Biased or Balanced? Where Does The BBC Stand?

The Tory government seems to have it in for the BBC at present - and for Channel 4 News, The Mirror, The i, HuffPost, PoliticsHome, The Independent among others – with journalists excluded from Downing Street briefings, ministers refusing to appear on the Today programme on Radio 4, and suggestions that by 2027, when the BBC’s charter is up for renewal, the licence fee will have been scrapped and the corporation thinned down to a mere shadow of its current form.

Too right, many of you may say. You may also say that the BBC is a liberal, left-wing, anti-Tory, anti-Brexit organisation – except those of you who think that the BBC is pro-Tory, pro-Brexit, and very much anti-Labour (and particularly anti-Corbyn). But the role of the BBC – and other broadcasters and journalists for that matter – is to question and challenge politicians (and anyone else) and not simply accept what they say and parrot it blindly. I suspect that many people who are critical of the BBC questioning Boris Johnson and his government would be similarly critical of the BBC if it didn’t pursue Jeremy Corbyn or any Labour politician in the same way.

Dominic Cummings – the Prime Minister’s special adviser – is attributed with remarks that No 10 would ‘whack’ the BBC. Mr Cummings is an interesting specimen, for whereas unelected Brussels bureaucrats were considered beyond the pale, he, the unelected bureaucrat that he is, is considered okay – “He may be an unelected bureaucrat, but he’s our unelected bureaucrat.”

There is an argument that runs along the lines that because the BBC is supposed to be balanced and impartial, then every programme, every debate, every news broadcast, has to be. That every report into one claim or another has to include something or someone that refutes that position. On that basis, when they reported the craze for eating Tide Pods back in 2018, they really ought to have balanced the argument that doing so could be fatal with a viewpoint from someone who had survived eating one and promoted the view that it was a harmless piece of fun. Or perhaps not.

If we are talking about a lack of balance, then Question Time is probably the prime example. Nigel Farage – the high priest of Brexit – has appeared on the programme more than thirty times, during which time not a single pro-EU MEP has appeared, yet Farage believes that BBC is biased against him, and against Brexit. By the bye, Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time than anyone else in the 21^st century. Equally, however, I’m sure that there is ‘proof’ that Question Time is a rabidly left-wing, anti-Brexit, Farage hating, Boris baiting, tree-hugging programme full of snowflakes.

My point here is that it is very easy to pick up on something – no matter how rare or isolated – and offer it as proof of one’s own beliefs and prejudices and the media feeds that, because whether we accept it or not, the mainstream media – and social media – have a powerful role in affecting behaviours and attitudes.

The bulk of the newspapers published in England tend to be right of centre, which is scarcely surprising given that they tend to be owned by organisations or individuals that are right of centre. Understandably they will support politicians whose policies and interests are most closely aligned to, and protect their interests, but I’m sure you already knew that. Naturally, consumers of these publications may, having been drip-fed the views and outlooks that those papers support, find their own prejudices and points of view moulded by what they read. And, of course, people will naturally gravitate towards newspapers that support their own point of view or preferences.

For many years I read the Daily Mail, although I haven’t done so on a regular basis since 2012. When I did read it, I often found myself nodding along in agreement with it, particularly with some of the opinion pieces. Now I don’t know if it is me that has changed, or whether the paper has become more rabidly right-wing in recent years (a bit of both I suspect), but I picked up a copy of it in a dentist’s waiting room recently and despite knowing what to expect vis a vis its political views, I was unprepared for the bile, spite and hatred that it spewed: I’m sure it was never as bad when I was a regular reader. Then there is the Daily Express. I’m not sure whether I know any regular readers of that newspaper, but I suspect not, since – if the paper is anything to go by – they would be easily recognisable as being in a constant state of outrage given the frequency with which words like ‘anger,’ ‘fury,’  and ‘rage’ appear in the randomly capitalised headlines on their website (when they are not writing about Princess Diana, statins, or the impending cataclysmic weather we can expect next winter).

The influence of newspapers in forming opinion should not be underestimated. Liverpool, Sefton and the Wirral bucked the trend during the 2016 EU referendum, as these districts were rare islands where Remain was in the majority among a sea of Leave voting areas around them. 

The apparent 'Sun' effect on Liverpool voting Remain may just be that larger, more metropolitan
areas were generally more likely to be in favour of staying in the EU

A major reason that has been cited for this was that these areas had largely boycotted The Sun newspaper following its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which it placed blame on the Liverpool supporters. Researchers at the London School of Economics and the University of Zurich found Merseyside was around 10 per cent less Eurosceptic than the rest of the UK as a result of the boycott. It seems that having shunned the Brexit supporting Sun, many of these readers migrated to the more pro-EU Daily Mirror. This argument carries less weight however when one considers that Manchester (where there was no known Sun boycott) also heavily voted Remain.

Liverpool has never forgiven Th Sun for stories like this.

It is easier to destroy than create, easier to criticise than to praise, and the media are hyena-like in picking on the weak and vulnerable. It is nothing new that the tabloid press and the celebrity magazines build people up just to knock them down, and are able to hold two contradictory views about people simultaneously – so long as both are negative views. Thus, Piers Morgan is able to criticise Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for taking money from the crown rather than going out and earning it, and then criticise them for getting involved with bankers Goldman Sachs. Not earning your own money is bad, but equally so is earning it, or so the logic runs.

Celebrity gossip magazines like these are now often banned in various waiting rooms
due to their negativity and celebrity shaming.

Despite the ambiguous evidence as to how influential The Sun boycott on Merseyside was in the 2016 referendum, it seems fairly unequivocal that the mainstream media and social media play a very significant role in shaping public opinion, or in reinforcing it. Even if allegations of bias against the BBC have any basis in fact, at least they rarely – if ever – spew the bile and hatred so commonplace elsewhere, especially in the print media.

Whatever you may think of the BBC, they are actually an oasis of calm and measured consideration of news stories when compared with many of their competitors, and we lose that at our peril. The criticism of the BBC – that it is not as impartial, or unbiased as its charter requires – could not be applied to any news organisation that took its place. Look at Fox News in the USA, or RT International; are these balanced, impartial and unbiased broadcasters? No, they have no need to even pretend to be.

If the day comes and the BBC isn’t there anymore – or is as pared back as some might wish - then our television and radio may be dominated by broadcasters who have no reason to even pretend to be balanced or unbiased and that could not be a good thing.