BBC bias is not a problem

Note: This piece was written during the election but went unpublished. I’m posting it here given the recent attacks on the BBC from both the Conservatives and Labour.

That the BBC is blatantly biased shouldn’t come as a surprise. Bias is gloriously evident every single time you turn on your TV set and Huw Edwards isn’t barking out Uncle Kim’s propaganda whilst dressed in a kimono. Bias isn’t just revealed in what the BBC chooses to broadcast but in what it doesn’t. Bias is the reason Clive Myrie isn’t providing uninterrupted coverage of Greta Thunberg’s epic journey across the Atlantic on the back of a minke whale. The BBC is chartered to be selective in its biases. It’s there in the very first ‘B’ of its name.

That doesn’t mean it always gets things right, though. Justa few weeks ago, they were accused of “rewriting history” for children, whenone of its CBeebies shows, Go Jetters, described the migratory patterns ofstorks and, in the process, implied that Gibraltar is part of Spain. The story isreally about a lack of specificity leading to ambiguity around a hypersensitivesubject, but it also amounts to a momentary absence of bias. Impartiality is amyth. If the BBC were about true objectivity, every mention of Gibraltar wouldprobably demand a clarification according to some international standard. “Hey,kids! Aren’t those storks amazing the way they fly all the way from to Africafrom Gibraltar (termed by the UN “a Non-Self-Governing Territory” though consideredby the British to be an Overseas Territory after it was ceded to the crown inthe Treaty of Utrecht in 1713)”. What they instead failed to do is remember thattheir charter (6.5 to be specific) expects them to skew their output “[t]oreflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world”. They instead alloweda perceived Spanish alternative to creep in. The problem, then, isn’t that theBBC is biased but that the BBC sometimes forgets which bias it is meant toexpress. It is hardly a new complaint.

The Corporation was formed in 1922 but really began in 1927when John Reith was made its first Director General. In the early days theoutput was very limited to light entertainment. It could not broadcast“expressions of opinion by the Corporation on matters of public policy” or“statements involving matters of political, religious, or industrialcontroversy”. It was in 1928 when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin loosened thesecond of those restrictions and it was only a matter of a few years before thematter of the BBC and bias became a staple of newspapers.

In 1937, for example, it was the schools broadcast that becamea matter of parliamentary disquiet when the “History in the Making” series ran alecture by Professor John Holton reportedly “full of fulsome praise for acertain foreign government”. The phrase used was “Soviet propaganda” but, asreported in The Times, the concern spread to “broadcasts by the BritishBroadcasting Corporation [that] were tendentious in so far as they dealt withthe political and economic systems of certain foreign countries, and thatreports of proceedings in Parliament were tinged with partiality for the Left”.It led the leadership of The Central Council for School Broadcasting to write tothe paper to defend the corporation from accusations of bias. “[E]very one whofeels strongly either way is quick to suspect the B.B.C. of bias,” they wrote,“unless it confines itself to his side of the picture.”

“His side of the picture” would, of course, be “their sideof the picture” today but that only shows how biases are so deep as to bealmost invisible. The point, however, is a fair one. Every side thinks the BBCis biased. “Speak to me some more about me” is really what critics of the BBCdemand, with Conservatives demanding more Conservative content, Labour moreLabour, and the SNP apparently demanding that the entire country taken aninterest in even their most devolved problems.

The historian Richard Hofstadter once described the“paranoid style in American politics” in response to the “angry minds” of BarryGoldwater’s right-wing populism and it’s easy to understand why it might takehold in a nation created in the face of one distant threat which it replacedwith a somewhat less-distant threat in the form of a federal government. Eventhe title “United States” embodies the tensions of manifold regions forced tobecome a singular nation. Paranoia in British politics, meanwhile, is far lesscommon in the mainstream. Our provincial vs national differences are morecontained, the Union making diversity more of a feature than a flaw of ourpolitical makeup. Rather than paranoia, we have always entertained its oppositewhich is a self-assured confidence, typified by the word “fairness”. This,arguably, is one of those biases that the BBC found easier to express in atwo-party system. “Oh, it must be their turn” is one of those causal remarksabout election broadcasts that nearly everybody muttered at every generalelection.

Once that notional fairness was lost – diluted by these newpolitics where sides are more amorphous — the paranoid style consequently emerges.With TV time no longer divided equally between the two opposition parties,“representation” became a matter of percentage points and long boring articles,often filled with complicated maths, explaining a notional “fairness” that had previouslybeen obvious. Arguably, of course, the old system was even more biased than itis today but, somehow, we were more relaxed about the old status quo.

How then should the fairness model work for morecontroversial topics? Should flat earthers get the same time as round earthers?Climate change sceptics the same as advocates of climate change? How much isits role to intervene and check facts, rather than simply allow people toexpress opinions however ill informed?

The BBC was particularly slow to respond to this new reality. No matter how well it has tried to implement policies that would address these issues, it also faces a rival service in the form of social media which had effectively created a dictatorship of the subjective. Social networks amplify every outraged “I” and, with enough examples, produces a mandate to hashtag every ambiguity and elevate them to a national scandal. Last month, The Daily Express reported that the BBC is under fire because “[s]everal users on Twitter” (always a key phrase) accused the BBC of giving the Labour leader an “easy ride” in a recent episode of Question Time. There are about 16 million Twitter accounts registered in the UK, which means that any narrative you seek to push can be justified if you can find several making the same point. The bias, then, really becomes which bias you seek to push. How much airtime do you give to each bias and what method do you choose to decide that airtime (and which bias informs your decision)?

This, really, cuts to the point that bias is a loaded phrase.It’s really a codeword for something which is closer to methodology. When a methodologyisn’t obvious it becomes a bias.

The solution, then, is to ensure that the methodology isobvious. Biases must be made explicit. Take the BBC’s creative editing of BorisJohnson. Asked by a member of last week’s Question Time audience if hecould be trusted, Johnson faced laughter from the audience before he couldanswer. In later broadcasts, the laughter was neatly cut out. The BBCsubsequently apologised, blaming “timing reasons” to “edit out a repetitiousphrase from Boris Johnson”. The BBC clearly, then, has a bias towards brevity.It would be far more sensible to advocate unedited footage. Editing is apowerful political tool, as Eisenstein showed, and should be used judiciouslyaround sensitive subjects. Similarly, adopting a practice of properly labellingonscreen footage would help make it clear when material was shot. That was the gaffthe BBC made around Remembrance Sunday. That’s when they appeared to go out oftheir way to avoid using footage that embarrassed Johnson, who had laid the government’swreath upside down. They used footage of Johnson as foreign secretary, layingthe distinctive green-white wreath made from the plants and flowers of theOverseas Territories (including Gibraltar, termed by the UN “a Non-Self-GoverningTerritory” though considered… Oh screw that!)

There is no shame in “biasing” facts, well-sourced material, and accurate reporting. Nor, for that matter, would it be indulgent if the BBC began to regularly foreground the methodologies it employs. Of course, this immediately becomes fashionably “meta” – the news reporting the news – but that is simply a product of living in a culture where everything is contextual, where what we say is important but so too the way we say it. It would mean no more calling some politicians by their first names and others by their formal titles. It would mean identifying commentators by their political affiliations and not passing off every blogger as a “journalist”. It would also mean, as Peter Oborne has so persuasively argued, that “sources in Downing Street” should be treated with caution. It should also mean no more of those ridiculous vox pops whose sampling methodology would make any statistician groan (not all working-class people are found in Labour clubs in the middle of the day and Stoke does not represent the entire UK).

Where bias is concerned, the BBC should really lead byexample. When what they do is this important, it really is important that wesee how they do it.

@DavidWaywell