What a load of self-serving drivel.
For over 20 years, the BBC has risen to the challenge of right wing populism ... by enabling it. The two politicians who've done more damage to the progressive consensus as imagined by centrist hacks and establishment politicians - Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson - were indulged and cultivated by the BBC. The ha-ha celebrity enjoyed by Johnson wasn't a question of journalists not knowing how to handle him, but of promoting him on Have I Got News For You as a noted card. Thanks to Question Time, Farage enjoyed the safest seat UKIP ever had. But it was more than the BBC's flagship politics programme at fault; all of its news apparatus promoted him. Partly it was curiosity, a high-minded fascination with a new politics that could easily fill up news schedules that needed filling. Farage's tedious act of saying the unsayable (except for what tabloid editorials had been saying for years) created feedback responses where "fearless" journalism would parrot his talking points to senior Tory and Labour politicians, and they adapted accordingly by shifting right. Too many times the BBC put questions to senior figures UKIP itself was unable to. And getting the BBC treatment meant the doors were open to Farage for further mainstream coverage. If he was good enough for them, he was respectable enough for everything else.
Yes, this was a failure of establishment journalism. They did not hold Farage to account, because he was virtually their ally. Contrary to what Maitlis argues, the dominant interview style in the age of social media is the gotcha. If hacks can get politicians to trip over their words, look foolish, make a gaffe, or let slip an unvarnished opinion or policy, that's what gets clipped and circulated by media outfits. They are incentivised to make their encounters with politicians newsworthy in and of themselves. Because Farage's power was not institutionalised, his arguments - particularly on immigration and, for a while, on same-sex marriage - were repeated by journalists because it helped them hit the gotcha quota. He was challenged on occasion, but this was only a minor part of the coverage he commanded.
But not all populisms are equal. While Farage was flattered, once it was obvious Jeremy Corbyn was going to win the Labour leadership election seven years ago he was treated as an abomination. Maitlis moans about the infamous episode of Newsnight where the graphics team mocked Corbyn up with a Russian-looking hat and a red Muscovy background. She lamented that inviting a Corbyn supporter on later that week to challenge this was a mistake. The populists had played the BBC's naive desire for even handedness. Never mind Newsnight was repeating the sort of nonsense Corbyn copped from the press, and no amount of innocent face protesting alters it. They made Corbyn out to be Voldemort after all, and every time the former Labour leader sneezed BBC journalists were there to cover it. But unlike Farage, there was no de facto alliance of convenience between them. Corbyn and Corbynism was the target.
That's the fundamental difference. Using the talking points of rightist populism assisted career trajectories. Doing so from the left was suicidal. That Maitlis couldn't tell the difference is no surprise. But too late she laments the Tory cuckoo in the BBC nest, naming former Downing Street spinner Robbie Gibb as an "active agent" of the Tory party. Gibb uses his position on the board to act as "as the arbiter of BBC impartiality". What Maitlis finds offensive is "BBCism", the enlightened and aloof viewpoint from which the fraught tussles of politics can be viewed with equanimity, is getting enroached on by the Tories. She refuses to acknowledge, let alone reflect on the biases and political economy underpinning this establishment view. If the state is the committee for governing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, BBCism is a certain truce among its factions and fractions. A studied neutrality and balance when discussing and covering permitted politics, and a smear machine as scurrilous as any tabloid when the consensus is under pressure.
Holding politicians to account while seeking to inform, educate, and explain, these are the only journalistic ethics worth a damn when it comes to politics coverage. On the occasion the BBC meets these standards, it's more by accident than design. And in her new venture with Jon Sopel, we can expect Maitlis to continue with her shoddy, establishment-friendly output.
4 comments:
One Sunday afternoon I was watching a BBC programme where a viewer complained about bias on the channel. To deny this accusation a producer of news output was invited on to explain how this was not true. His explanation was, it is the public that set the news agenda, not the BBC. Therefore they only reported on what the public want to hear.
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Especially after the treatment they meted out to Corbyn, left MPs and their supporters.
Good article. Phil. The sheer , smug, arrogance of the lifelong uber-privileged BBC media folk is quite gobsmacking, no matter how often one sees it ! The likes of Maitlis , and Kuensberg , Sopel, et al , genuinely don't seem to grasp that any political or social viewpoint other than theirs is either valid or indeed 'rational'. They are all formally educated people , yet have had their intellects infantilised by their lifelong bubble of privilege. The dreadful , always totally useless Foreign Office mouthpiece, ex BBC Foreign Correspondent, John Simpson, on the radio this morning amusingly stated that " Emily doesn't understand that it isn't the BBC's role to tell people what to think " . YES it is John , you dope, - but Emily nowadays just can't stomach that the BBC , in amongst its regular issue selectivity lies and narrative-setting, statutorily has to allow on the occasional non 'mainstream' opinion, and couldn't be the propaganda station entirely for Remain over Brexit . Though in fact the BBC was a major media vehicle for all those 'Project Fear' claims from the 'Great and the Good' (sic) that the UK housing market and currency would collapse overnight if the UK voted for BREXIT of course. That chilling backdrop 'Corbyn in Russian hat and Red Square Background' for that notorious Newsnight 'discussion' still shocks years after for its arrogant utterly blatant red-baiting, Cold War era, nastiness !
"They (Maitlis, Kuenssberg , Sopel, et al) are all formally educated people , yet have had their intellects infantilised by their lifelong bubble of privilege."
The perspective of the BBC has been consistent from its Reithian inception. In brief, it's a top-down elitist, Platonist view of the world: they see their role as the 'Ubermensch' in Nietzschean terms, overseeing the masses and managing their 'resentment'.
Pull the other one, Emily Maitlis. We remember your role in the vilification of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not always help himself, but even so. Liberals, self-styled "centrists", do this all the time. They dish it out by the bucket load, but they cannot take a thimbleful of it back. They hack the legs off everyone else, but they only have to have their arms brushed and they go squealing to themselves as somehow the referee as well as a player.
Post a Comment