Confessions of a BBC liberal
The BBC has finally come clean about its bias, says a former editor, who
wrote Yes, Minister
Antony Jay
In the past four weeks there have been two remarkable changes in the public
attitude to the BBC. The first and most newsworthy one was precipitated by
the faked trailer of the Queen walking out of a photographic portrait
session with Annie Leibovitz.
It was especially damaging because the licence fee is based on a public
belief that the BBC offers a degree of integrity and impartiality which its
commercial competitors cannot achieve.
But in the longer term I believe that the second change is even more
significant. It started with the BBC's own report on impartiality that
effectively admitted to an institutional "liberal" bias among programme
makers. Previously these accusations had been dismissed as a right-wing
rant, but since the report was published even the BBC's allies seem to
accept it.
It has been on parade again these past few weeks on the Radio 4 programme
The Crime of Our Lives. It included (of course) the ritual demoni-sation of
Margaret Thatcher (uninterested in crime . . . surprisingly did not take a
closer interest), a swipe at Conservative magistrates and their friends in
the golf club and occasional quotes from Douglas Hurd to preserve the
illusion of impartiality, but the whole tenor of the programme was liberal/
progressive/ reformist.
The series even included a strong suggestion that Thatcher's economic
policies were the cause of rising crime. So presumably she shouldn't have
done what she did?
There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal
policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more
punitive penal policy.
This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the
producer/writer was a member of BBC staff. Can you imagine a BBC staff
member slanting a programme towards the case for a stricter penal policy?
The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the
BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has
puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple - much simpler than
the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group?
They are that minority often characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and
macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form are found in The Guardian,
Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC news and
current affairs. They constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus,
although the word "liberal" would have Adam Smith rotating in his grave.
Let's call it "media liberalism".
It is of particular interest to me because for nine years, between 1955 and
1964, I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine
years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television
programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Harold Macmil-lan's
premiership and I do not think that my former colleagues would quibble if I
said we were not exactly diehard supporters.
But we were not just anti-Macmil-lan; we were antiindustry,
anti-capital-ism, antiadvertising, antiselling, antiprofit, antipatriotism,
antimonarchy, antiempire, antipolice, antiarmed forces, antibomb,
antiauthority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more
prosperous place - you name it, we were anti it.
Although I was a card-carrying media liberal for the best part of nine
years, there was nothing in my past to predispose me towards membership. I
spent my early years in a country where every citizen had to carry
identification papers. All the newspapers were censored, as were all letters
abroad; general elections had been abolished: it was a one-party state. Yes,
that was Britain - Britain from 1939 to 1945.
I was nine when the war started, and 15 when it ended, and accepted these
restrictions unquestioningly. I was astounded when identity cards were
abolished. And the social system was at least as authoritarian as the
political system. It was shocking for an unmarried couple to sleep together
and a disgrace to have a baby out of wedlock. A homosexual act incurred a
jail sentence. Procuring an abortion was a criminal offence. Violent young
criminals were birched, older ones were flogged and murderers were hanged.
So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall
never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the
realisation that there have always been two principal ways of
misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking
up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by
identifying with individuals.
To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling
groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting
apart - the individual components shooting off in different directions until
everything dissolves into anarchy.
To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest
group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more
rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.
Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty,
equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and
worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of
these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and
both sets of dangers are real, but there is no "right" point of view.
The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too
much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and
variety.
In retrospect it seems pretty clear that the 1940s and 1950s were years of
excessive authority and uniformity. It was certainly clear to me and my
media liberal colleagues in the BBC. It was not that we in the BBC openly
and publicly criticised the government on air; the BBC's commitment to
impartiality was more strictly enforced in those days.
But the topics we chose and the questions we asked were slanted against
institutions and towards oppressed individuals, just as we achieved
political balance by pitting the most plausible critics of government
against its most bigoted supporters.
Ever since 1963 the institutions have been the villains of the media
liberals. The police, the armed services, the courts, political parties,
multi-national corporations - when things go wrong they are the usual
suspects.
But our hostility to institutions was not - and is not - shared by the
majority of our fellow citizens: most of our opinions were at odds with the
majority of the audience and the electorate. Indeed the BBC's own 2007
report on impartiality found that 57% of poll respondents said that
"broadcasters often fail to reflect the views of people like me".
There are four new factors which in my lifetime have brought about the
changes that have shaped media liberalism, encouraged its spread and
significantly increased its influence and importance.
The first of these is detribalisation. That our species has evolved a
genetic predisposition to form tribal groups is generally accepted as an
evolutionary fact. This grouping - of not more than about five or six
hundred - supplies us with our identity, status system, territorial
instinct, behavioural discipline and moral code.
We in the BBC were acutely detribalised; we were in a tribal institution,
but we were not of it. Nor did we have any geographical tribe; we lived in
commuter suburbs, we knew very few of our neighbours and took not the
slightest interest in local government. In fact we looked down on it.
Councillors were self-important nobodies and mayors were a pompous joke.
We belonged instead to a dispersed "metropolitan media arts graduate" tribe.
We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the
evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British
Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the royal family, the
defence budget - it's a wonder we ever got home.
The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of
exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas
about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions
actually work, we were convinced that Britain's problems were the result of
the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.
This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to
occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid
world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal
world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world.
We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. We also
had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is
still there. Say "Tesco" to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says,
"Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers." The
achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the
food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract
millions of shoppers does not register on their radar.
The third factor arises from the nature of mass media. The Tonight programme
had a nightly audience of about 8m. It was much easier to keep their
attention by telling them they were being deceived or exploited by big
institutions than by saying what a good job the government and the banks and
the oil companies were doing.
The fourth factor is what has been called "isolation technology". Fifty
years ago people did things together much more. The older politicians we
interviewed in the early Tonight days were happier in public meetings than
in television studios.
In those days people went to evening meetings. They formed collective
opinions. In many places party allegiance was collective and hereditary
rather than a matter of individual choice based on a logical comparison of
policies.
These four factors have significantly accelerated and indeed intensified the
spread of media liberalism since I ceased to be a BBC employee 40 years ago.
But let's suppose that I had stayed. Would I have remained a devotee of the
metropolitan media liberal ideology that I once absorbed so readily? I have
an awful fear that the answer is yes.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2240427.ece
