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
8:37PM BST 12 Jul 2013
1147 Comments
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.
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