Institutional bias at the BBC

The free-market think thank the Institute for Economic Affairs has produced a new report calling for the BBC to be privatised. 

Part of the report looks at the subject matter of this very blog: BBC bias. Ryan Bourne analyses the date (pp 67-97) and Stephen Davies considers why the BBC might be biased (pp 100-112). 

Both are subtle and nuanced takes, emphasising how difficult bias can be to nail down and how it isn't as simple as just 'left-wing bias' or 'right-wing' bias. They argue that the BBC's bias doesn't result from a conspiracy. They say it's institutional, arising from things like the composition of the BBC’s staff, its internal culture and certain structural features of the BBC. They say it's also partly produced by the world-view of the kind of person who chooses to work at the BBC, "combined with the consensual views of the political class, which has come to have an ever-closer connection to all the mass media". The BBC's "commitment to and focus on a received or conventional wisdom that is not the settled view of the population as a whole (to the very small extent that such a thing ever exists) means that certain views are marginalised and either misrepresented or even ignored" - a tendency intensified by the modern media's obsession with seeing political and intellectual divisions "in binary terms".

On the issue of 'complaints from both sides', Ryan Bourne has this to say:

Unsurprisingly, the BBC itself is extremely defensive about all of these ‘accusations’. It seizes on reports that dismiss accusations of ‘left-of-centre’ bias and uses the fact that it gets criticised from left and right to robustly defend itself against charges of political or ideological favouritism. Yet, few suggest that the BBC is overtly and deliberately biased at all times, particularly towards or against a political party. It is more that an institutional worldview sometimes appears to shape coverage, whether through decisions on what to cover, what to include in a story or what to admit. Just because figures on the left and right sometimes moan about the effects of this world-view does not implicitly make the BBC ‘neutral’.

The data in the report (courtesy of David Keighley & Co. at News-watch) is interesting in its own right. 

From reading other pieces about the report (such as Toby Young at the Spectator and Iain Martin at CapX) it's clear that the figures on Radio 4's Thought For The Day have caught people's attention. They certainly caught mine. Of course, they show that John Bell, Giles Fraser and the rest of the TFTD gang are, on the whole, as left-wing as we already knew them to be, but it's the sheer scale of the anti-capitalist bias across the spot's output that's so striking. Negative commentaries about business outnumbered positive portrayals by a factor of more than eight to one.

The bigger study of Today's EU coverage is even more damning though. In contrast to British public opinion which has long had either a substantial minority or a small majority wanting us to get out of the EU, Today has persistently under-represented such voices:

Fresh News-watch analysis commissioned for this chapter has sought to combine all News-watch survey sample data on Radio 4’s Today programme between March 2004 and June 2015. In the monitored sample, the Today programme included 4,275 guest speakers on EU themes. Just 132 of these (3.2 per cent) were identifiably in favour of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Furthermore, 72 per cent of withdrawalist speakers were representatives of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and over a third (37 per cent) of all withdrawalist contributions were from Nigel Farage alone. Left-leaning withdrawalist voices have accounted for just 0.07 per cent of all EU speakers over this period (three appearances from Labour Party supporters and one representative from the Socialist Labour Party). 

One thing that can be said in favour of the BBC during this present EU referendum period is that they have redressed this staggering imbalance somewhat, most strikingly by featuring Labour Party withdrawalists (Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart especially) much more often. I myself have been looking out to see if that's happened - and it has.

Going off at a tangent, maybe, but in the section on 'health warnings', there's a chart showing how certain think tanks are described by the BBC. It got me thinking about that most 'influential' of 'independent' think tanks, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). It is often given such labels by the BBC (along with 'respected'). As the IEA report says, such adjectives constitute "a powerful, positive signal that the viewpoint should be taken seriously and is untainted by political biases." When someone from the IFS passes judgement on, say, the Budget or what a Brexit might mean economically or on mass immigration's benefits and costs, it is automatically given considerable weight and status. Does it deserve to be so exalted by the BBC? Is it always right? Is its track record so impeccable? Why does no one ever seem to ask that, or check that?

As I say though, that's just an aside arising from the report.