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Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism.

The BBC officially regards Eurosceptics as mad

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: September 5th, 2010

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If the excellent Lord Pearson is mad, so are 55 per cent of us

There’s a fascinating snippet in Rod Liddle’s column today (secured behind the fastness of the Times paywall). He writes of being summoned to see his boss at the BBC following a complaint about the Corporation’s bias against Eurosceptics. The complaint had been made by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, then a Tory peer. Rod writes:

The [BBC] panjandrum listened to my nervous musings and then held aloft Lord Pearson’s latest letter and said: “Rod, you do realise that these people are mad?”

See how the concept of insanity has been redefined by our state broadcaster? Malcolm Pearson was, and is, the most decent of men. Instead of raging publicly against the BBC, he had set out, politely and patiently, to convince it that it could do better. To this end, he employed a professional firm to monitor all BBC current affairs programming over a period of six months. Its methodology was thorough and empirical. It measured, to the second, how much airtime was given to enthusiasts for closer integration, how much to soft sceptics, and how much to opponents of EU membership. It looked at the background clips, and at the remarks of presenters. Its conclusion – as I well remember, having been involved with the project – was inescapable. The BBC was consistently biased against Eurosceptics, not only in the sense of rarely inviting them on air but – more insidiously – in the sense of casting them as eccentrics.

Malcolm was perhaps naïve in believing that his findings would be enough to induce a culture shift within the Beeb. But “mad”? If so, then the 55 per cent of British voters who, according to the BBC’s own opinion poll, want to leave the EU, must be dribbling loons.

To be fair, the BBC did start to include anti-Brussels voices in its broadcasts after the Pearson exercise – whether because it genuinely recognised that it was in the wrong or, as Rod’s anecdote would suggest, simply to get us psychotics off its back. But anyone who thinks that the Beeb is now neutral on the issue of European integration need only compare its coverage of UKIP and the Greens.

Most bias takes the form of opinions being presented as fact – a process which is, almost by definition, unconscious. If you begin from the belief that EU membership is vital to Britain’s prosperity – if you regard this as a datum, rather than an arguable proposition – your coverage of the European question is bound to seem biased to the 55 per cent who disagree. They, in turn, will strike you as people who cannot accept objective reality – in other words, as mad.

Tags: BBC, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, Rod Liddle