Is the BBC institutionally biased?
ICA, London, 22 February 2007

Tessa Mayes
posted 5 March 2007

Robin Aitken, a former BBC reporter for 25 years, has launched his new book Can you trust the BBC? to much acclaim. But Aitken's approach is old-fashioned. His view that the BBC's news and current affairs output over the past few decades and now is biased relied on the use of a defunct political concept: 'left-wing.'

Speaking alongside Peter Horrocks, head of TV News at the BBC, and Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the University of Westminster, Aitken argued that the BBC may be free from commercial bias, but not from political or cultural bias. Aitken says he spotted plenty of examples of the BBC's institutional bias while working for the corporation. Having been a reporter in the 1980s, he claims that the BBC didn't like Margaret Thatcher's government. Today, the BBC doesn't cover 'unfashionable subjects', he says. More recently, the BBC called Blair a liar over claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and treated Alaistair Campbell as if he were mad. For Aitken, the BBC had an editorial construct that it held to regarding the WMD story. The question they missed, he said, was: what is it we are fighting for in Iraq and, is it worth fighting for?

The solution, says Aitken, is that the BBC should acknowledge there is a problem and widen the voices it represents. He says the corporation claims to be keen on diversity, but few right-wing journalists, such as himself, are employed there. As he put it, people from all different backgrounds should expect equal treatment by the BBC, but it is 'tilted to the left' at the moment. Plenty of people agree with Aitken. For example, Michael Gove, the Conservative MP and member of David Cameron's front-bench team, also called the BBC 'left-wing' in a recent interview for the Financial Times magazine. Gove says this bias causes problems for those on the right of the Labour party itself as well as for Conservatives.

Yet in an era when 'left' and 'right' have less political purchase in society than ever before - except for those who insist on keeping hold of the labels despite a changing world - it seems strange to be proclaiming that 'left-wing' as opposed to some other kind of bias, such as a preference for particular issues like the environment, crime policy or the Iraq war, dominates the BBC's output. All the recent external academic and internal BBC studies have focused on the way a particular subject is reported, not on whether its reporting is 'left-wing' or not. Those accusing the BBC of bias have tended to say it under- or over- reports a particular side in an issue. For example, those accusing the BBC of pro-Palestinian bias in its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli war have used words such 'anti-Semitic', 'anti-Israel and pro-Palestine' or, 'wildly inaccurate', not 'left-wing.'

A credible accusation that the BBC is 'left-wing' would require a 'left-wing' constituency and ideology to point to. Today, groups identifying themselves as 'left-wing' have diminished to the point of virtual irrelevancy in British politics. So what is the constituency for this allegedly 'left-wing' BBC?

Despite this problem with framing the debate about bias in terms of 'left' and 'right' wings, the other panellists addressed the issue of whether the BBC was biased towards any kind of political viewpoint at all. Peter Horrocks said Aitken's evidence was merely anecdotal. For instance, the corporation isn't pro-republican - as is evidenced last week by its coverage of Prince Harry going to Iraq. The BBC wasn't covering South Africa and the ANC favourably at all times, said Horrocks, citing reports by John Simpson on the rise in crime in South Africa that show that the South African government isn't always getting things right.

Jean Seaton told the ICA audience that since the 1920s the BBC has been accused of being both left and right at various times. If anything, the BBC is biased by being 'pro-state' but not necessarily pro-government and, she added, 'it's pro-religion generally.' The trouble with this debate is that if you look at what the BBC has been accused of over the years, the BBC has been accused of all kinds of bias from all kinds of sides, including being against particular religions.

Aside from the politics of left and right, an emerging issue has been the rise of an emotional bias in news reporting, including at the BBC. This is something BBC reporters have been quick to defend. For example, Orla Guerin, the former BBC's Middle East correspondent, has noted that showing the human cost of war for all sides is a useful way of keeping viewer's attention. This is something that even Aitken doesn't see as controversial. He answered a question on emotional bias by arguing that the emotions of Palestinians are given more weight by the BBC than those of the Israelis. Even if what he said is true, Aitken's answer reflects the view that emotion from all sides should be reported equally, rather than asking whether BBC should be focusing on emotion in the first place, as opposed to hard facts and analysis.

The shifting sands in what counts as unbiased news content and how bias is judged reflects how methodological approaches to understanding news values have changed. Whereas Aitken has an old-fashioned approach, preoccupied with 'left-wing' bias, Horrocks is looking at the issue of what should be reported upon from the point of view of what the audience wants. He said that BBC News is still covering parliamentary politics, but now wants to widen the range of who is covered in its political news coverage. The idea is to have a wider range of political views, rather than aiming at the mid-point between the main parties. This is 'true impartiality,' said Horrocks: it's a 'more honest and appropriate way to determine what stories' should be covered. Seaton agreed that the idea of balance defined as giving the three main political parties equal airtime is redundant, because it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth of a situation.

Atiken's view (that all sides should be equally reported) seems reasonable, but it reflects a past age when clearly defined 'left' and 'right' wing ideologies were expressed in society. Today, the world is not divided this way; people in Britain don't tend to take a political side as left or right, and an increasing, significant number don't opt to support any political party (whether left, right or any other) at all. News reporting needs to report on this new political reality, not impose an old fashioned construct that no longer explains how the world is. Despite disagreeing over the issue of 'left-wing' bias, Aitken and Horrocks both agree that everybody's diverse views need to be reported upon - for Aitken this means the inclusion of 'left' and 'right' wing ideologies, and, for Horrocks it is the diversity of all views held by the audience.

But where does that leave the idea of impartiality in the sense of objectivity? One thing the Aitken-Horrocks approach does not demand is the removal of emotional bias so that reporters can get on with reporting the facts and offering an analysis based on them to get to the truth, although Horrocks did at least acknowledge that emotion in news reporting shouldn't be abused. What is missing from both their approaches is the idea of the universal in news values - that there are some things we all can hold dear. Instead, what's offered is a definition of the news as offering a plurality of diverse opinions as if they all have equal weight in understanding the truth of a situation. Now that's a problematic bias against objectivity.

Still, there at least one universal value worth the BBC can aspire to, a bias in favour of free speech. The Attorney General tried to stop the BBC from reporting that an injunction had been placed banning a story about the loans for peerages story last week. To its credit, at least the corporation was trying to oppose the ban.