Letter: BBC bias (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

The recent questioning of the myth of BBC editorial independence must be a very touchy issue in Broadcasting House. I doubt if Richard Cooper's letter to them concerning possible TV censorship (Letters, November Socialist Standard), will evoke other than evasive platitudes in reply. But even these would be an advance on their card replying to my letter, sent from India to the Listener, copied to World Service, and telling me that they had no space to print my "interesting letter". This letter had pointed out that references by their correspondent Mark Tully, to the government of the state of Kerala, India, where I was then living, as marxist. were contradictions in terms and that his persistent references to the government of state capitalist Russia as "the Soviets" were similarly historically inaccurate and misleading.

The reputation for objectivity held by the BBC abroad rests largely on the assumption that its news reportage is unsullied by bias, personal or official. Having worked in the UK for the BBC and abroad with other broadcasting organisations, I have concluded that unless one is closely familiar with the subject, personally biased news reporting usually goes undetected. Even when exposed, the wholly unwarranted reputation persists. There is, of course, no reason to suppose that BBC and other media employees should be any less biased than the rest of the working class in matters of sex, politics and race.

The fact is that BBC bias exists on many levels. Apart from personal partiality, the perpetuation of popular myth can be seen in the reporting of the role of black workers in inner city rioting. I first heard of the 1981 riots in St. Pauls. Bristol from the World Service news. This referred to groups of youths "some of whom were black ' Factually correct of course, but quite irrelevant the area in any case has a significant black population and their absence, not their presence, would have been exceptional. It would have been equally correct, but just as pointless, had the reference to colour emphasised "some of whom were white". But the stereotypical, riot-prone black loomed larger in the minds of the newsroom editors and the damage was done. Just as it was when the black worker whose traffic offence is alleged to have sparked off the Handsworth riots, was invited to make abject apology on TV for the rioting immediately after the revelation that two Indians had been burned to death. Although two white workers were subsequently charged with their murder, the blacks were already guilty by association. The colour of those involved was. of course, quite immaterial.

These examples of the perpetuation of historical and racial mythology may not appear strictly as bias, but they do reflect the underlying distortions that, through repetition in the "respectable" media, have become common in support of status quo ideology.

The reinforcing of popular prejudice by the broadcasters' subjective, often unconscious, assumptions is probably the most dangerous power of the media, for it is largely hidden. Blatant and open propaganda is usually easier to counter. To charges of bias, such as those regularly made on ITV's Right to Reply, the producers will answer that an in-depth programme on a contentious issue requires some favouritism and discrimination in order to express its viewpoint. It cannot allow an impartiality which, within programme-time limitations, would reduce its analytical perspective. Balance is to be achieved, they maintain, not within any one such programme, but over a substantial period during which allocation of facilities is made without bias.

This seems fair enough. But does broadcasting policy permit of such balancing of opposing viewpoints? The three main reports on broadcasting since the war are all specific on this. Beveridge's 1949 Report of the Broadcasting Committee states in Chapter 10:

It is essential that the broadcasting authority, in allotting opportunities for ventilation of controversial views, should not be guided either by simple calculation of the numbers who already hold such views, or by fear of giving offence to particular groups of listeners. Minorities must have the chance by persuasion, of turning themselves into majorities.

Even more explicit is Pilkington's 1960 Report of the Committee on Broadcasting:

Both the BBC and ITA must see to it that minor parties are given a fair opportunity to take part: it is part of their responsibility to see that dissent in party political, as in other forms of public discussion, can have a hearing. The difficulty of ensuring impartiality and balance should never be allowed to serve as an excuse for excluding controversy and dissent from public discussion (page 94)

So why is it that the case for socialism is distorted and rarely heard? After mentioning the restrictions due to the compromising dependence of journalists on their information source such as politicians.,Lord Annan's Report of 1974 provides the answer. Under a heading "External Pressures" on page 24. it states

. . the constitutional authority of radio and television to function at all stems from an organ that the political parties control.

So despite fears the BBC may feel for its alleged independence, it doesn't really matter if the Peacock Committee recommends replacing existing funding — through licence fees and government grant with private sponsorship and advertising The state remains the final arbiter and authority on its broadcasting function. Its Board of Management will still have to be polite to the Board of Governors and through them to the Home Secretary.

In any case, the BBC has never been independent of government pressure on its programme content Its 1927 Charter makes clear that "Government has the last word. It confers on the Government a formally absolute power of veto over BBC programmes", and the Secretary of State . . . may from time to time by notice in writing require the Corporation to refrain at any specified time or at all times, from sending any matter or matters of any class specified in such notice". (Clause 13(4) of the Licence.)

It has also been clear since 1927 what the BBC means by "impartiality" The Charter goes on:

Impartiality is not absolute neutrality, or detachment from those basic moral and constitutional beliefs on which the nation's life rests. The BBC does not feel obliged to be neutral as between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery . . .

And if we ask whose truth, whose justice, whose freedom the BBC is partial to, we need look no further for the source of its bias.

This may throw some light on the continuing difficulty the Socialist Party experiences in trying to obtain access to broadcasting facilities.

W. Robertson 

Brighton

Screening capitalism (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is the month when — if the ballyhoo is to be believed — our lives are about to take on a new dimension. A fourth television channel is to begin broadcasting in Britain.

But who believes the advertising? Let us make a little bet — a prophecy. By November 1983 we shall be able to look back on a year's broadcasting on Channel 4 and see that it has churned out much the same mixture as BBC1 and 2 and ITV1. How can we be so sure? Not because television isn't capable of much more interesting. attractive and relevant programmes; but because what is broadcast is ultimately decided not by the producers or programme controllers — but by the demands of British capitalism.

Capitalism’s demands fall into two broad areas — the economic and the political. Economic constraints dictate how much can be spent on programmes, where the money is to come from, and whether there will be advertising. Political constraints decide what things may or may not be shown and what points of view shall predominate. These were the capitalist realities faced by the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting set up by the Labour government in 1974 under the chairmanship of Lord Annan. Their job was to consider submissions from a wide range of interested groups and organisations who had very definite ideas about how television should be used, but not much appreciation of capitalism's imperatives. When the Committee finally presented its report in March 1977 (538 pages, and half as many again in appendices), it proposed the setting up of a new Open Broadcasting Authority which, it hoped, would give programme producers greater freedom from interference and more scope for initiative than existed in BBC and ITV. The Labour government dragged its feet in agreeing to implement the Report (Queen's Speech, November 1 1978); and when the Conservative Party was elected they scrapped it and announced (Queen's Speech, May 1979) that the fourth channel would be placed under IBA control with a modified arrangement for programme production. The £70 million estimated cost of the first year of operation was to be raised by subscription from the independent television companies who would be allowed to sell advertising time on Channel 4 and also to sell programmes to the IBA subsidiary set up to control programme provision.

A loss-making enterprise will not be tolerated unless the capitalist class, usually through the state, agrees to provide the money. And they do not do that unless it performs a function valuable to them. What has become clear in the development of British television is that the British capitalist class can eat their cake and have it. ITV has shown that it is not only quite “safe” politically, but that it is also a vast financial success. The BBC, funded directly by the state, but having its budget tied more and more explicitly to the licence fee, has found itself struggling to compete for audience ratings, and so becoming more and more like ITV in what it offers.

The sort of television this gives us is predictable and has strong similarities with television all over the world. Its main characteristic is that it is directed, almost exclusively, at the working class. Not simply those on low incomes, of course, or those whose work gets their hands dirty, but all of us who depend on a salary, a wage, or the dole for our living. Part of the reason for this is that the other class, the capitalist class for whom we all work, either in private industry or through the state, is such a small minority of the population. And television is a mass medium. Its advertisements have nothing in common with those in Queen, Country Life, or even The Times. Working class viewers provide a huge market for mass-produced commodities, and advertisers will pay hundreds of pounds for a few seconds’ access to that market if they are convinced that viewing figures are high.

The most expensive time for advertisers is in the middle of the evening, because that is when most workers turn to television. After a tiring, often frustrating and humiliating, day at work and a crowded. stressful journey home, thousands of workers in Britain eat a meal at roughly the same time and flop in front of the television set. What they see and hear must not disturb their recreation — this period of rest and recuperation which, together with a night's sleep, enables and encourages them to go to work tomorrow and tomorrow.

This is the other part of the reason that television is devoted to the working class: it has become part of the process of government. As the most powerful means of mass communication yet devised, it plays a crucial part in persuading the working class to leave the land, factories, mines, railways, shipping, airlines, and so on in the hands of the ten per cent who own them. It helps to ensure that we do not seriously object to continuing to manufacture and manage their wealth, building up their profits. It encourages us to acquiesce in policing one another, managing one another, and generally running their whole exploiting system for them. And in times of economic slump like the present, it prevents the working class from asking fundamental questions about the idiocy of a social system that throws millions of them out of work — not because people do not need the products and services but because there is no longer enough profit to be made in producing them.

Television performs its daily task of selling capitalism to the working class by methods that have been well tried in cinemas and newspapers, pulpits and classrooms for many years. Its cardinal rule is never to acknowledge for a moment that it is in fact talking to the working class. It cajoles us as consumers, flatters us as responsible citizens, stirs our pride as Britons, chats cosily to us as gardeners, appeals to our appetite for food, titillates our sexual feelings — but. as people who spend the main part of our lives working for a ruling class, it never addresses us at all. That is quite sensible. The one thing feared by the capitalist class (who are very class conscious) is that workers should realise their unity of interests as a class, because that will herald the end of their reign.

What comes out of the television screen is therefore of two broad types. On the one hand, there is a wide spread of entertainment meant to be amusing, diverting and inconsequential. Workers who have spent all day at housework, or a machine, or a desk, or a steering wheel have had about all they can take of capitalism’s realities. It is not therefore surprising that they will escape, without being very critical, into Crossroads, or the weak situation comedies about couples who are not quite living with one another, or the antics of athletes dressed up as buffoons in It’s A Knockout. They can work off some of their frustration and anger watching the increasingly vicious variants of the cops and robbers theme in series like The Professionals. They can travel, if only on film, to those interesting parts of the world that their wealthy employers visit in person. And occasionally they are allowed a film tour round one of the actual homes of the ruling class.

The other type of television offering is information, ranging from news at one end of the spectrum to popular science programmes at the other. The television companies, and especially the news departments, begin with the pretence that they are impartial. This is, of course, a lie; and occasionally they are caught out when conflicting reports from other countries turn out to be nearer the truth. But. by and large, news and current affairs programmes do their work by carefully selecting what they show, by emphasising some aspects at the expense of others, and by the attitude of the commentators and interviewers. Government ministers, industrialists or churchmen are nearly always treated respectfully. even reverentially, whereas workers on strike or trade unionists (usually out in the street, shouting above the noise of traffic, or on a secondary screen in some distant studio) always come across as slightly peculiar, disgruntled people who no sensible viewer would have anything to do with.

The assumption behind all information programmes is that the structure of society is basically sound, and that everything would really be quite all right if it weren't for this or that unreasonable person, or group, or party, or other nation. "Impartiality” on this understanding means keeping things fundamentally as they are. To a large extent the camera operatives, reporters, directors, producers and controllers work as they are compelled to. for fear of losing their jobs or missing promotion: but it is also an unfortunate fact that the glamour of working in television allows them to forget, all too often, their own position in the working class.

Unaware, for much of the time, of the political and economic strings from which they dangle, they are able to persuade themselves that their enthusiasm for the status quo is their own impulse. Channel Four will not make a dent in all this. Nor will it be able to avoid its share of the job of trying to prolong capitalism by distracting and deceiving the working class. Nevertheless, television is a medium only, not a message: and once the working class wake, up to who they are and what they really want, they will, begin to use television with a power and a purpose that dwarf today’s offerings into the popcorn they really are.

Ron Cook

Really Bad News (1982)

Book Review from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow University Media Group, Really Bad News, Writers and Readers. 1982.

Really Bad News is the latest publication of the Glasgow University Media Group and follows on from Bad News (1976) and More Bad News (1980). The report aims to prove that the BBC and IBA are politically biased in their presentation of news and profoundly committed to a distinct social and political order:

The preferential treatment accorded to some right-wing views is only part of this. A second critical feature is the closing off of possible alternatives. Information which contradicts the preferred view or which would give credibility to the alternatives, is either rewritten, downgraded or simply left out. (Pp. 88-89)

The media are said to relay an ideology appropriate to a passive population and to foster acquiescence by limiting access to different ideas. The Glasgow Group claim that by so doing the broadcasting institutions are in contravention of their legal and conventional obligations to be balanced and impartial. A powerful case is presented to justify the claim that the media support management at the expense of shop floor workers, and analyses are made of television coverage of the British Leyland dispute of 1975, the Glasgow Corporation dustcart drivers' strike of 1975, the treatment of inflation in 1975, and the Labour and Conservative Party conferences in October and November 1979. This is followed by an analysis of the media in a class society and suggestions for the reform of broadcasting.

The Glasgow Group argue that the broadcasting medium's assumption is that "production in our society is normal and satisfactory unless there are problems with the workforce" (p. 76). To prove this they analyse individual broadcasts of both ITN and the BBC and conclude that the news is organised in such a way that only one set of explanations and policies is endorsed. The logic built up in their presentation "dictates the flow of information, the range of accounts and the legitimacy that is given to these" (p. 59). As far as inflation is concerned, the media assume this to be caused by wage increases and therefore endorse wage restraint. Both the BBC and IBA argue that their reportage is accurate and trustworthy and deny that they either select or distort but the evidence presented contradicts this.

The Group argue that the existing range of views within society is not presented in a balanced way. Ideas are neglected if they are not consistent with the accepted ideology or are downgraded and made to look unrealistic or idealistic. They are especially critical of the treatment of Tony Benn and the greater part of a chapter is devoted to the media's attitude to treatment of him. There is more than a slight hint of the Group's own bias towards Benn in this section. This is extended into an analysis of the rejection of the "left" and is linked to the media's attitude towards the working class and trade union activity. One major aim of the report is to redress the balance on behalf of trade unions and the “left" and to pinpoint the faults of management and the organisational structure.

The Group also argue that the media are undemocratic in that only the views of people defined as “important" are taken seriously. These include senior civil servants, trade union leaders and leading politicians. They deny that they wish to replace a right-wing oligarchy with a left-wing one, and claim to want an equal opportunity for their views to be represented. At the same time they make a more profound criticism of the media when they claim that broadcasters:

may look at “isolated” abuses in the economy — it may investigate "pockets of poverty" or the effects of unemployment in a single area but not usually at the nature of the economy which produces these (p. 140).

The same is true of the Glasgow Group. They wish to reform the media but not to overthrow the system of society which has created the conflict of interests. They represent an alternative view of the economy — of capitalism — but like the media they see this as being the only valid form of society. They claim that broadcasting can be organised in such a way that there is a greater proliferation of views and policies. This will be accomplished by the "democratisation" of the media. Broadcasting is said to be too important to be left in the hands of broadcasters and must therefore be opened up to democratic participation. They propose that:

1. the state should no longer control the BBC and IBA:
2. "independent" broadcasting must no longer be under commercial domination;
3. new structures be set up, representative of the plurality of British society in terms of class, sex, ethnic and other groups;
4. all institutions be democratically organised and controlled at community, regional and national level.

It is important to recognise the bias of the media and in this sense the work of the Glasgow University Media Group has some value. Our criticism lies in the falsity of the hope that we would have a more equitable society if all views were represented within broadcasting. The work of the socialist movement is hampered by the media; had we access to it we would not put forward false hopes and dreams for capitalism but pinpoint the failings of the system itself

Philip Bentley

Between the Lines: The detestable Lord Wyatt (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the November 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who funds the Tories?

Here’s your starter for ten points. Fingers on buttons, now. Ready? Right: Which of the following give millions of pounds every year to the Conservative Party?

1. Elderly pensioners who want to be kind to others.
2. A secret group of freemasons based in Chingford.
3. Millionaires and multi-millionaires who stand to gain by policies which they think will make them richer and more able to exploit their wage slaves?

Do I hear a buzzer? Yes, you are right, it's number 3. Now for five more points - big scores here: on which TV programme was the above answer given? Was it

1. Neighbours - that everyday story of how millionaire capitalists are screwing the workers?
2. All Creatures Great and Small? (No, that was the Liberal Party conference you are thinking of. Take your hand off your buzzer and try again. And we'll have no crude jokes about Cyril Smith and David Steel either, thanks very much.)
3. Panorama - BBC1, 9.30pm, 1 October.

Yes it was 3 again. Now, for a bonus point, who can tell me which party has in it’s principles the statement that "all political parties are but the expression of class interests"? Is it

1. The Labour Party (Take your hand away from that buzzer - it should be obvious to everyone by now that they have no principles).
2. The Tory Party - (No, they claim, contrary to the clear evidence shown on Panorama that they are funded by big business, that they stand for everyone's interests.)
3. The Socialist Party. And once again - surprise, surprise - bring on Cilia Black to sing Imagine - the third answer was correct.

Millionaires devote money to a political party that they think will uphold their interests. The Tories will probably seek ways to punish the BBC for allowing such an obvious truth from being exposed. But who can blame the bosses for putting their money into the Thatcher mob.

The pity is that the workers do not follow their exploiters’ example and put their time and money into the only party which stands for their class interests: The Socialist Party.

The Detestable Lord Wyatt

Woodrow Wyatt is a detestable specimen of capitalist politics. He began life as a Labour faker. He is now a Tory Lord. He writes a weekly political column for the News of the World which is filled from end to end with crass, prejudiced, ill-informed, sickening bigotry.

Wyatt’s thoughts belong in the tabloid gutter where he is paid to pour out the kind of rubbish which leads workers to believe Thatcher's latest exercise in Orwellian speech: her promise at the Tory conference that the present government is committed to creating a "classless society".

Wyatt is a leading force behind a new law, currently going through parliament. The law professes to seek to eradicate bias in TV. In fact, it is the most powerful censorship law ever attempted by any government in relation to TV.

Even Lord Whitelaw has warned that the law would be a charter for the government to force documentary-makers to reflect its views. This new law, which will force the BBC and ITC to allow the government to reply to any adverse criticism of it (even from comedians or in factual news stories) will push TV further away from any claim to being an open and critical medium.

It will mean that while the likes of Wyatt can defame and attack bodies such as the trade unions in his weekly column with impunity, TV producers will be legally forbidden to attack the obnoxious ideas of the Wyatts of this world unless they are prepared to ask the government to have equal time to deny what has been said.

There is an irony - a bitter, tragic irony - in the fact that just as the Stalinism which gripped the media of one half of Europe is being de-clawed, here in Britain the neo-Stalinists of the Tory Party are sharpening their claws more than ever - all with more than a little help from their millionaire financial backers. 

Steve Coleman