Broadcasting and political bias

A lot of unhappy people are commenting on Emily Maitlis’s opening remarks on Newsnight last night.

I didn’t see it live - I stopped watching Newsnight years ago when it became the broadcasting equivalent of the Guardian - but I did see a clip on Twitter this morning.

Maitlis began the programme by apparently speaking for the entire nation:

"Good evening. Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that and it's shocked the government cannot.

"The longer that ministers, and prime minister, tell us he worked within them the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be.

"He was the man, remember, who always 'got' the public mood, who tagged the lazy label of 'elite' on those who disagreed.

"He should understand that public mood now, one of fury, contempt and anguish.

No hyperbole there!

"He made those who struggled to keep to the rules feel like fools and has allowed many more to assume they can now flout them."

And still it went on. Cumming's behaviour, she said, had caused "deep national disquiet".

I don't dispute there is annoyance, even anger, in some quarters but instead of reporting public opinion impartially there is plenty of evidence that the media is whipping things up and won't let it rest until they get their man.

Far from representing the entire country, however, I understand that Maitlis's remarks have generated plenty of complaints to Broadcasting House.

I wouldn’t point the finger at her alone, however. She is merely taking advantage of shockingly weak management within the BBC and a culture that considers this sort of thing to be perfectly OK if the target is the senior advisor to a pro-Brexit prime minister many of them hate with a passion.

Given what we have to endure daily from Sky News and other broadcasters, it's just about possible she may be completely ignorant of the fact that BBC presenters are meant to be impartial, or perhaps they just don't care any more.

I must declare an interest. From 1985 to 1990 I was director of the Media Monitoring Unit which monitored television current affairs programmes for political bias.

There were a lot of biased current affairs programmes in the Eighties (it mattered more then because many of them were broadcast during prime time) but I don’t remember the sort of editorialising we see and hear on news programmes today.

No wonder veteran presenters like former ITN journalist Alastair Stewart find it hard to stomach. This morning Stewart tweeted:

Sorry, but to me it is the most important edict governing broadcast media. Newspapers can say what they like, within the law. Broadcasting is fundamentally and profoundly different, whatever size of audience a programme attracts and at whatever time of day it is transmitted.

Perhaps we will just have to get used to it. LBC and TalkRadio have both gone in that direction, with some presenters apparently hired for their strident political views as much as their broadcasting expertise.

As it happens I still think the best presenters on LBC - Nick Ferrari, Eddie Mair – are those who do not wear their politics on their sleeve.

You might think you know how Ferrari and Mair vote but to me it’s far from obvious, and they are both excellent interviewers who generally give everyone a good grilling regardless of their politics.

To be fair I wouldn’t presume to know how Emily Maitlis votes either. Nevertheless the BBC is completely different to LBC, TalkRadio or even ITV. It is funded by us, the licence payer, and if you work for the BBC in any capacity you have a responsibility – even more so as a presenter – to be politically impartial.

By all means play devil's advocate if you are interviewing a single politician or lobbyist – that's called 'balance' and is perfectly acceptable – but the sort of editorialising Maitlis did last night was woeful.

According to Lord Hall, the BBC's outgoing director-general, people have "turned to the BBC in their droves" during the current pandemic.

I certainly haven't but if it's true then the BBC has an even bigger responsibility to report the news impartially, not comment on or twist the news to suit some internal agenda.

Frankly, I’ve had it with all news outlets, print and broadcast. However many years I have left on this earth I would happily never watch another news or current affairs programme again, or read the news pages of our daily or Sunday papers, which I used to love doing.

I will give Times Radio a chance when it launches. I’m not a huge fan of The Times (the Sunday Times is largely unreadable) but the new digital radio station has an interesting line-up of presenters including John Pienaar, formerly the BBC's firm but fair deputy political editor, and Aasmah Mir, another ex-BBC presenter I enjoy listening to.

But back to the BBC. Last year Newsnight appointed Lewis Goodall as the programme's policy editor. According to the Mail:

Mr Goodall was studying history and politics at Oxford when he began writing opinion pieces for the Guardian, which described him as ‘a Labour Party activist and blogger’.

He has also worked for the Left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research. In 2018 he wrote a book called Left For Dead? The Strange Death And Rebirth Of The Labour Party.

Formerly with Sky News, Goodall was the author of a 'string of aggressively anti-Tory comments on social media.'

And now he's the policy editor on the BBC's flagship daily news and current affairs programme.

Which brings me to an essay I wrote in 1990. It was published in a report called 'Broadcasting and Political Bias'.

'Monitoring the media: left-wing bias on television' was based on a speech I gave to the 'Reporting the Nineties' conference during a debate between me and the late Ray Fitzwalter who produced ITV's flagship current affairs programme World In Action.

Organised jointly by the BBC and Granada Television, 'Reporting the Nineties' took place in Manchester. I knew I was going to be roasted so I concluded my speech to the 200 broadcasting executives present by commenting on what I diplomatically (!) called the "media mafia".

After all these years I won't mention any individuals by name, although I did at the time. I was a lot more fearless when I was younger!

Finally, a word about another MMU project concerning the placing of television recruitment advertising. Research highlighted a huge disparity favouring the media section of the Guardian at the expense of similar sections in The Times and Independent.

There would of course be no guarantee of fair recruitment even of the BBC and ITV advertised impartially in all three newspapers as, given their obligations, they ought to. Nevertheless the favouritism that is shown towards the Guardian-reading left is symptomatic of an attitude of mind and it certainly merited being exposed.

Far more worrying is the existence of what I a call a 'media mafia', a clique of cross-fertilisation between left-wing campaigning journalists and television current affairs appointees which is not matched, so far as I can see, by parallel practices on the right.

I particularly have in mind the recent flurry of appointments to Thames Television’s This Week [not to be confused with the much later BBC programme of the same name presented by Andrew Neil] and Granada's World in Action, programmes that already exhibit far too much bias to the left. This Week has just recruited the left-wing campaigning journalist X from the Observer, whilst World in Action has picked up his former colleagues Y and Z.

What are centre-right politicians to expect in future when approached by programmes run by these gentlemen? Z, for example, has a track record of hostility to the Special Branch and MI5, whilst X has made such a speciality of attacking people he regards as on the right of the political spectrum that, within the last twelve months alone, no fewer than three libel actions have successfully been brought against him and his former newspaper as a result of articles written either by him alone or jointly with Y.

One thing is certain, so long as there are impartiality rules that radical broadcasters deliberately distort or ignore, and as long as there are investigative political programmes that recruit their staff from the campaigning left, there will always be a role for bodies like the Media Monitoring Unit.

I gave that speech on Saturday October 7, 1989, 31 years ago.

I'm not sure much has changed since then except that it's no longer just 'investigative political programmes that recruit their staff from the campaigning left', it's also mainstream news programmes like Newsnight.

Update: Newsnight 'breached impartiality guidelines' with Dominic Cummings remarks (BBC News)