The row that has engulfed the BBC with the resignations of its director general, Tim Davie, and CEO of News, Deborah Turness, over allegations of bias is a self-incurred catastrophe for the organisation which has been a long time coming.
It stems from a gradually growing confusion between journalism, which can include expressions of opinion on many issues from the arts to politics, and reporting, which cannot. The difference was summed up more than 100 years ago by C.P. Scott, a legendary editor of The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) with the aphorism: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.
As mainstream media have come under growing competitive pressure over decades to offer their customers more than the facts of a story but increasingly strident opinions too, so the two have become more and more intertwined until they are hard to tell apart.
Starting in the 1950s and 1960s with the spread of television news, newspapers began to see that they could no longer rely on being first with the news; people no longer needed to wait until breakfast time to learn what had happened the day before; they had seen it already on their screens the previous evening.
Now TV itself faces the same challenge as social media usurps its role of being first with the news, as well as being almost completely unrestrained in the expression of opinion.
So as mainstream media (whether broadcast or print) can no longer be first they seek instead to make their versions of events more interesting to the audience by spicing them up with opinion, which is allowed to spill over from the editorial pages to the news pages, where it often even dominates. That can sometimes mean sensationalism, as in the case of some tabloids, or in the case of the BBC, biased pandering to the prejudices of at least part of its audience (the metropolitan elite part) and the left-liberal views of its own staff. That, at least, is what is alleged against the BBC.
It is charged specifically with editing a speech by Donald Trump to make it appear, inaccurately, that he explicitly encouraged the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021. This charge is, in effect, admitted. Other allegations include anti-Israel bias in coverage of the Gaza war, and “woke” bias on trans-gender issues.
These alleged transgressions of Scott’s axiom have served to place powerful ammunition in the hands of the BBC’s critics, including in the right-wing British media, and its enemies in the White House, leading in turn to claims of a right-wing coup against the BBC.
But as Nick Cohen points out on Substack, the BBC does not only pander to the liberal left. As he says: “There is the BBC that, in a clear breach of its rules, is making a deliberate attempt to warp its news values to woo Farage supporters.” This attempt to ride two horses at once, heading in different directions, has inevitably caused the BBC to come a cropper.
Trusted
Despite its faults, the BBC remains one of the most trusted news sources in the UK. And rightly so – its journalists are overwhelmingly excellent, particularly those operating overseas and in the UK regions. The problem seems, to an outsider, to lie in London, and the Broadcasting House HQ in particular.
Worryingly, according to YouGov, trust in the BBC declined from 81% to 47% between 2004 and 2020. The organization seems to be aware of the need to counter this trend, as well as disinformation from other sources, which is presumably why is hosts “BBC Verify” and produces programmes like “Unspun World.”
But this is not enough for those who see liberal-left attitudes pervading its news and current affairs programmes on a daily basis – a sort of surreptitious propaganda to turn what are actually controversial views into accepted cultural norms.
As this is a personal opinion piece, and at the risk of sounding like a codger harking back to the good old days, allow me to recall that on my first day as a trainee journalist in 1964 my news editor told me: “Never call yourself a journalist, son. Anybody can call themselves a journalist. We’re going to make a reporter of you.”
I hope they did. Certainly, I quickly learned that journalism can sometimes – as with this piece – mean simply sitting down and putting one’s opinions on paper. Reporting, I soon discovered, is 90% research – often sitting through a dreary court case or council meeting or fulfilling other basic tasks – and 10% writing.
I also learned that though of course I am not without political views of my own, I’d better leave them at the door when I arrive for work. The facts usually do a better job of speaking for themselves than I could. On the rare (I hope) occasions when I’ve not lived up to this aspiration I’ve nearly always come to regret it.
