Sir Robbie Gibb, once in charge of the BBC's political programmes before becoming Theresa May's communications chief, has a piece in The Daily Mail today about BBC bias.
His main beef is with the Today programme - or 'Radio Misery', as his friends call it. He claims that during the election it "bombarded its listeners with a relentlessly negative and sneering tone and painted a picture of Britain that was monstrously out of touch".
He also argues that it "spectacularly misread" the election with "endless" outside broadcasts from universites dominated by left-wing students and, therefore, missed "the real election story" unfolding in the working class towns of the Midlands and the North.
The reason? Because its "trapped by its own woke 'groupthink'".
So far, so familiar.
What's new here is his 'understanding' that the BBC has been carrying out private polling of the public's perceptions of its impartiality (or lack thereof) and that the results apparently reveal that the Midlands and the North have the least faith in BBC impartiality while metropolitican centres like London and Manchester show the most faith in BBC impartiality.
Hardly surprising, is it?
Update: I was pleasantly surprised to hear Nick Robinson quote from Sir Robbie's Daily Mail piece during this morning's Today paper review without sneering or editorialising. That's very grown-up, I thought. Unfortunately, just a few seconds after thinking that Mishal Husain promptly read out Today's rebuttal of Sir Robbie's criticisms and then interviewed former universities minister Jo Johnson doing that very BBC thing of picking up a phrase in a piece - "left-wing, entitled, virtue- ignalling students" - and using it to clobber people they don't agree with. Here Mr Johnson was all to happy to take the bait offered by Mishal's invitations to criticise Sir Robbie - an invitation made even clearer by her issuing it more than once and doing so in that slightly jeering tone she adopts when she's signalling something.
Further update: This was Today's case for the defence, as read out by Mishal Husain this morning:
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Update: I was pleasantly surprised to hear Nick Robinson quote from Sir Robbie's Daily Mail piece during this morning's Today paper review without sneering or editorialising. That's very grown-up, I thought. Unfortunately, just a few seconds after thinking that Mishal Husain promptly read out Today's rebuttal of Sir Robbie's criticisms and then interviewed former universities minister Jo Johnson doing that very BBC thing of picking up a phrase in a piece - "left-wing, entitled, virtue- ignalling students" - and using it to clobber people they don't agree with. Here Mr Johnson was all to happy to take the bait offered by Mishal's invitations to criticise Sir Robbie - an invitation made even clearer by her issuing it more than once and doing so in that slightly jeering tone she adopts when she's signalling something.
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Further update: This was Today's case for the defence, as read out by Mishal Husain this morning:
So did this programme's broadcasts from universities mean that it was far from the real story of the election dominated instead by interviews with "entitled students", as put forward in that column by Sir Robbie Gibb? We did go to the Universities of Edinburgh, Cardiff, Oxford, among others, but also to Wolverhampton, to Sheffield College, and reported on constituencies including Mansfield, Darlington, Birkenhead and the views of voters in Crewe, Newcastle and Lyme [sic], and other places as well.
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Yet another update: Thinking more about Mishal's read-out statement from Today, were you also curious as to why she said "among others" there? Well, those "others" are Bristol University and Queens University, Belfast. Why not mention them?
And whether Wolverhampton University really merits the "but" it gets there is open to question - yes, it's a Midlands university, but it's a university nonetheless.
During the campaign I too referenced the inherent bias displayed by Today in choosing to tour universities to provide a continuing commentary on the election. A more pro-Labour and indeed pro-Corbyn slice of the population than university lecturers and students would be hard to find! I don't think it was done in unthinking error, simply reflecting Metropolitan Bubble assumptions. No, BBC editors aren't that stupid. I think it was done deliberately, knowing that it would provide a continual negative commentary on the Conservative campaign over six long weeks. That it did.
ReplyDeleteIn the end it "availed them naught". But, who knows. perhaps it kept 50,000 votes in the Labour bag around the country...perhaps it saved one or two Labour marginals.
There's an interesting question this raises - why are universities, that are supposed to prepare young people for the real world, so divorced in opinion from the rest of the country? How has this happened? You only have to look at a political map of the south (minus London) to see this effect - Bristol, Exeter, Oxford, Southampton and most notably Caterbury student-dominated constituencies are red in seas of blue.
ReplyDeleteTurkey purged over 100,000 academics, teachers and civil servants in 2016 because they didn’t support Erdogan and favoured a more Western approach.
DeleteThis silent coup happened to us by stealth over many years and accelerated under Blair. The left own the instruments of education and most of our institutions of power and influence.
Do we want to follow Turkey? You can’t do it by half measures.
It's true. Anyone who doesn't sign up to the PC agenda is a target in a University. As a student, you can actually lose marks in essays if you fail to follow PC guidelines.
DeleteOne of the first things a populist government should do is link public funding to academic freedom. Universities should have to meet a baseline of academic freedom demonstrating a commitment against no-platforming of persons operating within democratic norms, that departments are welcoming to the full range of academic opinion and that curricula are not narrow exercises in PC dogma. If they don't play ball remove their public funding and grant support for their students. Explicit political campaigning by academics in receipt of public funds should not be accepted.