RIGHT WING BIAS AT THE BBC

I want you to imagine the following scenarios.

  1)    BBC Business Correspondent interviewing leading Trade Union official: “Well Mr Smith it seems you have increased your membership by 20% since last year, have successfully negotiated improved working conditions for your staff by threatening industrial action, and ensured extra payments for working unsocial hours. To what do you attribute your success?

2)    BBC Business Correspondent interviewing leading businessman: “So despite the fact that over 80% of your staff are paid the minimum wage, you are awarding yourself a bonus payment of over two million pounds, on top of your already generous salary package. Additionally your company has been heavily criticised for the fact that it pays virtually no corporation tax. How do you justify yourself to your workforce and the hard working taxpayers of this country?

The Today Programme
Not very realistic is it. Yet if you reverse the scenarios and replace the trade unionist with the businessman in scenario 1 you get an exact portrait of the tone of business reporting everyday on the BBC. The Today programme on Radio 4 is particularly notorious. If they want an expert on Tax they go to Price Water-House Cooper or some other tax avoidance outfit, who will, as happened in a recent example, be given plenty of uninterrupted space to propagandise on the ‘absurdity’ of returning to a 50% top rate.  Bankers are treated with levels of deference not seen at the BBC since political interviews of the 1950’s.

Compare this with the treatment of Trade Union officials, highlighted recently on the Andrew Neil programme The Sunday Politics. Before introducing him Neil describes the elected leader of a major trade union several times as a ‘Barron’ in semi derisory tones. During an exceptionally aggressive interview the man snaps back calling Andrew Neil, Neil. When Neil objects to this the reply is short and swift, “well I don’t liked to be called a Barron.”

“What about Mr Barron?” Neil responds.[1]

Now I don’t name the trade unionist concerns since he could be any one of a number of individuals, the important aspect here is the aggressive tone of the interview, which though on the more extreme end of the spectrum, is not untypical.
So tell me Mr McCluskey why do you want to hold the
 country to ransom? 

The Tory Party has done an extremely effective job of portraying the BBC as a nest of pinko’s, whilst gradually nudging the corporation, by intimidation and blackmail over the licence fee and Royal Charter renewal, ever further to the right.

Don’t just take my word for it this bias has recently been highlighted by research at Cardiff University, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bbc-accused-ofpolitical-bias--on-the-right-not-the-left-9129639.html

There is a rather silly argument to the effect that if both the right and the left complain about the BBC it must be getting it about right. This might be true if we were talking about minor aspects of reporting, yet we are just emerging from the greatest financial crisis since the crash of 1929, a foreseeable crisis that the BBC, the most prominent news agency in the UK, with all its fawning at the feet of City fat cats and large financial institutions failed to report.

I am a supporter of the BBC, and you only have to spend 10 minutes watching the execrable Fox news to see what the Tories would love to put in its place. You do not however do a good job of defending the BBC by turning a blind eye to its serious failings or buying into the idea that it represents, give or take a few errors, a completely fair and balanced picture of the world. 



[1] I am aware that I have recently praised Mr Neil, and do not withdraw that praise, I am all in favour of subjecting those influencing our lives to rigorous scrutiny. I just wish Mr Neil was a little less selective.



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