The BBC and the Gutter Press - not that different, really

My old employer, BBC TV News, has been cheerleading on behalf of the Public Sector strikers all day, whizzing around the country in search of signs of overwhelming support for these deluded wretches – and not coming up with any. Let’s face it, there’s very little sympathy among private sector workers who are being asked  to meet public sector pension promises in perpetuity while their own standards of living and pension entitlements evaporate.

Appearing before the official inquiry into Media Ethics the other day, former TV star Ann Diamond made the point – forcefully – that our broadcasters didn’t go in for any of the grubby tactics employed by the gutter press. And she’s right. At no time during the 12 years I worked for BBC News was I ever once asked to do anything shoddy or dishonest – and the thought of prying into people’s private lives would never have occurred to any of us. We were all issued with (expensively) printed  Producer Guidelines which specifically forbade any such behaviour, and I’m sure any contravention would have resulted in dismissal – or being shunted to some obscure backwater until the humiliation became too much to bear and the transgressor slunk off.

The downside, of course, was that BBC News rarely broke any stories, and relied almost entirely on newspaper scoops: corporation journalists who actually nosed out a fresh story often suffered the frustration of waiting until the Guardian or the Mirror published it before their bosses would dare to cover it. I know, because I got into TV news as a “researcher” (a new post at the time) charged with winkling out new stories for the flagship Nine O’Clock News’s specialist correspondent. Never happened. Not once. I pinched every story we ever covered from the newspapers: and that was fine, because I was a lousy investigative journalist.

So part of the reason that BBC News – and ITV News – can be so high and mighty about journalistic ethics is that neither organisation covers stories in a way that might tempt anyone to hack mobile phones or search through dustbins or blackmail celebrities to get them to co-operate. Besides, the people who run News at our major broadcasters are, on the whole, terribly decent: and there really isn’t any point in behaving badly if it doesn’t bring kudos or reward.

Having said all that, where the BBC practices dishonesty on a massive scale every day is in the way it covers major ongoing news stories (rather than celebrity flim-flam). In a recent post I mentioned a number of press articles pointing out that the BBC is wholly – and disgracefully - in thrall to the Holy Rollers of the Anthropocentric Global Warming conspiracy. The anti-Israeli bias of its Middle East coverage has been quite scandalous for years. The habitually negative coverage of America’s right-wing politicians – and the Tea Party movement in particular – should have resulted in a string of sackings. The treatment of the Tory Party and Ulster Unionists has been shameful. Its fawning attitude to the EU has been nauseating - and wholly wrong.

As for its treatment of any issue involving the Catholic Church, well, it's practically beyond belief.

There’s a particularly interesting chapter in former Today reporter, Robin Aitken’s 2007 book, Can We Trust the BBC? about a 2003 Panorama programme which basically accused the Vatican of helping to spread AIDS in Africa. Aitken draws on a report by an Assistant Newsnight Editor, David Kerr, written during a sabbatical at Oxford, in which he forensically destroys the tenth-rate journalism underpinning this piece of naked anti-Catholic propaganda, describing it as amounting to “polemical prosecution” – even I, who have always regarded the  Panorama production team as a communist cell, was shocked.

The BBC’s current, ludicrously one-sided, coverage of public sector “cuts” should have resulted in a clear-out of senior editorial figures, a public apology, and an extra, punitive cut to the licence fee. (The current two-part series on how our money is spent, by one of the Corporation’s few Tories, Political Editor Nick Robinson, is, one suspects, a timely fig-leaf, designed to allow News to claim a spurious even-handedness – better, of course, if those points were made on the main news bulletins rather than in the relatively obscure confines of BBC 2.)

If you think I’m over-stating the case, read this from today’s Telegraph and this follow-up on the Biased-BBC website. Paul Mason is Newsnight’s Economics Editor. He has no academic or journalistic background in economics (his training is musical) and he is evidently a screaming leftie. Just look at the photograph at the top of this blog, which shows Mason holding a placard during last year's BBC strike. The sign reads "Strike! to stop the pensions robbery". God, he looks pleased with himself! How are we supposed to believe that anything this man tells us isn't politically motivated?

Broadcasters may not go through celebrities’ dust-bins, and they certainly don’t try to get at their targets through their children, and they do their very best not to make up scurrilous stories which they know to be wholly untrue – but their politically-blinkered, nakedly biased reporting of many of the major events of our time represents a far more serious betrayal of public trust than anything the gutter press gets up to.

The BBC produces so much of worth - BBC 4, Radio 3 and Radio 4 Extra would justify the license fee on their own - that it's a crying shame it lets us all down so badly by flouting fairness when it comes to so much of its news coverage. 

Doesn't anyone in a position of authority over there in W12 think it's time to clean out the stables?