This week, George Entwistle has taken up his role as the new BBC Director General. All eyes will be on him, watching with interest in anticipation of which direction he will take the broadcaster. In particular, left-of-centre observers will be keen to see it brought back to the centre, following the excessive move to the right in a bid to correct its previously assumed leftist bias.
The myth of the BBC being substantially biased to the left (with the in-built implication of the broadcaster favouring the Labour Party) remains, often floated as a concept in newspapers which are explicitly biased towards the right - so hardly a neutral jury themselves. Demonstrations of this can be found in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and even The Sun. A Google search of "BBC bias" generates a whole plethora of websites of right-whingers claiming to feel hard done-by.
Such falsehoods become easy to promote when even the previous Director General of the BBC has claimed the broadcaster had to be seen to be compensate for a perceived leftist bias. Yet while under Thompson, the BBC may have been playing appeasement politics with its right-wing critics, the facts demonstrate that there are fewer and fewer visible leftist biases - in fact the opposite could indeed be argued.
It may have simply become in the interests of BBC reporters and researchers to take a right-wing standpoint on certain issues. While the structure of the BBC may be designed for it to be unbiased, the agents within it can speak their biases through their narratives. Furthermore, I would speculate that it is in the interest of many who are handsomely remunerated in the broadcast industry to share the interests of wealthy Tories. This is partly how the BBC is able to parade the Jeremy Clarksons of the world.
Can we really expect balance when Clarkson can go on whatever light entertainment programme he feels like, inflicting his views on anyone who will listen, all with a bit of a laugh? What about the BBC's Political Editor, Nick Robinson, who was a Young Conservative at the University of Oxford? And why is the Chairman of the BBC Trust a Tory? Why did Mark Thompson feel it necessary to steer the broadcaster, whose 'left bias' was only ever tenuous at best, to the right?
With the BBC in its current state, it is difficult to envisage voices of opposition and contention to the coalition government being sufficiently aired. An example of this malaise has been the coverage of the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS. For me, the process started with the Private Finance Initiative schemes, where public services were produced in association with private-sector providers. The benefit to the government was they got their new hospitals, schools and prisons up front, and the corporations that supplied the goods were paid back in installments over years, often decades. Now there is an expansion of this creeping privatisation.
All public spheres will inevitably have some relationship with private suppliers. Schools will not be expected to make their own calculators, for instance. However, the sale of ever greater slices of our public services has been woefully under-reported by the BBC. There is a quiet outrage on social networks about the unequal relationship between the reporting of the government's health upheaval and the breasts of the Duchess of Cambridge. This discursive media struggle is yet to play out on the main stage of debate.
This under-reporting may be because of the BBC’s own awkward position regarding the use of the private sector to provide services. A reasonable amount of its programming is produced by independent production companies, and the new Director General is keen for that to be increased.
However, on a broad level, there is still potential for BBC to reassert its role as the premier impartial public broadcast source - a status arguably lost to ITN. The following recommendations are ones which the BBC would do well to heed:-
1. The Staff: Employees in senior positions of the BBC hierarchy should neither be sourced from political parties, nor be strongly attached to one. The reason for this is it may lead the public to believe their public service broadcaster is (er...) biased! It would help if high-profile presenters were not using their light entertainment shows to sneakily transmit their political agendas.
2. Fair discussion for both sides of a debate: There should be rules for debates carried out applicable to all broadcasts. There should be a proponent, and opponent, and an agreed structure for their debate.
3. Fixing the in-built Question Time bias problem: Question Time is the BBC's leading political debate programme, but it is in serious need of a review. In the House of Commons, the Liberal Democrats take turns along with the Tories to ask questions to the Prime Minister, as they are part of a coalition. On Question Time, no such compromise has been made, as both parties from the coalition government benches are given representation. This would be less of an issue if the coalition had not set a precedent for collegiality in British coalition-building. On Question Time, therefore, we end up with two people making a slightly different defence of the government position, from their slightly different party political positions. These panelists are usually supplemented by the obligatory right-wing noise supplied by the David Starkeys and Kelvin MacKenzies of the world. This is nowhere near 'balanced' enough for a public service broadcaster.
At present, there is a fertile environment to generate distrust of the BBC and their news agenda. As I hope to have demonstrated here, addressing some of the above concerns, where practical would go a long way to rebuilding the trust the left has lost in the BBC.
