The BBC biased? Never!

For a good while now, there has been a debate in the UK about whether the BBC has a left-wing bias or not. Less of a debate, more a statement of fact followed by vehement denials. But still we have to roll out the arguments.

The BBC are supposed to be unstintingly impartial - that is their rasion d'etre. Yet on their news and cultural output they relentlessly either stifle, ridicule, or completely ignore anything other than a narrow 'progressive' viewpoint (of the Guardian/Independent newspapers) - which has very limited support in the country as a whole, but is given free (or license fee-funded) propaganda by the state broadcaster

The above view is an angry one - but it is supported by the facts. Every time I switch on radio 4, or watch a BBC news programme of any kind, the slant is obvious. There is no balance within the programmes themselves, as there should be, nor is there any hint of the news programmes being balanced by more libertarian programmes. If you think there is, please show me.

Last night, as an example, I switched on "Saturday review", on radio 4. This was hosted by the scrupulously impartial, on-the-fence Bidisha, whose previous quotes include:

“Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater”,

and

 “I wouldn’t be above some impromptu castration”

Please note that my collection of notes below took no work whatsoever. I listened to the programme once only, scribbling a couple of notes as I went along probably missing much. 

• look at the chosen topics: Naomi Alderman's novel undermining Christianity, a left-wing protest album (at a time when the Democrats are in power in America). Bidisha talks of the TV drama showing an "Empire with victorian values, undergong forced changes and reversals of power"
• the guest Cahal Dallat states that the programme "has a good Tory in it, which I think is something worth watching" - this 'good Tory'  talks of a minimum wage  3 times the one "that socialists have brought in"*
• the idea of the "old world breaking up" is mentioned about 5 times in 5 minutes
• when talking about a sci-fi-based play by Aykbourn, Bidisha enthused "That android is everything a man should be"
• there were odd remarks about Jesus’ “socialist principles”
• Bidisha rather wanted the Ry Cooder album to be history-changing,
• one guest said it was “really good to see a grumpy lefty getting out there and doing protest music"

Those are just a few examples, but the general agreement was relentless. Where was the non-progressive viewpoint to balance all this? I'll answer that for you: nowhere, and it won't appear soon on the BBC.

Sometimes your Guardian reader will respond that these views are now standard UK opinion, whereas a cursory (or more in-depth) look at newspaper sales shows that exactly the opposite is the case. If you mention this, they will, without missing a beat, change tack, and claim that the alternative 'liberal' view (read "Marxist inspired Guardian view") should be given some air-time. Which is ok - but not ALL the air-time. But by now their attention will appear to have wandered.

They don't care what the rationale is, they just want the progressive viewpoint pushed by public funding whatever the reason given needs to be. It is therefore unbalanced political propaganda and no-one should pretend it is anything other than that.

* for a very eloquent man, Cahal Dallat overused the words "socialists" and "tory" a little - which may or may not reflect his framework thinking about the world

How an ideology-driven broadcaster might work

A little while back now, I worked for a public-sector quango producing statistics and reports for other people in very similar jobs to look at. One feature of this job was the unsurprising left-wing flavour of the conversation there, another was the curious authoritarian atmosphere. The woman in charge of the (rather female heavy) group was a fine person, but slightly intimidating.

To illustrate why, take morning coffee. Most bosses grudgingly accept coffee breaks as one of those things to be tolerated, like haemorrhoids or Laurie Penny. But actually in this job attendance at morning coffee was compulsory. Despite the bosses' diminutive size, her habit of singing happily over her desk, and the fact that you could imagine her knitting there quite happily, there was a quiet that came over this whole matriarchy when her will was expressed - there was NO WAY you would contradict it.

At these strictly enforced chats over coffee, which the boss-lady presided over (and dictated the tone and topic of each day's chat) there was a on-your-best-behaviour-or-else atmosphere. It was somehow required that you contribute, and you would try jolly hard to say things that met with approval - both general and from on high. This meant having an intelligent observation to make - but also one that fitted the prevailing political feeling. And it may not surprise readers to learn that boss-lady was a strongly political reader of the Guardian newspaper.

The designated topic one day seemed to be the pre-eminence, in athletics, of black people. Well I remember the nods of approval when I found something to say about Ussain Bolt. There was no doubt I was fitting in by saying it - rather than mentioning the extraordinary record of white males in gaining Nobel prizes.

The reason I tell this story is that I've been pondering how those in charge of a TV/radio broadcaster might encourage employees and writers to come up with dramas that fit their ideological slant. Now this is pure hypothesis on my part but may turn out to be useful. A political slant in some news coverage is interesting, but in a way easier to understand - if only in terms of journalistic incompetence. But allowing a political slant to enter into dramatic output seems more in the spirit of 1984 or Uncle Joseph himself

It doesn't, I think, take a great deal of imagination to read my story of the awkwardly political coffee mornings, and to start to understand how employees can be pressured into adhering to an ideology in their work. And not just through a dominating boss or bosses.

It might be that the rules - as so often - are left unspoken most of the time, lest an email be leaked and .. ermm .. misinterpreted. Far more effective if staff are left to guess the rules - in the competitive scrabble for position in their careers they are sure to fall in line pretty quickly. These staff may be the ones choosing or commissioning which dramas are shown, for example. 

Thus, unaccountably, the employee will do well, who introduces a drama with the requisite focus on particular designated victim groups (blacks, Muslims, etc). And it helps if the drama contains 'acceptable' representations of gender, race, and sexuality. So members of groups thought (by our hypothetical broadcaster) to be commonly racially stereotyped, will often need to be portrayed in an entirely positive light IN A DRAMA. The justification for this will be to fight said stereotypes.

By contrast, the employee who suggests airing a drama dealing with working-class British heroism in - say - the Falklands conflict, will be ignored. Other employees soon get the idea, and - fearful for their careers - toe the line. The same pressures consequently tell on writers of these dramas. Preference will quietly be given to the more ideologically sound work - and we all know well how this kind of interference leads to a far worse dramatic work.

So our hypothetical broadcaster is in great danger of feeding us ideologically sound drama, but of worthless quality. In my next pieces, I will look at both some possible effects of this kind of censorship, and some of the thinking behind it.

BBC bias

Even the BBC themselves have reported this story.

David Amess has made (ahem) amess of this by complaining about female newsreaders "smiling" when reporting serious issues. This is hardly going to help his argument, as much will be made of him being rather out-of-date etc.

It needs to be said again, however that he is absolutely right about the everything else he says. The BBC is part of a group that (whilst most of them are probably not anti-semitic) talks as though Israel is a fascist or apartheid state. This is nonsense. To understand Israel it is simply necessary to imagine the level of security you'd need trying to run a small democracy in the middle of about 10 countries sworn to destroy you*. The BBC should report this in a more balanced fashion.

The BBC also takes a strong line on gender politics, which is very nicey-nice of them, very much the moral high-ground amongst some people. It is however a matter of politics, not of fact, and BBC employees with their customary cynicism about politicians would do well to realise that most feminist writers and activists are in the same game, just on a different side. They use the same methods of propaganda, and have the same cavalier treatment of facts and research, using them only when they assist the cause.

The BBC is consistantly critical of the Conservatives, in or out of government. BBC members are disgustingly unperturbed about this. They really do seem to think they are balanced, even when it is clear that their main criticisms of Labour come when they seem to be moving to the centre (or right). They make a great claim to impartiality, but in practice they have given up even trying to be impartial - they have a strong line on most things. Look at the public spending "cuts", the recent riots in London. They really thing parroting the Guardian is a 'balanced' view...

A huge number of people listen t the BBC, and I fear too many believe that it gives 'the balanced view'. Not true. The bias is clear in their news AND in their drama (which was once the envy of the world - now it's worth nothing). They are misusing taxpayers money. It is entirely right that attention should be paid to their vaunted impartiality, and whether they are fullfilling that promise.


* see this artcle on Archbishop Cranmer's blog

Why we should at least listen to David Starkey...

An expanded version of my comment on the biassedBbC website about David Starkey's comments on Newsnight yesterday (12th August 2011)

"David Starkey did phrase his comments in a slightly inflammatory way - he focused on one type of "Black Culture", and I guess he could have said Gang culture or referred to HipHop music without saying Black. He was trying to provoke debate, I guess.

He also was saying something that we don't face up to. Young boys in this country apparently don't see someone like Richard Branson as a role model, or Stephen Hawking or Andrew Wiles. Many seem to look to this gang/drugs/fighting culture as the only way of being a man. This culture celebrates the criminal. It is negative, violent, anti-education, anti-authority, and anti-British.

At the same time the Beeb, Guardian, and others have been so exercised trying to highlight how girls and women are achieving more and more that they have inadvertently sidelined boys and their future. I think it's uncontroversial that perceptions of gender roles have changed. By all means celebrate the successes of women, but I wonder if we've lost track of what we think masculinity should be.

Being a 'man' seems to have too many negative connotations to people these days. Yet all the men haven't gone away. They feel powerless and angry. I believe that this is one (just one!) cause of the riots and looting. We have let down a generation of boys, who have turned to violence. On both the left and the right people are angrily trying to blame the other side for the cultural mess that is behind the riots.

Starkey was interrupted at every sentence he tried to say. The interviewer didn't like what he was saying and didn't give him a chance to speak. Both the other interviewees seemed to be there to give different shades of views the Guardian might find acceptable."

Thoughts for the day

Themed blogs are not conducive to rational discussion. Exactly the opposite is the case: they seem to allow people free rein to their prejudices. Over and over I see a voice that slightly deviates from the line taken in a blog construed as "trollish". I myself have just been accused of "wanting to start a fight" because I sounded a note of mild context-giving to a particular debate on a BBC-bias blog.

It was the same behaviour I've seen before, and it is anti-debate, anti-rational. People will simply become yet more entrenched in their lopsided views as a result. There's no doubt a blog or site for every misguided world-view around, so you can agree with like-minded people instead of having your views challenged and in the realest sense possible 'rationalised'

Hallelujah!

I am not alone! Why did it take me so long to find these people....

So I've been going on about the BBC left-wing bias for a while now, feeling as though
a)  I was micturating into the wind, and
b) no one else thought the same way.

Well I was wrong, and my web-searches were inadequate. There is Biased BBC, and also see the comments in David Thompson's blog post here.

BBC feminist clique on the website....again

A week or two ago I started noticing this trend in the BBC website again and blogged about it. The front page had a feature on "Women in business: linking to a page packed with rather gender-politically biased headlines.

Today's example is again on the homepage and is a feature called "Women War Artists", with the subtitle
"The Imperial War Museum London is celebrating their remarkable experiences and achievements"

I'm sorry to harp on about this - I really have no problem with women achieving a much as men do. I just take exception to the political and social pressure to constantly "celebrate" it when a woman does anything at all, however minor. There is an implication here - perhaps not clear even to those writing this stuff but there nonetheless - of a certain inequality, which is exactly what feminists claim they hate the most.

The thinking sometimes hear is that women's achievements have to be 'celebrated' (I hate that word, it is rather PC-speak, don't you think?) because they have been under-represented in the past....This is a kind of orthodoxy and there is considerable pressure in some places to accept and affirm it. .Would I be right in thinking the BBC was just such a workplace?

The problem with this orthodoxy are twofold:
a) we don't know if it's bloody true or not! It's just stated and restated by feminists
b) even if it WERE true, the solution that would be most equal would be not to mention the sex/colour/"race" of who is achieving things in the first place

The problem  is that the BBC think that it is important to keep saying that women are doing great things and we need to know why they think that. It does rather look as if they wish to speak negatively about men and always in the most glowing terms about women.

Still doubt me? Do a google search on "women" on the BBC website as a whole, or just in the news section. And you'll see how anxious the BBC are to divide people up into men and women, and assign values and victim status one way or another. Some headlines, in case you miss them:

Women 'cope better with stress'
Men 'out-performed at university'
Are women better negotiators?
If... Women Ruled The World
Monkeys learn more from females
Women drivers 'more law abiding'
Women top men as share tipsters
Women 'to be richer sex by 2025'
Macho culture 'putting off women' in construction
Business | Women could be the way forward
Male managers 'should copy women'
Women better drivers, says watchdog
Women 'better at holding drink'
"Women nose ahead in smell tests"
"Men 'drink far more than women'"
'Don't tell women how to give birth'
Bedside manner 'gives women edge' (in medical exams)
Women 'better investors than men'
Latvian women 'dealing with capitalism better ...
"Hormones make women safer drivers"

The BBC have carefully selected pieces of research that they think are 'interesting', which may mean they fit into a particular slant on gender politics. We need to escape this "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" reflex that is so prevalent - it is NOT the way forward to fairness

BBC left wing slant

I've mentioned my feelings on this subject once or twice before, but cannot believe the scarcity of comment on the web about it. So I've decided to entertain you once more on the theme.

Peter Sissons is not a person I ever had much time for before. Indeed, I often thought he was complicit in the political bias of Auntie Beeb. However I've belatedly come across something of his written in the Daily Mail of all places (not my usual reading matter, I must say) that made me a very happy bunny indeed.

All through Margaret Thatcher's premiership (I was a slip of a lad), my mother would listen to PM at 5pm, the radio 4 news program. Every day a chap who I strongly suspect was Brian Perkins would dole out the bad news in a way that made you lose your will to live another moment longer. I do believe my mother's happiness (and my own) suffered as a result. Unemployment figures, inflation, etcetc were reeled off at us in deadly tones. His tone of voice told us emphatically that "things are getting worse"

BBC newsreaders do a lot with tone of voice, the editors choose their subjects wisely, and give highly partial write-ups and readings to those in any debate. They use the word "Tory" freely. The bias is especially noticeable throughout the BBC website. One commenter on the Sissons story said the following:

The BBC on line form you can fill in to do with their committment to delivering their equality and diversity agenda is loaded with socially engineered wording that is simply sickly and leaves no doubt as to where the company leads towards. It explains much bias consistently churned out led my feminist secular humanist types.

Now I can relate to this having read through a BBC online form asking what I thought of their representation of Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals. The questions were all very carefully worded, and there was included a little lecture on why it was right to represent groups in a certain way - just in case you were still undecided.

So when BBC employees furiously defend the coorporation's commitment to impartiality I get particularly annoyed. If you have a strong political bias, have the courage to say it. If their job is to be impartial, I think that certain people are not doing their jobs. And being paid our money. The organisation needs a reshuffle. Sissons talks about the whole mindset of the BBC,  Rod Liddle spoke of the the Big Bother feeling (my words) in the seminars and workshops there.

But nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care....The BBC has a big effect on the way many people see the world and I can't see that its reporting is conducted responsibly.

Sissons' essay is superb, extremely honest, and is saying something that should have been said ages ago, and acted on. I urge you to read it, not because I want you to vote for fools like Cameron, but because you should care about standards of journalism and the ideas we are being given to believe.

BBC Gender Politics bias

K sooner or later someone is going to tell me I'm imagining the BBC's anti-male gender politics bias. I invite them to look at todays BBC website main page and it's link to the business page. The main page has a feature on two only slightly related topics: "Why do men cat-call" and "Women in the workplace" (oh also a link to a page on "second-wave feminism")

I know there are some people who will seriously contend that these 2 topics are directly related, indeed many people think they have been abducted by little green men in flying saucers who conducted 10 year experiments on them. However, speeding swiftly back to planet earth (on our faster-than-light UFO) and reality I'd like to list some of the topics on the BBC Business News "Women in the workplace" sub-page today.

To their scant credit, the website editors have included the

Gender 'irrelevant in business'

story. This is so they can claim they have added an opposing point of view when in fact their world view is horribly skewed. Here are some of the other stories

Women 'still missing top jobs

• More women in boardroom demanded

  
  

  Women find glass ceiling 'intact'

  
  

  May rebukes 'feminist bigots' MP

  
  

  Sky sacks 'offensive' pundit Gray

  
  

I once started making a list of biassed BBC website pages, with dates, but i got bored of the depressing job. They seemed to leap on every bit of research they could find that made women look morally and intellectually superior to men, credulously swallowing every word. "Women better than men in business", "Women smarter decision makers" etcetc

The problem with people wanting to encourage women in business is that they need to be aware of the possibility that they are creating an imbalance the other way around, whereas in fact they aren't aware of anything (except their perceived cause)

The fact that this feature exists at all is in my view evidence of the strong but very questionable political bias in the news section of the BBC website - I don't know if it comes from the same editorial team as the Today programme on Radio 4, or if the website follows their lead.


UPDATE: By 12:30 the same day these pressing gender issues have been replaced on the BBC front page by the super-vacuous Anna Chapman 


I believe the correct thing to say here is ROFL. Maybe the feminists are balanced out by the lads in the BBC after all :)

In our time - Melvyn Bragg vs Pat Hudson - trends in Historical thinking

I urge anybody who is interested in the Industrial Revolution (I.R.), or even just currents of thought in History, to listen to "In our time from last week. I've only just got round to doing so, and it was a great treat.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wqdc7

Now I think we can safely say I'm not about to become any sort of historian at all  - but particularly not a Marxist historian. Perhaps Professor Pat Hudson wouldn't want to be categorised like that. I don't know. But here's the fierce debate that arose:

When Bragg and his guests were discussing the causes of the I.R., Hudson said something along the lines of "we must get away from this idea of a peculiar British genius for invention", at which Melvyn Bragg exploded into life - defending the inventiveness of some of those behind the technology that set Britain ahead at the time. Enormous fun to listen to, and very instructive. You can always learn a lot when people get very heated in an argument.

I'll discuss the arguments in more depth elsewhere - or this post will bore anyone who tries to read it to death - but I want to talk about the historical biases I think are at work here.

Hudson doesn't like the version of the I.R given in old history books, and taught in the classes I attended at school. She doesn't like the emphasis on great men, or any patriotic statements that might imply that any national superiority set Britain ahead in Industrial development. As I understand it, this was a basic trend in historiography, where 'Marxist' historians reject an old "Whig" version of history. Great men and national superiority are out, social & economic forces and accidents of history (such as where resources happen to be readily available) are in, as explanations of history.

Much of what Professor Hudson said made very good sense indeed: there is never any one cause for anyone event, let alone a huge economic trend. And too much patriotism will probably muddy our thinking - as will any bias or prejudice in our thinking.

But I think her own bias was fairly clear. She (and others) seem to equate patriotism with National Front nationalism, and therefore racism. That is a big step  And it's not just historians jumping to that conclusion. She's too anxious to discount the inventiveness of the British (as a cause for the IR) - which while it may not be the only, or most important cause, may still have it's place in the story.

If she'd said "the evidence suggests to me that Britain's industrial power had a lot to do with Empire and protectionism in trade (which all European countries were competing at) which made possible the development of the Textile industry - and that the inventions in that industry became more powerful later", then I'd have felt she was making her theories fit the facts, rather than the other way around.

But she didn't say that - I sensed a narrow "Powerful outside forces caused inventions to happen" point of view and tried too hard to emphasise other inventions made round the world.

It seems to me this kind of thinking has many disciples in this country. I meet it all the time and it's important to  realise that it is a bias - just like Patriotic history.

"Thinking allowed" and BBC objectivity

I've just been listening to a few episodes of this program. I can't find a way to comment specifically to the makers and anyway my comments would be lost ... I'm brought to a real soap-box subject for me - my views on  which I've bored my partner with many times.

If you look on the BBC website, their concise description of the program (on the podcast page - copy/paste) is "Laurie Taylor explores the latest research into how society works and discusses current ideas on how we live today"

ie: sociology. Lots of sociologists.

My impression of the program is that it's title suggests that you'll be listening to open-minded discussion whereas in fact Laurie Taylor just seemed to be giving his prejudices, he is already in full agreement with the people who get invited on - there should be opposing opinions and there aren't.

BBC news-presenters, program presenters and editors all seem to me to share similar views and don't brook counter-argument. I think they are mixing up education with their point of view.

Take today's programme: Taylor and a guest were discussing XMAS decorations on houses and antipathy towards the people who do this. seem to have visited a website dedicated to intolerance towards "chav"s, and picked out some of the more warped views. Taylor's guest called the views "obscene" - in other words she's well on the way to the same level of intolerance shown by loony contributors to web forums - and she's supposed to be an academic...

It's not hard to find extreme language and opinions on the web - it's where (sometimes unbalanced) people give full expression to their opinions*. When Jan Moir published an article that was seen as homophobic (and it was pretty awful) the amount of hate on the web - some of it apparently praised by Stephen Fry in a tweet - was something to behold. So it isn't just the reactionaries who vent intolerant bile once you get them on forums and blogs :)

As to counter-argument, there was no mention of the obvious point that others have to live with displays they find unsightly - and hence might have complaints about the fact. Just Taylor's opinion reigned supreme. Might we change the programme title to "Thinking not allowed"? 

(We already have "A Point of view" and it is generally rather better listening, in my view)

*and here I am :)