Owen Jones on BBC bias (2014)

f the Conservative Party and Tory cabinet minister. Andrew Neil, a celebrated interviewer and the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily and Sunday Politics and This Week – who, unlike many of his colleagues, was not privately educated – is known to have stridently right-wing views, owns the conservative Spectator magazine and is a former Sunday Times editor. Robbie Gibb, the editor of these shows, is former chief of staff to Conservative politician Francis Maude, and was one-time deputy chair of the Federation of Conservative Students, before it was wound up by Norman Tebbit for being too right wing. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, is a former national chairman of the Young Conservatives. In another example of the Establishment’s revolving door, Robinson’s senior political producer, Thea Rogers, was poached by George Osborne at the end of 2012. Other Conservative politicians fish from the BBC, too. David Cameron hired former BBC news editor Craig Oliver as his director of communications following Andy Coulson’s resignation. Tory Mayor Boris Johnson’s communications chief was Guto Harri, a former BBC political correspondent. When Harri left to join the Murdoch empire as director of communications at News UK, the successor to News International, he was replaced by the BBC’s Westminster news editor Will Walden.

Neither does the career direction of senior BBC journalists suggest a corporation brimming with left-wing bias. The BBC’s economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, abandoned her job in September 2013 to take up a £400,000-a-year position at investment bank JP Morgan. When the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston shifted roles to replace her, his post was taken by Kamal Ahmed, the business editor of the right-wing Sunday Telegraph who was attacked by Nick Davies over his reporting of the Iraq War. Ahmed’s articles demonstrated that he was firmly on the side of corporate interests. In June 2013 he condemned ‘the relentless and mostly negative coverage of the business world’, speculating whether the ‘political classes actually want high-performing, innovative, global corporations to operate in the UK’. Britain was ‘drifting into an anti-business funk’, he had written, with the financial crash leaving ‘the West unable to appreciate that the hunt for profit and competitive markets … ultimately create goods people need and the progress people strive for’.

As one former senior BBC journalist put it to me – strictly off the record – the corporation is ‘set up to be the transmitter of mainstream ideology’. This unofficial mission statement, he believes, is reflected in other appointments: like James Harding, former editor of Murdoch’s The Times and now head of BBC News; Peter Horrocks, director of the BBC’s World Service; and James Purnell, the BBC’s director of strategy and digital and a former arch-Blairite cabinet minister. Along with Flanders, Ahmed and Peston, the unnamed journalist told me, ‘what they all have in common is a liberal centrist view of the world’. The BBC, he said, was a ‘factory churning out that viewpoint’: a deep-seated commitment to neo-liberal economics, fused with liberal views on issues such as sexuality and gender. According to the journalist, they would form a ‘mini-club with whoever was in power’, boasting of friendships with key figures in government. BBC coverage was framed around the agenda of the government of the day – for example, an announcement of a new government policy, followed by responses to it.

The BBC is a perfect vehicle for the Establishment, for it allows the free-market status quo to be portrayed as a neutral, apolitical stance. Only those who deviate from it are seen as biased and needing to be countered to preserve objectivity. ‘99 per cent of business coverage on the BBC has the subtext that “business is good”,’ says the former BBC journalist speaking off the record. ‘They say “capitalism is good, capitalism is dynamic, the free market is delivering, it is making better lives for the people of the Global South.” If you say, “capitalism is bad, capitalism is not delivering, capitalism is ruining the lives of the Global South”, that’s seen as ideological. For balance, you should be able to hold both ideas equally, but the BBC don’t, because these are the views of the elite.’

The right’s relentless criticism of the BBC for ‘left-wing bias’ is a clever preventative measure: it allows them to police the output of the BBC. The Daily Mail is a particularly aggressive critic, having even accused the long-running TV series Sherlock of providing ‘more evidence’ for the BBC’s ‘left-wing bias’. In February 2014, Tory cabinet minister Chris Grayling suggested the BBC was dominated by a ‘left-leaning, metropolitan group of people who are disproportionately represented there’. This leaves the corporation in constant fear of providing evidence of left-wing bias. When the BBC does give a platform for more critical journalism, suggests the former BBC journalist, corporation managers feel ‘they have to atone for it’ with programming that does the reverse. Wary of complex issues such as immigration, BBC executives are deeply reluctant to look at them through the prism of economic insecurities like falling wages and a lack of jobs. The management structure of the BBC helps ensure everybody toes the line. In order to rise through the ranks, a journalist has to attach him or herself to someone higher up the food chain who can protect them when things go wrong, and promote them when things go right.

What’s more, the BBC has tended to cover certain key news stories – stories emphatically in the public interest – with a very light touch. When the Conservative-led government assumed power in 2010, it began a systematic privatization of the NHS that had never been proposed to the British people during the election campaign – the Conservative election manifesto had gone out of its way to stress its commitment to the NHS. But it was almost impossible to learn about this privatization programme by watching BBC bulletins, because it barely featured in them. When the legislation was being pushed through Parliament in 2012, it received very little coverage. When it finally passed into law, news bulletins declared ‘Bill which Gives Power to GPs Passes’ – a government spin on the legislation strongly disputed by organizations representing NHS workers, including the British Medical Association that represents GPs themselves. Similarly, cuts were routinely being described as the sanitized ‘savings’. As the government transformed a popularly loved national institution without seeking consent first, the BBC acted like its press office.

The BBC projects Establishment opinion on both domestic and foreign issues alike. In January 2009 it refused to air an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise money to help those affected by Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Such a move ran ‘the risk of reducing public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality’, argued the then Director General, Mark Thompson.11 The move provoked widespread fury, apparently highlighting a strong pro-Israeli bias in BBC coverage. When some BBC journalists asked Thompson whether they could privately put their names to a statement in support of the DEC appeal, they were told that to do so would mean having to leave the corporation.

Independent research underlines the extent to which the BBC echoes the views of the status quo. A study undertaken by Cardiff University academics, published in 2013, examined the BBC’s coverage of a broad range of issues. Their findings showed a predictable bias towards governments of the day. But whereas appearances by Gordon Brown outnumbered David Cameron in 2007 by less than two to one, David Cameron outnumbered Ed Miliband on news bulletins in 2012 by nearly four to one. There was a similar difference in ratios between Conservative and Labour ministers in 2007 and 2012. The study also found that the debate over the European Union was framed and dominated by those hostile to it, with few voices appearing in support of it. Business representatives appeared on the BBC significantly more than they did on commercial ITV news. In 2012 business representatives outnumbered trade-union representatives on the BBC’s News at Six by more than nineteen to one, a dramatic increase from five to one in 2007. Voices from the City – such as stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers – dominated coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent bailout of the banks.The BBC, in short, is an outlet that is staunchly pro-business, biased towards right-wing voices, and acts as a consistent platform for Establishment perspectives.

[from Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It]