The UK is often willing to claim the moral high ground on how free and democratic it is, and it is compared to countries with true despots in it.
The BBC has a code of editorial standards based on its reporting being free of bias, and free from poor bias and balance. Whilst not a corporate as such, it responds in a slow, unaccountable, corporate manner; thousands send in complaints into the BBC every month, and you never get to hear about the response of the BBC Trust on the whole. It gives the appearance of doing much of its business behind ‘closed doors’. It has a stranglehold on the licence fee, in that many (mainly on the right-wing) argue that there is choice such that we are free to shop around. Supporters of the BBC threaten that, if it were not for the BBC, we would be dependent upon Sky for the news coverage, playing on the relative unpopularity of the Murdoch “empire” to make this point. Supporters of the BBC also draw attention to the quality of its output elsewhere, e.g. Wimbledon, special events (such as the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies), or Newsnight.
Balance is a very strange beast for the BBC. It argues that it cannot be rampantly left-wing or rampantly right-wing, as as many people from either side of the political spectrum complain about its coverage. That is why the BBC will often contort itself into giving a ‘balanced’ view of any news story, despite the fact that the facts might lean very much in one direction (e.g. the changing of grade boundaries versus OFQUAL). Without doubt, however, has been the selection of its news agenda. The BBC is very well connected with Conservative HQ, with Craig Oliver, who used to be senior at the BBC, now heading up the Conservatives’ Communications Unit (famously previously a job done by Andy Coulson). There has not been any reporting of the protests on the BBC news TV output itself of the protests against ATOS, despite such reports being widespread on the internet.
Video coverage of the latest event not to be covered by the televised BBC News, however, does exist (see below). ATOS has attracted fierce controversy, in real life and on the blogosphere, over its involvement in the Games while contracted by the government to carry out “fitness to work” tests on incapacity benefit claimants. Campaigners say the £100m-a-year contract from the Department of Work and Pensions to conduct “work capability assessments” is part of a money-saving drive to force people off benefits even when they may be unable to work. They claim the scheme has driven many disabled people into poverty or, in some cases, to suicide. This is clearly a matter of public interest, as there are currently 6.9 million disabled people of working age, a figure which represents 19% of the working population, there are over 10 million disabled people in Britain, of whom 5 million are over state pension age, and there are two million people with sight problems in the UK. The enactment of the Welfare Reform Act was barely covered on the televised BBC News, apart from when they are heavy defeats in the House of Lords (the parliamentary procedure later adopted by the Coalition government in passing this legislation finally was given minimal time on televised BBC News). Here the key point is that such protests accompany a massive worldwide event: the Paralympics. On Thursday, ParalympicsGB officials denied British athletes at the Games had hidden their accreditation badges at the opening ceremony, after observers noted that none was displaying the lanyard that bears the sponsor’s logo.
Strangely enough, Russia Today covered the event, but our own state news broadcaster chose not. The BBC have also chosen not to cover the ‘managed decline’ of the high street legal aid service in this country, affecting access-to-justice in key areas of social justice including housing, immigration, asylum, welfare benefits, and employment, for example. There has been the bare minimum of basic coverage or even detailed political debate about the privatisation of the NHS, whilst nobody can deny that this has been a major plank of legislation to have been given Royal Assent this year. The traditional reason for not covering these issues is that ‘it isn’t news, is it?': sorry – it is very much big news having public riots during the Paralympics by disabled protestors about disabled cuts.
This situation has often been likened to Communist Russia, or the way Goebbels used to run the media, but certainly the left has always suffered from an extreme problem with hyperbole. However, James Macintyre from earlier this year put it brilliantly:
“Indeed, the BBC’s news website, for which Robinson and Landale have no responsibility, often covers the Conservatives in what could almost be described as a Pravda-esque style. I’ve lost count of the scores of times I’ve logged on over the past few years to find the lead story, in place for much of the day, the latest proposal by David Cameron. Just as revealing is what it doesn’t report. The most recent example of many came last Wednesday. To its credit, the Murdoch-owned Times ran the Cameron-Brooks text message story from the updated biography of the prime minister on its front page. I was not surprised to see that the BBC news website avoided the story. The bizarre case is the first that I can remember of the BBC (which often takes its lead at weekends from the Sunday Times) failing to echo the News International agenda.”
The fact that the BBC is never responsive to complaints about its news coverage does lead many to wonder why they are still stuck with paying the license-fee. The BBC Trust has become an irrelevance to many, with individuals unsure how to make a complaint or what happens afterwards. Even the most burgeoning quasi-corporate service, the NHS, has a complaints procedure, but this is enshrined by statute, such that many more cases do end up at the High Court for judicial review as a final stage in a stressful process for many. The BBC news traditionally has not been a life-or-death issue in the same way as the NHS, but the fact that people allegedly have been led to suicide because of their despair over welfare benefits shows how sensitive this issue has become. The BBC occupies large market share, and has been able to win public trust through comparison with overtly criminal activity in other news entities exposed in the Leveson Inquiry.
As it has a position of dominance, it should therefore be highly guarded against its abuse, on behalf of the licence fee-payer, which is, after all, the ultimate contributor of indirect taxation. If the market were truly deregulated, it would be much easier to switch ‘news providers’, but here’s the thing, it isn’t. The cost of buying the decoding equipment and subscriptions is prohibitive for some in having a wide range of TV news services, and the BBC is in a privileged position in having the state licence-fee. In a way, with so many of its operations having been outsourced to private companies, it is exactly the sort of thing which could be totally privatised, for maximisation of shareholder dividend, if it were not for the strange component of Eton/Charterhouse/Oxbridge affection for the BBC that exists in Government and higher levels of management of the BBC.