Even Andrew Marr worries about groupthink at the BBC

BBC bashing is a favourite sport on the internet, and on blogs in particular. It’s easy, because no news organisation can please everyone all the time, and particularly not one that at least aspires to be impartial in its reporting. Most of us hold partisan opinions on a variety of subjects, so being confronted with arguments that suggest that we may be mistaken is likely to be disconcerting and annoying. This often leads to strenuous venting in the blogosphere along the lines of, ‘Trendy lefties are at it again. What do you expect from the BBC.’Such outbursts can easily be dismissed as knuckleheaded spleen, but you don’t have to look far to find confirmation that there is almost certainly some truth in them. For instance here is something rather startling that appeared in the BBC’s impartiality report last year:

Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 66

It is not just the thrust of this quotation that is startling, but the name of the author too, for Marr is not only a veteran of the BBC’s news gathering organisation, but he arrived there after spells working for two avowedly left of centre publications; The Economist and The Independent, of which he was editor. Indeed Marr’s time as Political Editor at the BBC was characterised by accusations that, while he might be aiming at well balanced reporting, he often seemed unable to resist giving New Labour the benefit of the doubt.

I have just been re-reading Anthony Jay’s* iconoclastic paper published by the Centre for Policy Studies; Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer’. In it, Jay takes a very thoughtful look at what he calls ‘media liberalism’ at the BBC and tries to explain how it is that an organisation that is avowedly impartial can nevertheless be intensely partisan without even realising that this is happening. He describes the process of isolation that he and other like-minded liberal activists at the BBC experienced in these terms:

… even our next door neighbours were rarely part of our social group – we belonged instead to a dispersed ‘metropolitan-media-arts-graduate’ tribe. We met over coffee and lunch, had a drink together at the end of the day’s work, and invited each other round to dinner in the evening to reinforce our views … We so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that we took our group-think as the views of all right-thinking people.

Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, page 8.

Later he says:

… the spread of media liberalism [has significantly accelerated] since I ceased to be a BBC employee forty years ago, but they have not changed it in any way. If anything they have intensified it. … It still identifies with The Guardian and demonises The Daily Mail. The BBC’s 2007 impartiality report reflects widespread support for the idea that there is “some sort of BBC liberal consensus”. It talks of programme-makers inhabiting “a shared space, a comfort zone”. Their Commissioning Editor for Documentaries, Richard Klein, has said: “by and large, people who work in the BBC think the same, and it’s not the way the audience thinks.” The former Political Editor, Andrew Marr, says: “There is an innate liberal bias within the BBC”.

For a time it puzzled me that after fifty years of tumultuous change in political ideas, allegiances and experiences the media liberal attitudes could remain so similar, indeed almost identical, to those I shared in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy at all, even less a political programme. It was an ideology, a secular religion, based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. Our beliefs belonged not to the political platform but to the ecclesiastical pulpit. The security, the prosperity and even the survival of the nation could not take precedence over equality and social justice.

Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, page 11.

All this has resonance for anyone who has marvelled at the enthuiasm with which the BBC has embraced climate change catastrophism, and the resulting partiality of their reporting on this subject. Environmentalism and liberalism do not have to go hand-in-hand – all three major political parties have joined the crusade – but there is a less direct link that Jay points to. He says that he and his colleagues were:

… we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism,anti-monarchy,anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb,anti-authority.

Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, page 1.

The list of things that liberals love to hate may have changed a little over the years, but not very much, and climate change alarmism fits very well with them. It can be seen as the apotheosis of all concerns of media liberalism; carbon emissions destroying the planet can be portrayed as the nemesis of a successful, industrialized and affluent society; proof that the wages of profligacy are destruction.

I started this post by deprecating BBC bashing. What little experience I have of the corporation has lead me to believe that programme makers are generally intelligent, dedicated professionals who want to make the best programmes possible. So why does the BBC not report the climate change debate objectively? Another quotation from Anthony Jay may help explain:

… it is hard to make general ideas, balanced arguments and statistical evidence interesting on television. Its forte is conflict, narrative and personal, individual emotion. The arguments for and against the NHS are tough going, but the grief and anger of ignored and mistreated and suffering patients and their families do wonders for the ratings.

Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer, page 10.

So dramatic sequences shot after floods or hurricanes are likely to appear on our screens accompanied by references to global warming; discussions about the contradictory evidence that underlies the assumed link will not. For a producer or editor who has no specialist knowledge of climate science, their will aways be a temptation to rely on evidence that supports such stories, and disregard evidence that challenges them.

If there must be bias at the BBC, then liberal bias is probably less damaging than many others, but that does not mean that any kind of bias in that great institution is acceptable.

* SIR ANTONY JAY was a founder-producer of the BBC nightly topical television programme Tonight in 1957 and was Editor from 1962 to 1963. He became the BBC’s Head of Talks Features in 1963 before resigning to go freelance in 1964. He was the coauthor, with Jonathan Lynn, of the successful British political comedies, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. He was also a founder with John Cleese of the Video Arts training film production company. He has been the Editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations since 1994.