Peter Hitchens II: BBC Bias And Ignorance

In The New Statesman:

How would we tell if the BBC were biased? The wrong way of doing so is the way used by the corporation's own executives and representatives. The BBC's staff are so enclosed in a world of left-liberal assumptions that they do not even understand the question. They think they are being accused of explicit support for the Labour Party, openly expressed in their output. They fend off accusations of partiality by saying (rather questionably, but that's another argument) that they are strictly neutral between Labour and the Tories. They once sought to prove this by removing Melvyn Bragg from the chair of Start the Week when they discovered (seemingly to their amazement) that he might be a Labour Party supporter. This possibility became apparent to them for the first time when he was made a Labour peer. Yet Bragg's elevation somehow did not stand in the way of his swiftly becoming the presenter of In Our Time. The BBC's dim inability to see how funny this is, or how far from the point, would itself be funny if its results were not so damaging.

I recall a few years ago a group of BBC staffers making what they thought was a killingly amusing satire - which they proudly showed at the Edinburgh TV Festival - on the idea of an impartial news bulletin, as allegedly imagined by conservatives. Since they had no real idea what a conservative is or thinks, the film was clueless, full of blatant right-wing editorialising and sycophancy towards an unnamed corporate boss.

Were I a multibillionaire, I could commission the proper research into nuance, tone of voice, who gets the last word, presenters' backgrounds, running order, drama, soap operas and cultural coverage, that would demonstrate beyond any doubt that the BBC is on the side of the cultural and social revolution that I and many other licence-fee payers oppose with all our hearts.

But I am not, so I shall rely instead on personal experience. I could, if there were space and I were nasty enough, list here many instances of the BBC's near-horror of the conservative person; its nervous need to allow them on, but its extreme difficulties in treating them fairly when it does; its refusal to let them anywhere near presenters' chairs (the seats of power) unless the audience is tiny. I would detail instances of its failure to understand what conservatives think, or to pay any attention to what they say - the current affairs producer who thought Melanie Phillips and I agreed about the Iraq war, and the researchers who called me up in the hope that I would make the case for torture, or for arbitrary imprisonment, spring to mind.

I could dwell on the assumptions of programmes such as The News Quiz and Have I Got News for You, which depend for their humour on the belief that everyone in the audience thinks (I encapsulate here) that socialism is basically good, that religion is bad for you and the monarchy is absurd. "Do you really think," a senior radio executive, apparently intelligent, once asked me with a puzzled frown, "that The News Quiz is a left-wing programme?" This was one step down from the presenters of current affairs programmes who would demand of me, when I was allowed on in an honourable but nervous attempt at "balance", questions that always began "Are you seriously saying . . . ?".

They could not believe that I, an educated human being of their generation, held the opinions I hold. They had never, in the course of their long and comfortable journey from their Oxbridge junior common rooms to White City or Portland Place, ever met anyone who did not share their assumptions, whom they hadn't also felt able to despise. Even worse, perhaps, was the knowledge that I was once on the left myself, though they are keener to acknowledge my Trotskyist period (obvious extremist, you see) than my long stint in the Hampstead Labour Party. That is not to say that they do not despise me, too, but I make it difficult for them by not being Nick Griffin, Alf Garnett or Geoffrey Dickens. Sometimes I make it so difficult for them that they stop asking me on at all - not because they disagree with me, but because they agree with me. During the Iraq war (with the significant exception noted above), my invitations to take part in radio and TV discussions shrivelled to nothing. Opponents of the war were good. "Right-wing" people were bad. I was "right-wing" and against the war. It did not compute, so I was dropped.

What troubles the BBC is not a party bias. On the contrary, the BBC is so powerful that it has now succeeded in converting the Conservative Party to its point of view, and rewards it with increasingly extensive and sympathetic coverage. It is a set of potent cultural, moral, social, sexual and religious assumptions, which touch on all topics from cannabis to the EU, and which affect everything from the plot-lines of The Archers to the use of the metric system on nature programmes. I cannot say how sad this is for the dwindling numbers of British conservative people who value the BBC as a national institution and do not wish to see it swept away. I wish it were not so.

And on his blog:

Today's posting is slightly unusual in that it is a response to a challenge on another weblog. We do not provide links here, for legal reasons, but I can tell you that this challenge, entitled 'Is the BBC biased?' can easily be found by Googling "Mehdi Hasan", "New Statesman" and "Peter Hitchens".

It stems from articles by me and by Mr Hasan which appear in the current issue of the New Statesman. I argue that the BBC is hopelessly morally, socially and culturally biased against conservative ideas, so much so that it doesn't even understand that it is biased, or how it is biased. Mr Hasan argues, hilariously, that the BBC is biased to 'the right'. Links to these articles are provided in Mr Hasan's posting. After an unsatisfactory private correspondence about our disagreements, which will stay private, we agreed instead to debate the matter in public. Here beginneth my first riposte.

Why is Mehdi Hasan so confident that his assertion that the BBC is in fact ‘a right-wing and conservative institution’ cannot be effectively rebutted?

Before I begin I should state that (as he knows) my main complaint against his original article is its ludicrous claim that I believe I am 'ignored' by the BBC. I do not think this, which is why I haven't said it. The article which I wrote (at his request) and which he presumably read before publishing it, (and before publishing his own contribution), makes it clear that I have no such belief. Much of it, in fact, dwells on the way in which the BBC approaches me when it asks me to appear on TV and radio programmes, something the BBC couldn't do if it were ignoring me. I would be grateful if Mr Hasan would have the grace to admit that he was mistaken, and to withdraw the claim. It makes his argument look silly, and gets in the way of proper debate.

I suspect that his assurance stems mainly from his almost complete misunderstanding of conservatism. He shares this problem - of blank, clueless incomprehension of his opponent - with the BBC itself. The Corporation has not felt the need to take conservatism seriously for many years, for reasons I'll set out shortly. The same is true of many of the other institutions of modern Britain, where the Left's long march, begun in the 1960s, is now complete. The result of this is that people whose assumptions are 'progressive' (their own terminology) occupy all positions of decisive authority, and never meet or need to justify themselves to anyone who disagrees with them, whom they do not also despise. In fact, they generally despise anyone who disagrees with them, believing for example that a person who supports capital punishment for murderers is beyond the pale of civilisation.

At the same time many millions of BBC licence fee payers do not share these new opinions, and hold largely to the old, dethroned ones. Is the purpose of the BBC to serve them, and to reflect their views, or, by exclusion, derision, obscenity, foul language and triumphalist propaganda, bring them round to its own opinion? If the second, surely that is bias?

There are large arguments to be had about how and why this came about. I've tried to address them in my book 'The Abolition of Britain' and more recently in another book The Broken Compass, so won't dwell on them here. But I think it would be very hard for anyone to argue that it hadn't happened. The occupiers of significant positions, whether they be Cabinet ministers, MPs, Bishops, Anglican vicars, Catholic priests, Permanent Secretaries, Professors, head teachers, ordinary teachers, judges, editors, producers of TV and radio programmes, heads of broadcasting and media organisations, newspaper and TV reporters, businessmen, publishers, historians, novelists, artists, actors or police officers now hold social, moral, cultural views wholly different from, and often opposite to, those their forerunners of 40 or 50 years ago would have held. There are exceptions, but they are rare and much remarked upon. I am not arguing here about whether this is good or bad (not that my view is any secret), just stating it as an indisputable fact.

The view which has been dethroned in this process is conservatism. This can be summed up as a pessimistic view of humanity and society based on a Christian belief in the imperfectibility of man, demanding the exercise of individual conscience, strong self-restraint, deference to established authority, sexual continence and constancy, patience, respect for age, for hierarchy and for institutions, patriotism and monarchy - generally combined with a strong predisposition in favour of hard work and thrift and a horror of idleness and debt. These views were once held widely by voters on both sides of the political divide. The modern person may recognise all these things under the other names which progressives give to them: ‘repression, religious bigotry, snobbery, sexism, chauvinism, xenophobia, suburban and/or “Victorian” values etc.’ Call them what you like, but don't imagine that your choice of name doesn't betoken an opinion on an important issue. They once were dominant and are now despised and rejected. And the BBC is entirely on one side in this conflict, and cannot conceive that any good person could take the other view.

Mr Hasan seems to think that I have personally invented the conservatism I espouse, and it is a quirky, random collection of views which appear contradictory to him. Let me assure him that I am simply the inheritor and continuer of a tradition much older than I, which is only proper for a conservative. Mr Hasan also, for some reason inaccessible to me, thinks the Conservative Party embodies conservatism, thinks that conservatism consists of support for free markets, or for the Iraq war, or a general liking for the United States. In fact some of these positions are those of classical liberalism, while others are those of 'Neo-Conservatism', a tendency more attractive to disappointed Marxists, in search of a new Utopia, and to ultra-liberal globalists, than to conservatives. Many, if not all, neo-conservatives are cultural and moral and social radicals, and economic ultra-liberals. Some of these positions are common to both these views. None of them is conservative.

He is also, I think, confused by the fact that the BBC, which was generally sympathetic to the Blair government because of its cultural leftism, could never really cope with that government's globalist decision to go to war in Iraq. Sentimental Leftists, whose politics are really a series of displaced religious opinions, often misunderstand, and lag behind, the vanguard of their cause. Only the sharper and smarter ones, the 'hard liberals', recognise that their aims may be served by bombing a few cities. The Tory Party had a parallel problem. Having sold Britain to the EU and being secretly ashamed of it, it now strives to look ultra-patriotic on every possible occasion by banging the drum for war and supporting 'our boys', though it overcame this when we surrendered to the IRA in Northern Ireland, the last actual national conflict in which our armed forces were deployed in British, rather than globalist interests. The neo-conservative liberals, whose reasons for backing these wars are entirely different, thus have an easier time with their backbenchers than do Labour. Sentimental Tory MPs back wars they should oppose. Sentimental Labour MPs oppose wars they ought to support.

As for the Tory Party, the BBC is biased against it only when it shows signs of being conservative. Such moments are increasingly rare. I am not now arguing, and never have sought to argue, that the BBC is biased against the Conservative Party. On the contrary, I state in my article for the NS that the BBC has now completely converted the Conservative Party to its own world-view, and has rewarded it with sympathetic and generous coverage. This is one of the most important political developments of our time, which is why most political journalists, incurious, sheep-like and conformist, have not even noticed it.

The BBC is not a deliberately or consciously wicked body. It does what it does because it believes fervently (like so many harmful people and organisations) that it is doing good. Many of its decision-makers feel a genuine urge to be fair. But they do not know how to do it. Thanks to the successful Gramscian 'war of position', described above, they are almost physically repulsed by the opinions and attitudes of people such as me, and also of the Thatcherite liberals described above. They would never have such people in their own homes, around their own tables. Yet they feel they must have us in their studios.

This is to their credit. It is hard. I sympathise. They are too busy shuddering to distinguish between us, hence the blunders described in my New Statesman article. Yet they swallow hard, adopt fixed smiles and try to invite us on, if only to prove to themselves that they are just. Of course there are many different degrees of being 'invited on'. There are the 'balanced' debate programmes where the occasional conservative can be fitted in, permitted to speak but obviously not in any way endorsed by the Corporation. There are also brief discussions on Radio 4 current affairs programmes. But these are concessions, not the real thing.

The real things are the major behind-the-scenes executive positions which give direction to editorial policy and to the appointment of key presenter's chairs, decisive jobs such as that of Political Editor, influential slots such as Newsnight anchor.

In a few cases, notable mainly for their rarity, presenters' chairs or regular panel slots go to people who are not full members of the new post-1968 consensus. Andrew Neil is a highly skilled and competent broadcaster and a journalist of great experience. He is, it is true, allowed to present a few programmes. These may be much-watched by enthusiasts, but I do not think we could really call them 'prime time' or even 'mainstream'. Ask yourselves this. Can you conceive of Andrew Neil being appointed as a main presenter of Newsnight, or of the Today programme? If not, why not? (I should point out here that I doubt if Mr Neil agrees with me on many major subjects, and I do not regard him as a conservative). I think it rather touching that Mr Hasan believes Mr Portillo is a conservative. It was in 1999, I think, that I put myself forward for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea, purely so as to make the point that Mr Portillo is not a conservative. Is he really Diane Abbot's opponent when they sit together on that sofa?

Then there's the Nick Robinson argument. Mr Robinson must speak for himself, but I would make one point about comparisons between him and Andrew Marr. Mehdi dwells on Mr Robinson's student Toryism, a documented fact. But Mr Robinson had, for many years before he became BBC Political editor, pursued a BBC career during which he was not able to express a political opinion, even had he wished to. We do not actually know what his current or recent political opinions are. So we cannot really claim to have any recent information on this.

Andrew Marr, a short time before his appointment, was an opinionated writer for the Daily Express (in its Rosie Boycott manifestation) and in other places. I think it fair to say that the opinions he stated were not generally conservative ones. I don't think this is a parallel with Mr Robinson's appointment. Again, a question. Could a conservative columnist on a national daily, whose current views were well-known, with the equivalent experience of Andrew Marr, have been appointed to the job? If not, why not?

The issue is confused by the fact that the political opinions of the leaderships of the two main parties are now so similar (see the recent statements by Michael Gove) that a declared Tory (not conservative) and a declared New Labour supporter would find little to criticise about the policies of the party he supposedly opposes. In fact much of the left-wing media establishment are now entirely reconciled to the arrival of a Cameron government, because they rightly believe the Blairite project is safe in Mr Cameron's hands.

My own view has long been that BBC presenters and commentators should declare their political sympathies, instead of pretending absurdly that they have none, that the BBC could achieve a true balance by ensuring that it recruited from among conservative as well as among left-liberal journalists, and that programmes should be presented in an adversarial fashion, ensuring (for example) that no politician should be interviewed by a supporter of his party.

If this doesn't happen, then I think the BBC will eventually lose the necessary consensus of support, politically required for the continuation of the licence fee. I should regret that. I am a friend of the BBC as an institution. I do not think its disappearance would be a good thing.