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It's all in the edit

Some of the BBC's reports about the recent strike action have a disturbing undertone: working-class people are racist

• 
• • Padraig Reidy
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 February 2009 17.30 GMT
  • Article history

Why is the BBC obsessed with making working-class people seem racist?

Watching BBC news bulletins yesterday, it was very easy to believe claims that the current spate of wildcat strikes is inherently motivated by xenophobia. Constant emphasis was placed on objections to "foreign workers" per se, rather than fear of workers' wages being undercut, which would seem to be the real issue.

The 10 o'clock bulletin gave us a good example. A voiceover by the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, (about 12 mins in) told us: "Beneath the anger, ministers fear, lies straightforward xenophobia." Cut to woolly-hatted worker telling BBC reporter: "These Portugese and Eyeties – we can't work alongside of them." There we are: northern white bloke refusing to work with foreigners. Case closed.

Except, watch Paul Mason's report on Newsnight, featuring the same interview (about 4:30 in):

These Portugese and eyeties – we can't work alongside of them: we're segregated from them. They're coming in in full companies.

Even taking into account the dodginess of the use of "Eyetie" to refer to an Italian person, one has to admit that it would be very difficult to portray the second, full quote as racist or xenophobic. It's a statement addressing basic workplace issues – British workers literally cannot work alongside foreign workers, as they are separated. There really is no excuse for editing and presenting a quote in such a misrepresentative manner, unless one is setting out to prove something – namely, that working-class people are racists.

The BBC does have form on this, unfortunately: last year's White seasonwas almost exclusively concerned with portraying white working-class people as paranoid and racist. This despite the fact – and this really needs to be repeated until it's firmly implanted in every bien pensantliberal's head – that white working-class people are the most likely to have friends of other races and religions, and are most likely to marry and have children with people of other races and religions. Not the behaviour of a resentful army of racists.

The apex of the White season's utter weirdness was a Newsnight interview with the BNP's Nick Griffin, author of Who Are The Mindbenders, a 1997 pamphlet detailing how "the Jews" control the BBC and other media. Griffin was interviewed on his own, and then we were taken in to a panel discussion featuring, among others, Bob Crow andNick Ferrari (both of whom had obviously refused to share a platform with Griffin, hence the solo interview). Hardly natural bedfellows, Crow and Ferrari took turns lambasting the BBC for its portrayal of working-class people. It was an encouraging sight.

But even after this spectacular dressing down, the practice persists. Why? Is it because of a skewed identity politics at play in BBC newsrooms and commissioning meetings? Or is it because the BBC, like much of the media, is increasingly dominated by middle-class scions who don't actually know many working-class people, and thus breezily project any prejudice or other trait they wish on to them? Either way, it's a sordid state of affairs, and – as shown by the devious editing of last night's 10 o'clock news, a dangerous one, too.