The BBC is flagellating itself again over immigration. A BBC Trust report, based on research by Cardiff University, concedes that for a long time the Corporation failed to reflect fairly the views of immigration sceptics. You have to give it credit for trying to find out whether this was true, although I guess that, being paid by all of us to do its job, the BBC has an obligation other broadcasters don't have to try and represent a fair range of views.
But it's interesting to reflect on the words the Trust uses and the evidence put before it to see what they say about the BBC generally, its recruitment policies and the way it views the world.
The Trust thinks the BBC got it wrong because the agenda of debate was "too driven by politicians". The report's author, Stuart Prebble, said that the BBC had too closely followed the Westminster agenda and for many years mainstream politicians had been reluctant to discuss the issue.
I wonder whether that's true. As far as I remember the Tories, from backbench level downwards, have always been opposed to immigration (often for racist as well as utilitarian reasons). But they were simply not given airtime to express their views. No doubt when younger I would have been quite pleased about that.
The BBC did not force governments to be complacent about immigration, but given that it is the window through which most British people view the world, its handling of the issue clearly has some bearing on the climate of debate out of which policy grows. It can't wash its hands of all responsibility.
Former director of news Helen Boaden told the Trust that when she came into the job in 2004 she was aware of a "deep liberal bias" in the way the BBC approached the topic. As I've written elsewhere on this blog, if you mostly recruit from middle-class metrocentric Humanities graduates, you are going to get a liberal bias. It's not complicated.
But I think liberal bias is an expression which tries to thwart meaning just as much as it tries to communicate it. Essentially it is trying to foster the impression of a cultural bias whilst stifling the suggestion that there might rather be a political one. But this is to minimise the extent to which culture fosters politics, and you can see how this works by asking what the reverse of a liberal bias might be. A conservative bias, you might think.
The BBC is very largely staffed by social liberals. "Thank goodness!", you may say. But now go on and try to justify the licence fee.
A former Today programme reporter who gave evidence to the BBC Trust said the Corporation "was damaged by a "fundamental niceness" and reluctance to give offence that stopped it covering a subject such as immigration properly".
I'm not sure this will do. As a former member of the bien pensant metropolitan Left, I would say that it was characterised by a fundamental niceness only for the causes it favours. It exhibits a fundamental contempt for the causes it abhors, for example the views of the provincial Right. And in any case, let's not forget that being nice about immigration meant being horrid to the people who were opposed to it. Whoever the editors and opinion formers were who kept debate about immigration off the air, they chose to whom they wanted to be nice, and their choice is revealing.
As ever in these circumstances, the Trust was keen to stress that it's all OK at the Corporation nowadays. A spokesman said, "We agree it is always vital to guard against unconscious bias or "group think" and will continue do so and we've committed to a number of actions to improve our coverage even further". You would hope this was so. But I've included here some extracts from another BBC Trust report, "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel".
"Stephen Whittle, former Controller Editorial Policy, pointed to what he called ‘the lack of intellectual curiosity’ in the BBC. ‘It’s monochrome in its thinking.’ He said it wasn’t diverse – in terms not just of colour, religion and culture, but of radical ideas about society. ‘It’s actually about not asking yourself hard enough questions – not actively getting out beyond the comfortable circle in the office in W1 or W12 into where the intellectual debate is happening.’
Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington correspondent, said the BBC and other broadcasters failed to ask serious questions about why the USA is ‘as successful as it is, why the system it invented works. And, in the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride. We don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts.’ When Webb was asked about ‘a casual anti-Americanism’, he said he consciously tried to redress it.
Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publiclyfunded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.
Michael Buerk said he believed the problem lay with an insufficiently diverse employment policy. ‘Most of the people working for the BBC are middleclass, well-educated, young metropolitan people.’ He said that, although the BBC had made great efforts to widen ethnic and gender diversity, ‘the actual intake of those people has narrowed quite appreciably in terms of age, social category, and education’.
Roger Mosey, Director of Sport, thought that ‘the BBC has in the past been too closed to a wide range of views and we’ve had too narrow an agenda. And I have some sympathies with what Janet Daley says generally about a liberal/pinko agenda at times.’ Mosey, in his time as Head of Television News, had an . . . experience, in the case of a film about census returns in parts of east London, showing that ethnic communities had become the majority. The film included interviews with council officials, members of the Asian community, and one white resident – who pronounced himself happy with his neighbourhood. Questioned as to whether this voxpop was really representative of the white community, the reporter replied with pride: ‘Oh no, we had to work really hard to find him!
When (Jeff Randall) was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was ‘a good thing’. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: ‘Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that.’ Now, does that sound like impartiality to you?"
It's worth asking in the light of the above whether there might be a "deep liberal bias" towards any other issues as well as immigration.
No doubt when From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel came out, the BBC Trust was assuring us that all was well too. The report dates from 2007.
