If you want to see BBC man in his natural habitat you must travel to the
unpromising reaches of Wood Lane in west London, the corporation’s spiritual
heartland.
You can learn a lot about the organisation from pavement level. Your eye will
certainly be drawn to the familiar outline of Television Centre (known as
“the centre” by BBC types), but you will also take in the massy new
development which squats by the elevated section of the Westway. This is
known — in irritating coinage — as the “media village” and its imposing size
and confident design telegraph to the observer that this organisation is a
leviathan.
With its proliferating television and radio channels the corporation is easily
the country’s most important media organisation. It reaches into every home,
is many people’s constant companion, and shapes and moulds opinion in ways
that we hardly understand. Its stated ambition is to become the most
“trusted media organisation in the world” and given its glittering
reputation for quality, accuracy and fairness we might think that it has
already realised that aim.
However, after 25 years as a BBC reporter I concluded that I could not trust
it. Auntie has moved away from its nonpartisan ideals to championing
progressive causes. And that is a distorting prism through which to see the
world.
Back to pavement level. As you stand there outside the Tube at White City, BBC
people course past you. They swing into work with their interesting bags and
clothes, no two alike. In this respect, at least, the BBC does fulfil its
royal charter obligation to balance: no style goes unrepresented. But their
colourful plumage camouflages a more insidious conformity. For with
membership of the tribe comes adherence to a set of well defined political
beliefs, distinctly inclined to the left.
These convictions are not made explicit to the outsider; the line for public
consumption is that the BBC has no line. But this is moonshine; it takes
very strong editorial positions which are consistent and clear. There is no
central diktat, for instance, insisting that all employees believe that
George Bush is an idiot and that the American religious right threatens
world peace. But you would find few BBC people who would dissent from such
views.
Why should this be so? First, the majority of BBC employees share similar
backgrounds: they are middle-class arts graduates of liberal outlook.
Second, the internal political culture within the corporation’s newsrooms is
well defined and subtly coercive.
It was Lord Macpherson, in his inquiry into the Stephen Law-rence murder, who
alerted us to the possibility that organisations can develop institutional
deformations; in the case of the Metropolitan police it was racism. In the
case of the BBC, by precise analogy, it is leftism.
When I first joined the BBC in the 1970s I accepted all this as the natural
order. In BBC Scotland where I worked in the 1980s there was a suffocating
antiThatcher consensus. As it happened, I was the business and economics
correspondent and I had become convinced that Thatcherite economics were
necessary and actually worked.
These heretical views were looked upon askance; most of my colleagues thought
I was just winding them up. “You don’t really believe that, do you?” they
would sometimes ask plaintively. I nearly came to blows with one producer
(who later rose to prominence at BBC Westminster) because he would not
accept that Thatcherism was a legitimate political creed at all.
The antiThatcher bias was sometimes jaw-dropping. In 1984 I returned to my
office in Scotland having covered the Tory conference in Brighton at which
the Grand hotel was bombed by the IRA. “Pity they missed the bitch,” one of
my colleagues commented.
When I moved to London I found things were just as bad. If you find yourself
working alongside well educated, intelligent and agreeable people it can be
uncomfortable to be the dissenting voice. As one producer described it, you
almost feel part of an ethnic minority.
I remember a planning meeting at The Money Programme where we were discussing
priva-tisation. I offered up the Thatcherite orthodoxy; there was a pause of
the kind you get when someone has made an audible bodily function at a
dinner party and then I was politely ignored.
Try making a reasoned argument against abortion, single parenthood or
comprehensive education — or in favour of the Iraq war — at the BBC and see
how much progress you make.
Of course none of this would matter if it was merely about the discomfiture of
a handful of misfit conservatives in the BBC’s ranks. But it is much more
serious than that. The fact is that the BBC’s internal political culture
profoundly colours its news output. The corporation’s public stance has
always been that it is fair, evenhanded and nonpartisan. Sadly the reality
is different.
Of course the convictions of individual journalists have a bearing on what is
broadcast. How could that not be so? For it to be otherwise BBC journalists
would need to display a judiciousness that would be remarkable in the
judiciary itself. All journalism is about selection: which story to cover,
which to ignore, who to interview and which bits of it to use in the
finished piece. At every stage journalistic judgment comes into play.
As consumers of news, we should all be aware that the BBC’s news agenda is
only one among many; it is fallible, partial and hugely influential. Scripts
are often as opinionated as any editorial in The Guardian.
There will be many, I’m sure, who will immediately object and fly to the BBC’s
defence when I claim that the corporation’s journalism consistently favours
the Labour party and the liberal left generally. They will point especially
to the Iraq war, Andrew Gilligan, Lord Hutton et al. Surely that proves the
corporation is robustly independent?
Er, no, actually. What was striking to me while working on the Today programme
was how rapidly a doom-laden BBC line emerged about the war; from the very
outset Today and the rest of the corporation were instinctively and
viscerally opposed to military action. When I suggested that our coverage
was skewed, the programme’s editor told me: “That’s a very dangerous view.”
The BBC’s stance had consequences. I believe it reduced even further the slim
chance that military action would prove effective, for the combined might of
the BBC’s suasion was committed from the outset to proving that the war was
a disaster and Tony Blair a liar (just think what effect that had on opinion
both in Britain and around the world).
The loss of public support, orchestrated by the BBC, has been a grievous
handicap for the war party. The only reason the BBC bet the farm on Gilligan
was that it passionately wanted to believe that not only was the war wrong
but that the government had lied through its teeth. Inconveniently Hutton
found otherwise, not that this altered the BBC’s conviction that, really, it
was right all along.
The BBC is too big and important an institution for the situation to be
allowed to persist. The first step towards a remedy must be for the
corporation itself to acknowledge that it has a problem. There are plenty of
BBC people, including senior and well known individuals, who will do exactly
that in private. But it is essential that the BBC breaches the omerta — the
code of silence — and fesses up in public. Then some practical steps could be
Some of Aitken’s colleagues celebrated the Brighton bomb taken. Bias not
only stifles public debate, it is also destructive for the corporation.
In the late 1990s my colleagues had elected me to the BBC forum, designed to
improve communication between management and staff. At one meeting in
December 2000 I suggested to Greg Dyke, then the director-general, that
there should be an internal inquiry into bias. Dyke, a Labour party donor
and member, mumbled a muddled reply. As he left the meeting I overheard him
demand of his PA: “Who was that f*****?”
“Diversity” is a concept much venerated within the BBC and yet my
diverse political view was never respected. Dyke labelled the institution
“hideously white”, but skin colour is not the only diversity issue. There is
a need for some kind of reasonable balance between people of differing
political complexions. It is striking, for instance, that whereas I could
name a long list of senior BBC journalists with left-wing antecedents, I
cannot think of a single one from the right.
It is time that the BBC started hiring journalists from the right, not as a
token presence but as part of the mainstream. And it would not be a bad
thing if, like London policemen, BBC producers and reporters got “diversity
training” that sensitised them to the problem.
A more radical change would be to go for a market solution. No one demands
that newspapers should be nonpartisan; readers are allowed to choose the one
that chimes with their outlook. Why should broadcasting be different?
Fox News in America challenged the old networks and showed there was a big
appetite for such a service. But entry costs are very high. Why not take,
say, 2% of the BBC’s revenue (a tasty £60m) to establish a rival serv-ice?
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a real alternative to Radio 4? The BBC has
demonstrated it cannot be all things to all men; perhaps it is time for a
change.
Can We Trust the BBC? is published by Continuum
