Robin Ramsay has begun putting up articles on the latest issue of Lobster, no. 79, for summer 2020. In his ‘View from the Bridge’ section he has posted this piece, which was written posted on Facebook by the former Beeb journalist, Marcus Moore, on how the Tories turned the Beeb into their own pet propaganda mouthpiece.
‘A number of changes made during the last seven years or so, spearheaded by David Cameron, have led to the corporation’s news and politics departments becoming little more than ventriloquists’ dummies. Of particular note are the following:
a) important posts at the BBC being filled by pro-government figures from the private sector (Rona Fairhead, David Clementi, James Harding,Robbie Gibb etc)
b) direct links with the manipulative tabloid press being strengthened by Downing Street giving important positions to dubious characters like Andy Coulson and Craig Oliver
c) the subsequent recruitment of people like Alison Fuller Pedley (of Mentorn Media), who is responsible for choosing who gets to be in the Question Time audience, and Sarah Sands (formerly of the Telegraph, Mail and Evening Standard) who now edits Radio 4’s Today programme
d) all of the above follows Cameron’s appointment, in June 2010, of John Browne (Baron Browne of Madingley) to the post of ‘Lead NonExecutive Director’ for Downing Street, his role being that of ‘recruiting business leaders to reformed departmental boards’ – Browne’s questionable history at BP notwithstanding (remember Deep Horizon!)
e) how all of this quiet, underhand activity has been largely unreported,but has given the current Conservative government immense power within fashionable and influential circles.’
All of which means that the Beeb isn’t remotely an impartial broadcaster, as it purports to be and should be by law. I’ve said that the Beeb makes some excellent programmes. It does, and this season’s Dr. Who has been a case in point. But its news reporting is irredeemable.
As far as I’m concerned, everyone in it should be sacked, and especially Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson.
A few days ago Zelo Street put up an article commenting on a letter Joel Benjamin sent to the Beeb’s Director-General complaining about the corporation’s massive pro-Tory, anti-Labour, anti-working class bias. Benjamin had taken the step of writing to Tony Hall directly because he didn’t trust the Corporation’s complaints service. He stated that it was
a private contract administered by criminally negligentoutsourcing company CAPITA. Experts in dull, pro-forma response letters, which fail to address the complainants concerns and a symbol of much that has gone awry at the BBC and in neoliberal, corporatist Britain.
He also listed the following specific examples of the Beeb’s bias towards the Tories.
To which Zelo Street added a few more of their own.
‘(a) the use of newspaper columnists, editors and press hangers-on in paper reviews, allowing the press to mark their own homework and therefore perpetuate right-wing bias,(b) the blatant use of the BBC’s Sunday Politics by veteran presenter Andrew Neil to push climate change denial, and (c) Neil and political editor Laura Kuenssberg, along with Robbie Gibb, orchestrating a resignation from the shadow cabinet live on the Daily Politics just before PMQs to the benefit of the Tories…(d) Ms Kuenssberg effectively taking dictation from Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott over the campaign breaking electoral law, (e) Refusal to discuss the misbehaviour of Cambridge Analytica, to the extent of having Carole Cadwalladr shouted down during a paper review on The Andy Marr Show™, (f) a whole string of instances where the Question Time audience has been infiltrated by Tory plants, and (g) loading panel shows with right-wing pundits and other hangers-on.’
Benjamin particularly resented the Beeb’s dismissive attitude towards criticism. He wrote
Instead of BBC management being responsive to public criticism this election, licence fee payers were subject to Francesca Unsworth, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs – publishing a letter in the Guardian – framing complainants as peddlers of “conspiracy theories” in the wake of a highly visible series of self-ascribed“mistakes,” each, coincidentally, benefitting Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, whilst harming the Labour opposition. Despite the pushback to Unsworth’s article, you then chose to to double down, blame licence fee payers, andcry conspiracy.
He also remarked that the Corporation’s bias was
clearly unacceptable, yet a natural consequence of a broadcaster answerable not to the public, but directly to an increasingly brutalising, fact free, and tone deaf Government, that ultimately wants the BBC abolished. In this context, your servile, pro-establishment political coverage looks to fee payers like feeding Conservative crocodiles, in the vain hope the BBC get eaten last.
But what is also remarkable is the extent to which people share this dissatisfaction with the Beeb. Zelo Street reported that a poll by YouGov at the start of this month – December 2019 – had found that trust in the BBC had fallen to 44 per cent. 48 per cent, on the other hand, distrusted the Corporation. This was a marked drop from October, when 51 per cent of respondents to the survey trusted the Corporation, and 41 per cent didn’t.
The Street remarks that not everyone will share Benjamin’s views and his wider analysis, but they may understand his frustration, particularly at the Corporation’s refusal to listen to the people that actually support it by paying the licence fee.
He also warns that the Tories are determined to inflict further damage on the Beeb in order to create an utterly compliant media landscape. And if that happens, Hall and the rest of them may find themselves out of a job. Unless they actually start listening to their critics, and realise that there is a problem.
Now I dare say that many of those, who distrust the Beeb come from the Right. People who think that the Beeb really is biased against the Conservatives, because Johnson tells them it is while running away from interviews, his comments echoed and supported by the right-wing press. I’ve come across complaints from those on the extreme Right, who despise the Corporation because it generally supports multiculturalism, feminism and gay rights. Which in their view makes it anti-White and anti-British.
But the Left have every reason not to trust the Beeb. Joel Benjamin and Zelo Street are right: the Corporation has been massively biased. And not just in this election either. One commenter to Zelo Street’s post reminded readers how the Corporation was also biased in the referendum on Scots independence. They were. I remember how Nick Robinson was so dissatisfied with Alex Salmond’s very full answer to a question on the effect independence would have on the Scottish financial sector, that it was progressively cut down during subsequent news bulletins with Robinson claiming that Salmond had made an unsatisfactory answer. Finally it disappeared altogether, and Robinson claimed the-then leader of the SNP hadn’t answered it. Which is a piece of newspeak worthy of Orwell.
I despise the corporation’s political bias and its knee-jerk contempt for its critics. Any and all criticism of the Corporation is met with the same response: that the Beeb is criticised for bias by both Left and Right, with the implication that the Beeb isn’t biased and it’s all somehow in the critics’ imagination. But studies cited by Benjamin in his letter show that isn’t the case. And in some of the recent instances of glaring bias, the Beeb tries to excuse them by claiming that it was all a mistake.
This won’t wash. Not any more.
The Beeb does make some excellent programmes. But I’m sick and tired of its massive political bias to the point where I’d happily see nearly all their newsroom sacked. Johnson has said that he’s considering decriminalising nonpayment of the licence fee. And the Tories and their donors, particularly Rupert Murdoch, have been clamouring for the Beeb’s privatisation for nearly four decades.
The Beeb may soon find it needs all the help it can get. But it’s rapidly losing them on the Left, and may well end up regretting this.
Mike over on Vox Political has reproduced a series of tweets showing a video produced by EL4JC. This is a graph showing the cumulative proportion of left, right and centre guests on various Beeb news and politics programmes. The columns in the graph increase as the figures for each day and programme is added to the sound of Greig’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from the Peer Gynt suite. This ends by showing how massively biased the Beeb is in its selection of guests. Here’s a shot of the last image.
As you can see, the Beeb is massively biased in favour of the Right. Those guests, who are not from the Right are drawn far more from the Centre than the Left. One of those, who retweeted the image, Julie Houghton, commented
this is appalling. Retweet everyone and share. Sick of seeing right wing nutters having such a biased platform. Handed to them on a plate by the BBC & don’t get me fucking started on right wing lying newspapers, distorting the truth. Something has to change.
Yes, it does. And this analysis of Beeb bias won’t surprise anyone – not on the Left at least. Barry and Saville Kushner in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, tell how the Beeb on its news programmes always featured people supporting austerity to the exclusion of trade unionists, Labour politicos and protesters arguing otherwise. When these dissenting voices were allowed on, they were quickly silenced, or in some cases actually shouted down by the presenters. The media research departments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff universities have also produced reports into Beeb political bias. They concluded that the Beeb is far more likely to have speaking on their programmes Conservatives and spokesmen from the City than Labour politicians and trade unionists.
But why this massive bias now? Mike also reproduces this image, containing a tweet from a former BBC newsman, Marcus Moore, and a graphic about the career of Sarah Sands, now editor of the Radio 4 Today programme.
Moore’s statement that this all follows Cameron’s decision to appoint John Browne, formerly of BP, to the government department responsible for recruiting management and senior executives from private business to reformed government departments also deserves comment. I don’t doubt that Moore’s absolutely correct in that the ultimate responsibility for all this lies with Cameron. But Tony Blair was also keen to have the BBC parrot lines spouted by New Labour. And the appointment of private business people to the heads of government departments was not only a New Labour corporatist policy, but also that of the Nazis in their promotion of private industry. Not that the Beeb wasn’t biased in favour of the Tories long before that.
So where should people go for proper information?
Mike suggests that people would be better served taking it from social media, and the independent sources that so terrify the establishment media. So much so that there are now groups like Stop Funding Fake News, who adopt a spurious concern to prevent people getting their news from extremist sources. By which they mean websites like The Canary, which supports Jeremy Corbyn, but is not ‘extremist’ nor does it retail false information. The establishment claim that people taking their information from online sites like The Canary is not only fueling extremism, it is also destroying the ideological consensus built by people all reading and watching the same newspapers and news programmes. In other words, they’re afraid that people are moving away from them and their influence is being undermined by their online competitors.
Good.
The lamestream media are all pushing, to a greater or lesser degree, the same Thatcherite policies that have done so much damage to our country, and have destroyed so many lives – of the unemployed, the poor, and the disabled. It deserves nothing but our contempt, and people are far better advised looking at excellent left-wing blogs and sites like The Canary, The Skwawkbox, Novara Media, Evolve Politics, Vox Political, Zelo Street, Another Angry Voice, the Disability News Service and so on.
But Mike’s piece also concludes with a tweet from Mike Smart, warning people only to take their anger out on Beeb news programmes. Otherwise they will play into the hands of the right-wing and corporate shills wishing to privatise the Beeb altogether.
Yesterday Mike put up another article showing why the Beeb can’t be trusted to host the proposed debate between Tweezer and Jeremy Corbyn. When May first announced that she wanted to debate the Labour leader over Brexit, Corbyn replied that he would relish it, and that it should be on ITV. That’s his prerogative as the person challenged. He preferred the ITV format, which would simply be the two politicos going head to head.
But this hasn’t suited the Tories nor the Beeb, which would also love to host the debate. May’s director of communications, Robbie Gibb, was a member of the Beeb’s newsroom before joining her team. And he’s definitely been angling for his former colleagues at the Corporation to get the debate. And so the Beeb, and much of the rest of the corporate media, has been claiming that May’s proposal is a challenge to Corbyn, despite the fact that he’s already accepted. According to the Canary, Corbyn’s distrusts the Beeb’s proposal because it gives Beeb editors too much power to frame the questions and rig the debate. Matt Zarb-Cousin and others on Twitter have remarked that the Beeb seems to have been trying to get this debate for several weeks. On the 6th November there was mention of an interview with Dimbleby, and on the Torygraph this last Monday, 26th November 2018, the Beeb said they’d hold a ‘Question Time’ style session if Corbyn refused. Others followed, casting scorn on the idea that the Beeb’s debate would be impartial.
They’re right. As Mike has pointed out, the Beeb has form regarding deceptive political reporting. It was also this Monday, on Newsnight, that the Beeb included Lynn Hayter, a Beeb actress and fake Pastor of a miniscule internet church, in a debate about Brexit, trying to pass her off as a real vicar.
And this is far from the only piece of such deception the Beeb has made. Others have included packing the audience and panel at Question Time with members of the Tory party, and very biased reporting against Corbyn and the Labour regarding the anti-Semitism smears. Quite apart from the fact that one after another of the Beeb’s news teams has been shown to be a member of the party, and has left to join the Tories PR department. Furthermore, Ray Tallis’ book, NHS SOS, also has a chapter on how the BBC’s reporting of the privatization of the NHS actually supported it, instead of challenging it.
Tony Greenstein, I think, in one of his articles mentioned how, when the government passed legislation allowing the CCG commissioning groups in the NHS to purchase private medical services, the Beeb declared that it gave GPs more freedom, rather than describe it for what it was. It was, he states, pure state propaganda. It’s one example of a very long line. I can remember how, in the 1980s when Thatcher was cutting public services and the welfare state, the Beeb declared after the announcement of yet another round of such cuts that it was ‘more self-help’. Which was how the Tories wanted us to view it, rather than realise that it was simply yet more denial of needed state aid to the poor and vulnerable.
And Barry and Saville Kushner in the book, Who Needs the Cuts, have shown that the Beeb gives unequal airtime to those, who have swallowed the pernicious lie that austerity is necessary, and scream down dissenting voices from activists and trade unions. That is when the latter are even allowed on air. And academic media monitoring bodies at Cardiff and Glasgow University have shown how the Beeb gives far more space to employers, Conservatives and bankers over Labour members and trade unionists.
The Beeb is massively biased and should not be allowed to host the debate between Tweezer and Corbyn.
And more and more people are realizing this. A few days ago, the left-wing Vlogger Gordon Dimmack attacked the Beeb for its bias in its reporting of Julian Assange. He has also similarly criticized the Guardian for its bias, partly over Israel. At the end of that video, he announced that the mainstream media was so biased and untrustworthy, that he was going to use instead news from the New Media sources on the internet. This means sites and blogs like the Canary, whose very capable editor, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, so frightened and outraged the hacks at the Guardian a few weeks ago that they tried to ban her from being the speaker at an event to honour Black journalism.
And the new media is also rattling the Beeb. The Radio Times this week carries yet another self-serving article promoting Question Time, and lamenting the fact that politics in Britain is becoming increasingly polarized because fewer people are watching it, preferring instead to get their news from sources that match their own opinions.
I have zero sympathy. If people are switching off Question Time, it’s no-one’s fault but the Beeb’s.
They have been biased towards the Tories for a very long time, and people have always known and realized this. But with other sources of information instantly available on the Net, which can tell you what the Beeb isn’t, the Corporation’s lies and omissions have become glaringly obvious to more and more people. If the Beeb wants to get more people to follow its news coverage, then all it needs to do is become genuinely impartial.
But I fear that this is too much for the Corporation, which responds to any criticism about its pro-Tory bias by sending its critics pompous letters about how its journalists are trained to be scrupulously impartial. Even though a casual glance at the Six O’clock News reveals that the Beeb is anything but.
Corbyn definitely should not bow to pressure to debate May on the Beeb, and viewers are definitely advised to get their news from the other, great news organisations on the Net to correct the bias of the state broadcaster.
This is a very sobering video from Novara Media, which shows precisely how degraded the mainstream media is becoming, and implicitly, why independent news outlets like Novara and the other news sites and shows I repost here are so necessary.
Aaron Bastani reports and comments on an article put up by Open Democracy last Wednesday that the Evening Standard is due to sell its editorial independence to big business tomorrow, 5th July 2018. This move, led by editor George Osborne, who not at all coincidentally used to be Dave Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, will see the paper sell positive coverage to firms like Google and Uber for £3 million. Bastani states that this is important, as it breaks down the divide between journalism and paid-for advertising content. But, he continues, it’s nothing new.
He then talks about how the Evening Standard is owned by a collection of shady Russian oligarchs, and reflects their business interests. He goes on to describe how the media is increasingly dominated by Tory politicians. The first person to interview Donald Trump when he became president was Michael Gove in the Times. Danny Finkelstein is a Tory lord, and the Standard’s Associate Editor. Robbie Gibb, who is the brother of a Tory MP, and was Theresa May’s head of communications, edited the Beeb’s Daily and Sunday Politics. Boris Johnson has a column at the Torygraph, even though he’s Foreign Secretary.
Bastani concludes that the revolving door between politics, industry and the media has vanished, and those hitherto separate areas have become fused. He makes the point that while quality journalism is a public good, if it’s left to Osborne, Johnson, Gove and Lebedev we will have ‘a profoundly broken society’.
Bastani’s right, but this is just the latest development in a process that has been going on for a very long time. Editorial independence in many papers declined in the 1980s, when newspapers like the Observer were bought up by magnates with interests in multiple industries. Tiny Rowland, who owned the Observer, owned mining concerns in Zimbabwe, and so spiked stories that paper wanted to run exposing human rights abuses there. I also remember how, in the 1990s, Private Eye also ran articles every so often revealing how the Observer had published yet another glowing article about a country or corporation, without revealing that it was a puff piece paid for by the nation or company featured.
It’s also been the case that politicians very often have had their own columns in the papers, or written the odd article about a particular issue. Sometimes this happened after they left office. For example, David Blunkett was given a column in the Sun by Rupert Murdoch. As for Robbie Gibb at the Beeb, Mike’s put up a number of articles about the way the news department at the Beeb is dominated by members of the Tory party, including Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg. And it seems every couple of months someone else leaves the Beeb to work for the Tories. But the Corporation still keeps on pompously denying that it’s biased, despite its vicious attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.
But Bastani’s piece does show how far this process has gone, and is set to go, with the Evening Standard providing puff pieces for global corporations as news, while being packed, like the rest of the right-wing media, with Tory MPs. It’s almost a case of life imitating art. Or rather satire. Remember a few years ago, when people started satirising the corporate media with comments like ‘And now for our corporate approved content’, and slogans like ‘Remember: Corporate loves you.’ It now looks almost like Osborne saw the satire, but thought it was a good idea.
Until the mainstream media reforms itself, it has shown that it absolutely cannot be trusted. And people are far better off taking their news from the alternative media instead.
The Beeb constantly answers any criticism that it is biased towards the Tories by repeating its claim that it’s impartial, bound by its official charter and so on. Anyone writing to the Corporation to complain about its egregious bias, such as against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour, as shown in its coverage of the last general election and the barrage of lies and sneers long before by Laura Kuenssberg, John Pienaar et al are given this standard reply. The Beeb, you are sanctimoniously and haughtily told, is above suspicion, so you should go away and mind your own business.
Mike, as he reminds us, received one of these letters when he complained about the Beeb’s bias. So have many of his commenters, after they complained. Buddy Hell, over at Guy Debord’s Cat, got a similarly sniff missive from the Corporation when he did.
But the bias is real. Researchers at the media units at Edinburgh, Cardiff and Glasgow universities concluded that the Beeb was far more likely to interview Tory MPs and financial experts, and accept their comments, than talk to Labour MPs and trade unionists. Barry and Saville Kushner, in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, described how they were moved to campaign about austerity partly by the way the Corporation uncritically accepted the need for its savage cuts against the poor and working class. They cited one example where a leading trade unionist was effectively shouted down by a BBC presenter on the radio when he dared to say that they were unnecessary and the arguments for them didn’t hold water. The proles were getting uppity and questioning the impeccable logic of their lords and masters, and so had to be shut down.
You can hear the same claim of impartiality repeated ad nauseam on the Beeb’s own public relations programme, Points of View, where the Beeb takes a look at the letters its received about its programmes. Private Eye has criticised this many times over the years as simply an exercise for allowing the BBC to answer its critics while playing very fast loose and with the actual evidence. For example, if one programme comes under fire from a section of the public, the Beeb will cites correspondence it has received in support of the programme. However, it won’t mention the actual volume of correspondence it has received on the issue. So if it receives, say, 30 letters of complaint about a programme, and only two or three letters of support, those two or three letters will still be trotted out, along with a few remarks from the show’s producers, to give the impression that opinion was equally divided when it was anything but.
As for political bias, when this is raised the BBC will trot out the remark that all administrations have felt that the BBC was biased against them. This is probably true. Way back in the 1990s under John Major the Tories were constantly screaming how the ‘left-wing BBC’ were biased against them. They do the same today, on website like Biased BBC, where right-winger – and often extreme Rightists – whine about how the Corporation is pro-Islam and full of ‘cultural Marxists’.
These claims of impeccable impartiality were seen to be increasingly threadbare this week, as two more of the Beeb’s news managers vied with each other to join Theresa May’s team. The two candidates for the post of head of May’s communications team were Robbie Gibb, the head of the BBC news team at Westminster, and editor of the Daily and Sunday Politics, and John Landale, the deputy political editor at the Corporation. Landale, it seems almost needless to say, is another Old Etonian. One of the previous heads of communications for the Tories was Craig Oliver, another newsman from the Beeb. Oliver was responsible for revamping the News at 10 at organising the coverage for the 2010 Election.
In the end, Gibb got the job. Well, he is the brother of Tory politico Nicolas Gibb, the former chief of staff for Tory Francis Maude, and was best man for another Tory candidate, Mark MacGregor. He was also the vice-chair of the Federation of Conservative students.
Other Tories, who have found agreeable posts at the Corporation include James Harding, who is head of news and current affairs across the Corporation. He’s another Murdoch employee and a friend of George Osborne. Then there’s Andrew Neil, who was editor of the Sunset Times under Murdoch, a chairman of Sky TV, and chairman of the Press Holdings Group, which own the Spectator. Among the commenters on Twitter, who remarked on this latest blatant link between the Beeb and the Tories was Owen Jones, who reminded his readers that Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne all took their spin doctors from the Beeb. Another commenter, Will Black, said that with the numbers of Tories at the Beeb, the news should be written off as a Tory election expense, rather than be paid for by the licence fee.
This latest move of a high-ranking newsman at the Beeb makes it even more difficult for the Corporation to deny that it has a right-wing bias. Although I have no doubt that they won’t stop trying. Expect more guff about how the corporation is utterly impartial and above reproach, even when the careers of editors and presenters and the content of the news itself screams otherwise.
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