Good News! The Daily Telegraph has instituted a Beebwatch:
Time to watch the BBC bias that costs each of us £116 a year
By Charles Moore
(Filed: 09/09/2003)
The Kelly affair may lead some people to think that the BBC cannot really be politically biased. The usual accusation is that it is biased against the Conservative Party. But this is a saga of a row between the corporation and a Labour government.
"Look," the BBC may say, employing one of its favourite locutions, "we're getting attacked from both sides - we must be doing something right." In fact, though, BBC bias has very little to do with political parties.
On the whole, the BBC is careful to fulfil its obligations to balance air-time for different parties. Indeed, if it were only a party dispute, there would be little reason why we, the general public, should worry ourselves too much about it.
No, BBC bias is not a piece of partisan trickery - it is a state of mind. So strong is the state of mind that a great many of the acts of bias, perhaps the majority of them, are quite unconscious. It is time to delve into that unconscious. Hence our Beebwatch, which starts on the opinion pages today.
The BBC's mental assumptions are those of the fairly soft Left. They are that American power is a bad thing, whereas the UN is good, that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel isn't, that the war in Iraq was wrong, that the European Union is a good thing and that people who criticise it are "xenophobic", that racism is the worst of all sins, that abortion is good and capital punishment is bad, that too many people are in prison, that a preference for heterosexual marriage over other arrangements is "judgmental", that environmentalists are public-spirited and "big business" is not, that Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley, that government should spend more on social programmes, that the Pope is out of touch except when he criticises the West, that gun control is the answer to gun crime, that... well, you can add hundreds more articles to the creed without my help.
Now, none of the above beliefs is indefensible. The problem is that all of them are open to challenge and that that challenge never comes from the BBC. Fine, for example, to make a documentary about the sufferings of people on death row in the United States, but why is there never a documentary made by someone who believes that the death penalty cuts crime?
If the BBC puts on a play about GM foods, you just know that it will be against them (the recent offering in question was by Ronan Bennett, a supporter of Sinn Fein/IRA, and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian).
During the first Countryside March, the Archers managed not to mention it at all, but mentioned the Gay Pride March instead. It is a question of who is being put on the spot, of where the BBC stands in relation to its chosen subject.
Turn on at any time and you'll see what I mean, particularly where foreign affairs are concerned. Yesterday, just after Yasser Arafat had torn up the road map by ousting his prime minister, I heard James Naughtie asking an Israeli spokesman why his country wouldn't give the Palestinians more concessions.
On the same programme (the famed Today), I heard an interviewer asking an Islamist, virtually unchallenged, to expound his belief that the men who killed thousands in the World Trade Centre were doing the will of Allah. Imagine such respectful treatment for some white fascist who thinks God wants black people dead.
A few days earlier, I heard a strange Radio 3 drama in which a crazed huntsman tried to have his "dogs" (the author meant hounds) tear the hero apart because he was urban and opposed to foxhunting. I heard a trailer for a programme about how the Attlee government built the New Jerusalem.
I listened to an item on Today where a businessman from the North was castigated by a Green because he had agreed to take from America some old ships that needed breaking up: no one challenged the Green's facts, or whether she might not be damaging British jobs.
When I took part in Any Questions on the first day of the war with Iraq, more than 60 per cent of the studio audience opposed the war (the opposite of the proportion in the opinion polls), and all the questioners who were called opposed it. The jury, or rather, Lord Hutton, is still out on precisely what Andrew Gilligan did with the words of Dr Kelly, but there is no doubt of Gilligan's view of the attack on Iraq. He said that now Baghdad "is more deadly than under Saddam".
And here is the much-respected BBC world affairs editor, John Simpson, analysing American policy towards Libya last week as moves to end sanctions approached culmination:
John Humphrys: "Has there been a real fear in Libya that the Americans would attack them?"
John Simpson: "Very strong indeed. You see, they really suit the pattern that George W Bush has established - it's a weak country with a bad reputation. Now, most people don't realise it's weak; it's a bit like Iraq in that sense, [an] easy target to hit if you know what's really going on, but it looks big if you just watch the morning television programmes in the United States: built up as something terrible, whereas in fact it's small, weak, and it can't do anything very much to defend itself. That's why President Reagan hit it so hard in 1986, because he knew he could get away with it, and I don't believe that even the Americans thought that it was a major sponsor of state terrorism..."
Note a) the assumption of the stupidity of the American public; b) the assumption of the dishonesty of US Republican administrations; c) the instrusion of an extraneous point about Iraq; d) the condescension of the phrase "even the Americans"; e) the failure to spend time on the behaviour of Libya itself, the country responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. In short, a locus classicus of BBC bias. You can find one virtually every day.
This is what our Beebwatch sets out to do. Three times a week, The Daily Telegraph will offer brief reports culled from the airwaves. Our own team is helped in gathering information by Minotaur, a media monitoring unit that will study all relevant bits of the BBC output, television, radio and electronic.
Readers are warmly invited to point out examples, but please make them specific and give the name of the programme and the date on which it appeared, and send them to beebwatch@telegraph.co.uk.
Why are we bothering? Because anyone who wants to watch television in this country must by law pay £116 a year to the BBC for the privilege. It is like compulsory tithes to the Church of England in the 18th century. You may be interested to know what sermons your money is paying for.
telegraph.co.uk |
