Why people are deserting the BBC
Late last month it was reported on Bloomberg (archived copy here) that the government were considering making it compulsory to pay the TV licence fee to watch streamed on-demand entertainment online from providers such as Netflix and Disney+. Until a few years ago, it was legal to watch BBC content after the fact on iPlayer; this was changed when the government realised that too many people were freeloading BBC content. The TV licensing website makes it clear that the licence fee, currently required to watch any live-streamed content from whatever provider (as opposed to on-demand content), is used to fund the BBC; people also pay for subscription to these other services as well as for the Internet access they use to access them. Over the last few years, I have seen many people announce on social media that they are boycotting the licence fee, and in the panic to ensure the future of the BBC, the government seem blind to why this is. The reason is BBC News and its increasingly obvious bias.
George Monbiot observed in the Guardian a while ago that the BBC tends to be biased in favour of the government of the day, and when Labour in power were generally favourable towards them and gave Tory criticisms short shrift; Roger Harrabin, a former BBC correspondent, observed that its coverage took a rightward turn in 2001, when Jeff Randall (formerly of the Sunday Telegraph) was appointed business editor. In the 1990s, when John Birt had just been appointed director-general, I recall an incident where the BBC advertised on Ceefax for people to contribute to a programme supporting the John Major government’s Child Support Agency: “surely it is just making sure parents pay for the upkeep of their children”, it opined. I was shocked; weren’t they supposed to be impartial? I noticed the bias in favour of the government quite distinctly when covering the austerity policies of the Coalition government; the BBC ran programmes on “benefit dependency” and attacking ‘scroungers’, while the word ‘sensible’ was used quite often to mean supporting their “deficit reduction” policies on air. Since the genocide in Gaza began, a resistance to using that word has been widely noticed, with presenters interrupting anyone who uses it, whether they be a caller to a local phone-in or an official interviewee on a news programme; the presenter will tell the interviewee and the listeners that Israel “has a right to defend itself” and denies that this is what is going on.
Over recent years, the BBC has developed an approach to balance that means that every point of view and every claim has to be countered. They have started peppering their documentary programming with statements from people or institutions being accused of malpractice. In one case, a File on 4 programme about abusive practices in British ballet schools, it seemed that the report was interrupted every few minutes to read out a statement which seemed to last several minutes each, in one case implying that a former student was lying. But more generally on the BBC, it seems to be the policy that everything has to be a debate, even when people are pleading to be able to live their lives. A heated debate is entertaining in a way that a more straightforward, calm documentary sometimes is not. Some of this twitchy, compulsive balancing may stem from fear of litigation; the UK’s Victorian libel laws favour the plaintiff, requiring the defendant to prove the truth of their claims rather than the plaintiff to prove their untruth, something the government should make a priority to reverse. But, as Roger Harrabin noted, the BBC is “generally susceptible to bullying through attrition”, with certain lobby groups (he mentioned the HS2 company) being able to make life difficult for the Corporation’s editors, who “simply [don’t] have the time to deal with it”.
Sometimes complaints of bias come from people who actually want the news to be biased in their favour and to give opposing views to theirs the contempt they believe they deserve. There are several whole organisations dedicated to demanding ‘accuracy’ in coverage of the situation in Palestine, both in the media and in academia, which are actually Israeli lobby fronts. Some of these are also notorious for mass complaint campaigns, some of which are mistaken for being representative of widespread outrage at their coverage. Some people have a conspiracy mindset and would regard anything that fell outside it as representative of one of the conspiracies they believe in. That said, sometimes ‘objectivity’ means someone’s own subjectivity, and if enough powerful people hold the same view, a news outlet can fall into bias in favour of the views of the powerful and privileged. I have heard feminists say “objectivity is male subjectivity”, and the same could be said of ‘objectivity’ as dictated by middle-class white people, or any number of other privileged groups. In my experience, a lot of those who see the BBC as biased see it as promoting a pro-establishment and pro-British (and pro-western) view of the world, where British and American power is seen as a force for good; many people who are not white do not share this view, because this has not been their experience.
While it’s right that people who use infrastructure such as TV transmission facilities and the Internet should pay for them, it’s not right that people who do not watch BBC TV and do not feel well-served by BBC News (or who have no interest in other BBC programming) should have to pay for it just to watch programmes streamed live or on demand on other channels which they do separately pay for. I do watch a lot of BBC programming, including on iPlayer, local radio and Radio 4, but I find the subservience to the demands of Israel’s supporters nauseating: that Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide are obvious enough from their own words and deeds not to merit countering every time a member of the public, who pays the licence fee, states it. For many people I know, this issue alone has made withdrawing the licence fee a more urgent matter than it previously was. If the government wants us to willingly pay, they need to redress the often obvious pro-government bias and get rid of the Tory hirelings that maintain this policy.
Image source: Mike Peel, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike UK licence, version 2.0.
