the media . . . the only non-partisan voice”. The idea that the corporation might be more sympathetic to a conservative view of the world than a liberal one never figures in the discussion.
But should it? In November 2005, a well-known BBC presenter delivered the 14th annual Hayek lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs, in which he called for “a reorientation of British foreign policy away from Europe . . . a radical programme to liberalise the British economy; a radical reduction in tax and public spending as a share of the economy; a flat tax . . . the injection of choice and competition into the public sector on a scale not yet contemplated . . . excellence in schools with vouchers for all”.
These are views, drawing on the libertarian philosophy of the long-dead Austrian free-marketeer Friedrich Hayek, that are to the right even of the modern Conservative Party. The BBC presenter was Andrew Neil, whose shadow looms large over the corporation’s coverage of Westminster. Neil is on air roughly four hours a week, presenting Daily Politics, Straight Talk and This Week – where one of his co-hosts is the former Tory defence secretary Michael Portillo. Neil and Portillo often gang up, ideologically, on the soft Labour lefty Diane Abbott. Here is the legendary BBC “balance” in action.
But this is not about Neil, who has been on the Thatcherite right for decades now, first as editor of the Tory-supporting Sunday Times and now as chief executive of the Tory-supporting Spectator. This is about double standards, and about how the backgrounds of various prominent BBC employees have been curiously unexamined in the row over “bias”.
Can you imagine, for example, the hysterical reaction on the right if the BBC’s political editor had been unmasked as the former chair of Labour Students? He wasn’t – but Nick Robinson was chair of the Young Conservatives, in the mid-1980s, at the height of Thatcherism. Can you imagine the shrieks from the Telegraph and the Mail if the BBC’s editor of live programmes had been deputy chair of the Labour Party Young Socialists? He wasn’t – but Robbie Gibb was deputy chair of the Federation of Conservative Students in the 1980s, before it was wound up by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Can you imagine the howls from the Conservatives if the BBC’s chief political correspondent had left the corporation to work for Ken Livingstone? He didn’t – but Guto Harri did become communications director for Boris Johnson within months of resigning from the Beeb.
Much has been made in the right-wing press of the comments by the Telegraph’s editor-at-large, Jeff Randall, on the BBC’s “liberal” bias – “It’s
a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society” – during his four-year stint as the corporation’s first business editor. The bigger question is: what on earth was an outspoken free-marketeer doing as the supposedly neutral BBC business editor to begin with? So much for Auntie’s “Marxist” attitudes towards business and enterprise.
How about foreign policy? The BBC is constantly accused of anti-Americanism, but three of its most recent correspondents in Washington – Gavin Esler, Matt Frei and Justin Webb – have all since written books documenting their great love and admiration for the United States. Esler even used the pages of Dacre’s Daily Mail to eulogise Ronald Reagan after the latter’s death, claiming that he “embodied the best of the American spirit”. Can you imagine the reaction on the right to a former BBC Moscow correspondent delivering a similar encomium to Leonid Brezhnev in the pages of the Guardian?
On Iraq, right-wing voices such as the Tory MP Michael Gove have accused the BBC of pushing an anti-war agenda – yet empirical analysis has yielded the opposite conclusion. The non-partisan, Bonn-based research institute Media Tenor found that the BBC gave just 2 per cent of its Iraq coverage to anti-war voices. Another study by Cardiff University concluded that the BBC had “displayed the most pro-war agenda of any [British] broadcaster”.
Then there is the claim from small-c conservatives such as Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips that they are ignored by the BBC. Is this the
same Hitchens who is a frequent guest on BBC1’s Question Time (according to the screen and cinema database IMDB, he has appeared on the show every year since 2000, and twice in 2007)? And the same Phillips who is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze?
So where are the counter-accusations of right-wing bias from the left? The sad truth seems to be that this canard “the BBC is left-wing” has been repeated so often that it has been internalised even by liberals and leftists. How else to explain Andrew Marr’s confession of the “innate liberal bias inside the BBC” simply because it is “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large”?
“The left always feel faintly embarrassed at attempting to promote their own political agenda,” says Steven Barnett, professor of communications at Westminster University, “and since the 1980s have consistently failed to bang the drum about the issues on which they might equally be able to pillory the BBC – for example, human rights abuses and the failure to regulate corporate greed.” Barnett believes that allegations of bias are a concerted attempt by the right to “discredit any journalism with which they disagree and to promote a political agenda which is more consistent with their own”. Liberals such as Marr, he says, feel “slightly guilty about their own liberalism” – unlike those on the right, such as Randall, who feel no such guilt.
Barnett does not believe the BBC is biased “in any particular direction”. And yet, from top to bottom, in structure and staffing, in history and ideology, it is a conservative organisation, committed to upholding Establishment values and protecting them from challenge. Take two institutions not normally associated with liberals or left-wingers: the church and the monarchy. Wouldn’t a “culturally Marxist” (to use Dacre’s phrase) institution have long ago abandoned Thought for the Day and Songs of Praise? In 2008, the BBC broadcast more than 600 hours of religious programming on television and radio, up year on year. And can anyone really disagree with Jeremy Paxman’s accusation that the BBC “fawns” over the royal family, behaving more like a “courtier”? The corporation’s coverage of the Queen’s golden jubilee celebrations and the marriage of Charles and Camilla was stomach-churning both in its excess and in its deference.
The BBC’s bias is thus an Establishment bias, a bias towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy. The accusation that the BBC is left-wing and liberal is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission. “The right in America has waged a long and successful battle to brand the news as liberal, and the same is happening here [in relation to the BBC] with the aid of a predominantly right-wing press,” says Barnett. “I fear they may have similar success in redefining the centre ground of politics to suit their own political agenda.” With a Tory government on the verge of power, it is time for liberals and the left to fight back and force the BBC to acknowledge its real bias.
The Edinburgh International Television Festival runs from 28 to 30 August
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