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An inquiry into liberal bias at the BBC must be independent
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be the first to commentPosted by David Miller - Comment is free - The Guardian
So, BBC news is biased? There have been complaints that its coverage is not always impartial. But now the BBC Trust's chairman, former Tory grandee Chris Patten, has set up an inquiry to examine whether its coverage is too liberal.
We have been here before. Conservatives have agitated against the BBC for decades. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they raised the issue of liberal or left bias at the corporation. Norman Tebbit famously attacked Kate Adie over the coverage of the US bombing of Libya in 1986. During the Iraq war, the BBC was accused of being biased in favour of Stop the War, against all the evidence that they swallowed the WMD story whole. Then, as now, it might be instructive for the “independent" review to take account of the evidence on the alleged bias of television news.
Part of the review will cover the topics of Europe, immigration and religion. But the research evidence that we have does not suggest a liberal bias. On the contrary, it suggests a routine tendency for BBC news programmes to give more time and context to, and less interrogation of, establishment and elitist views.
On Europe, for instance, the BBC has been found to be more negative and critical of the EU than the German media. On the European constitution, this finding held, even when reporters were relatively more Europhile. A study of BBC online coverage of immigration found that it “invites a reading that might, most positively, be described as unease" in relation to immigration.
There seems to be some suggestion that the review of the BBC may also examine religion in general, and Islamophobia in particular. No shortage of material there. A variety of academic studies has examined how the BBC and other media have covered Islam, especially since September 2001. One found that “the framing of Islam as a security threat can be inferred from the very large numbers of news items in which Muslim political and military or paramilitary actors have been shown in postures of hostility towards aspects of [western] societies".
The authors contend that “while distinctions are made between dangerous, fanatical, politically driven Islamism and Islam as a religion, these distinctions are not always made clear, so there is a persistent danger of conveying the issues in terms of an all-embracing clash of civilisations". Not a lot of support in these studies for the contention in a Daily Mail leader column last week that the BBC “consistently attacks Christianity (though never Islam)".
There have been virtually no rigorous studies that concluded that the BBC was either “objective" or biased to the left. Almost every single study undertaken since the earliest, by the Glasgow University Media Group in the 1970s and 1980s, concludes that elite perspectives dominate the news. On the one occasion that an apparently serious study found the opposite (Martin Harrison's on the 1984-5 miners' strike), it was later revealed that the research was flawed (not to mention being subsidised by ITN).
An examination of the TV coverage of the current economic crisis concluded that “there was an overwhelming bias in the direction of narratives deriving from an elite perspective on what matters and what is thus newsworthy".
Whoever oversees the forthcoming BBC review must be allowed to undertake rigorous research. In the past, when truly independent academics have been commissioned, the results have not been what the Mail might have expected.
Those familiar with the research will not be surprised to hear that elite sources and explanations dominate news on Europe, immigration and religion. If the BBC Trust is serious about living up to its obligations to tackle bias, it will start a process that ensures a wider range of views is accessed, explained and contextualised.
Thursday 11 October 2012
David Miller is professor of sociology at the University of Bath and a director of Spinwatch
DATELINE: 12 October, 2012
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