Truth and lies are not of equal value

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A couple of day ago, the BBC reported that the UK and Australia had agreed “the vast majority” of the details of a new free trade agreement between the two states. Whether that was achieved by tying the Australian minister to an uncomfortable chair and having Liz Truss harangue him for nine hours was not reported, but agreeing the vast majority of the text of a trade deal is the easy part. It’s always the details which cause the problems. Time will tell – the possibility floated in the report that the final agreement will be signed in June, something of a record time for a deal, suggests either that one side has given a lot of ground, or else that the deal will turn out to be remarkably similar to an existing deal.

What I noted at the end of the report, however, was the matter-of-fact way in which the BBC report told us that “Trade can also be made simpler if countries have the same rules … The closer the rules are, the less likely that goods need to be checked”. It’s a statement of fact with which it is impossible to disagree, but it marks a major change of position for the BBC. During the EU referendum campaign, and in the interests of a specious form of ‘balance’, they regularly treated this key fact about trade as though it was merely an opinion, and treated the opposite opinion – that having different rules is no barrier to trade – as a position of equal validity. ‘Balance’ is difficult to define, and even harder to achieve, but it should never result in pretending that an obvious untruth has the same degree of validity as a provable fact. There is an old saying in journalism that “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true”. It’s the least we should expect from a publicly funded broadcaster, but the EU issue is far from being the only one on which the BBC seems to forget this basic tenet of news. Getting it right 5 years after allowing the lie to gain credence simply isn’t good enough.

Ignoring the problem isn't impartiality

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In the days since Boris Johnson’s car-crash speech to ‘the nation’ just over a week ago, it seems that the BBC’s reporting has gone from one extreme to the other in one sense. Having spent weeks failing to distinguish between the constituent parts of the UK, leaving most people with the misleading impression that the English ministers were acting and talking on behalf of the UK rather than simply England, they now frequently go out of their way to emphasise when rules apply across the board and when they are more specific. Sadly, sometimes they use those differences to make mischief – the report by BBC Scotland correspondent Sarah Smith a few days ago was a classic example. It looked more like English reporting about Scotland delivered with a Scottish accent than a report from Scotland for the interest of the UK as a whole, underlining the way in which the first ‘B’ in BBC is still the most important to the Corporation.

In theory, the differences between the approaches of the four governments aren’t actually as different as they seem. All four have attempted to produce some sort of roadmap indicating the conditions which need to be met and the sort of relaxations which can follow the meeting of those conditions. There are differences of emphasis between them, and some things might happen in a different order, but the theoretical position is that progress is determined by conditions on the ground. The differences are much less than those between the different regional governments in places like Germany for instance, although the reluctance of the English nationalists running the central government here to learn anything from mere Europeans means, apparently, that such differences are uniquely unacceptable in the UK.

But the real difference between England and the rest of the UK (or apparently, from an English government perspective, the difference between Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland on the one hand and the ‘rest of the UK’ on the other, in another hard-to-believe example of their own exceptionalism) isn’t in the theory, it’s in the practice. Having set out a strategy which makes it clear that the progress cannot be driven by arbitrary dates, England uniquely has gone on to produce an action plan which sets arbitrary dates and is attempting to drive everyone else into working to those dates. Of course it’s true that people want to have an idea about indicative dates, and I can understand the frustration felt by some that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have been so reluctant to do that, but if the plan is seriously based around events not entirely under the control of governments, setting dates, even indicative ones, is potentially dangerous. Turning them into targets is not only utter folly, it also undermines the strategy itself. And even leaving aside the doubts in the other three governments, the plan is falling apart in England itself in the face of opposition from local authorities across England.

The BBC may have gone some way, albeit haltingly and with an occasional lapse into deliberate mischief-making, but they haven’t yet gone far enough in exposing the truth. The problem is England and the English government; failing to make that clear to viewers and listeners isn’t impartial or unbiased reporting, it’s acting as a propaganda tool for just one of the four governments.

BBC - it's worse than an anti-Corbyn bias

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Politicians like to claim that the BBC is biased against them, and the BBC’s usual response is that, as long as all parties are saying that, they’re probably being balanced.  That seems a bit simplistic to me.  Two recent complaints involve the use of archive footage instead of actual coverage of the PM laying a wreath at the Cenotaph and the editing out of laughter when the same PM was asked about the importance of truth in politics.  This week has seen a suggestion that when Corbyn agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil it was on the basis of the BBC having indicated to his team that Johnson would be subjected to the same interviewer; a suggestion which it appears may not be true.  Any one such incident ‘might’ be excused as an innocent ‘mistake’, but at what point is it reasonable to highlight an emerging pattern of bias?

Andrew Neil is a tough interviewer, and whilst some of us might enjoy seeing our least-favourite politicians skewered, it would also be nice to see them given time and opportunity to answer a question or two.  And Neil’s questions are often loaded as well.  I remember my English teacher over half a century ago talking about loaded questions, using the classic example of the journalist asking someone “When did you stop beating your wife?”, a question which, however it is answered, leaves the listener convinced that the interviewee is indeed a past or present wife-beater.  Neil’s loading is a bit more subtle than that, but it’s there, nevertheless. 

Take his questions on nuclear weapons or dealing with the leaders of ISIS as examples.  The implication behind the questions is that no-one is fit to be PM unless (s)he is willing to confirm that (s)he would order:

a.    The incineration of millions of civilians in a nuclear strike, and

b.    The extra-judicial killing of foreign nationals in the territory of another sovereign state.

Both are, of course, illegal actions for any government to take under accepted international law, but the demand is that the interviewee give a categorical answer regardless of the complexities of the situation at the time – and the assumption is that there is only one ‘correct’ answer.  This is more than party political bias – this is bias towards a particular view of the world which refuses to accept the validity of any other viewpoint.

I wouldn’t argue that the BBC should treat all world views as equivalent; giving the same weight to an ISIS viewpoint as that of a more general ‘western’ viewpoint would be an absurd requirement (although it might help the BBC in its mission to inform and educate if it just occasionally made an effort to understand and explain alternative viewpoints rather than simplistically labelling their adherents using a catch-all word like ‘terrorists’), but the argument is rather different when it comes to domestic politics.  Corbyn’s world view is clearly not the same as Johnson’s, and the Greens, SNP and Plaid also have their own world views.  Failure to treat all of those as equivalent, particularly in the context of a general election, goes beyond mere bias for a ‘British’ view rather than a ‘foreign’ one and directly intervenes in domestic politics, something which a state-run broadcaster in a ‘democracy’ simply should not be doing.

The BBC is unquestionably biased, but it isn’t as simple as being biased towards a particular party and against others.  It’s more of an insidious, institutionalised bias in favour of one view of what the world is and should be, and it’s a bias which delegitimises alternative views.  And it’s much harder to deal with that sort of bias than a simple party-political one.

Whose Broadcasting Corporation is it really?

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In reporting on the proposed new charter for the BBC, the Western Mail chose to lead with the proposal that Wales would be guaranteed a place on the new BBC board.  How nice for Wales – another opportunity for a Welsh voice to participate in discussions before being over-ruled by the majority from England.  (Unless, of course, the chosen representative is carefully selected to be the sort of person who won’t make waves in the first place.)

It’s an obvious attempt to find a ‘safe’ Welsh angle on the news by another organisation not particularly well-known for making waves either.  But I didn’t think that it was the most significant element of the announcement from a Welsh perspective.  For that, we have to go further down the report, until we reach the part where the UK Culture Secretary said that one of the BBC’s “many responsibilities” was to “bring people together” and support “greater cohesion, not least among the nations of the United Kingdom.”

Now the quaint idea that many have that the BBC is somehow an ‘impartial’ reporter of events has never been true; it has always been the tool of the establishment, presenting all news from an establishment viewpoint.  But it seems to me that this is taking that lack of impartiality one stage further; this is giving the BBC an explicit responsibility to act as a tool for one particular outlook, and promote the idea that the nations of the UK are a homogeneous whole.  It says a lot about the self-styled “national newspaper of Wales” that it treats that as almost an addendum to the glorious news about us having a representative who can always be outvoted.

We need a better media than this in Wales; and in the field of broadcasting, the BBC needs to be broken up into an EBC, a WBC, a SBC and a NIBC, each with its own charter decided by the relevant devolved parliament.  And the sooner that happens the better. 

Progress depends on wanting it

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Wales is not Scotland, of course, but the recommendation by a panel of MPs that Scotland should have its own version of the News at Six in place of the ‘UK’ version currently broadcast can and should raise questions for us as well.  Since the advent of devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, policy in a number of areas has increasingly diverged.  Yet it often feels as though the BBC’s news coverage has not reflected that change.  Time after time, news bulletins refer to – or even lead with – stories on issues such as health or education which only apply in England. 

Certainly, there is usually (but not always) a caveat of some sort thrown in that the situation is different elsewhere, but similar issues in the devolved nations do not receive the same coverage.  Those who want to know what the impact of the same issue is in Wales (and presumably Scotland and Northern Ireland as well) then have to wait for the ‘regional’ news which follows; although unless there is a specifically Welsh angle, the issue may well not be covered at all.  It often seems as though the ‘Welsh’ news is more interested in simply repeating much of the ‘UK’ news.  If the principals are Welsh, then it’s generally a direct repeat; otherwise they try and find someone whose great-grandfather’s cat allegedly once visited Wales to make it sound more ‘local’. 

However, in defence of the BBC, something like 85% of the audience is in England; why wouldn’t a news programme trying to cover the whole of the UK have 85% of its ‘domestic’ news emanating from England?  The problem isn’t just an editorial one, although it’s sometimes described as such; it’s more to do with the fact that one nation of the UK is so much larger than the rest, and that a major UK institution has not adapted to a situation where there is no longer a single body of policy in the whole territory of the state - and doesn’t really seem to know how to adapt either.  It underlines the UK approach to constitutional change – tinker with one part at a time, and don’t worry about any consequences.  What’s needed is a more thorough-going rethink about the function and purpose of a single UK wide state-owned news medium in an environment for which it was never designed or built.

It’s inevitable that attention focuses on the BBC, because it’s a state-owned body; but the issue of the relevance of news provision and consumption is really much wider than that – it also includes private sector broadcasters and the print media.  The BBC itself published a story a few short months ago, highlighting the fact that only 5% of the Welsh population read a Welsh newspaper, and that four times as many people in Wales read the Daily Mail as read the Western Mail.  An academic from the Cardiff School of Journalism described the situation as being one of a ‘democratic deficit’; people in Wales voting on Welsh issues about which they were poorly informed because their news sources carried mostly stories about the situation in England.

It contributes to the situation on which I posted a few days ago; people in Wales assuming that the supposed ‘immigration crisis’ about which they read daily in the Mail and Express is not only true, but applies equally in Wales.  The issue also came to the fore in the debate prior to the EU referendum, where there was an almost complete lack of a specifically Welsh perspective on the issue.  Dr Daniel Evans of Cardiff University drew attention to this in a blog post for the LSE (see point 5 here).  The logic of having a more specifically Welsh media to report the news is clear, whether we’re talking about print media or broadcast media.

There are, however, a few problems with actually bringing that about:

·         To repeat: Wales is not Scotland, and in this context there are at least three important differences.  The first is that the smaller the population of a nation within the UK, the harder it will be to fund a specific media.  The second is that the border between Wales and England goes along the ‘long’ edge of the country; Scotland’s border goes along the ‘short’ edge.  This impacts directly on the extent to which policies (on health for instance) in England do directly affect a large number of people in Wales.  And the third is that the degree of policy difference is smaller, reflecting the more limited powers of the Assembly.

·         Horses can be led to water … by which I mean that even if there were separate Welsh news outlets available, there’s no way of being certain that people would turn to them.  If people buy the Daily Mail rather than the Western Mail, that’s the exercise of choice.  Even a vast (and much-needed) improvement in the quality of the latter newspaper would not guarantee a change in people’s preferences.

·         Is there enough Welsh news to report?  One of the depressing features of the referendum campaign was how little effort was made to put a specifically Welsh perspective on the issue; Wales’ politicians and campaigners seemed content to argue that the only real difference was the extent of our dependency on the begging bowl.

·         If sensationalism sells newspapers, what guarantees that a specifically Welsh media would be any more truthful or honest in its reporting than the English tabloids?  I sometimes think that some of those calling for a more specifically Welsh media are making an implicit assumption that the editors would be nicer and more honest people because they’d be like ‘us’ rather than like ‘them’.  I’m not sure that assumption stands up to examination.

There are other issues as well, of course, but of those listed above, I think that the second is the most important.  In the coverage a day or two ago about the matter of the ‘Scottish Six’, one of the issues raised was that there doesn’t really seem to be much demand for it amongst the consumers; the demand is driven by politicians seeking better coverage of what they’re doing rather than by the viewers.  And in this case, I suspect that what’s true for Scotland is even truer for Wales.

One can argue that it’s the result of long term conditioning or whatever; but the underlying question here is about chickens and eggs.  People won’t demand new media in their own nation until they realise the inaccuracy of what they’re getting now; and they won’t realise that until they have and use those new media.  Demands for change often seem to be predicated on the assumption that ‘others’ should do ‘something’; but unless we can first create the demand, why would they?  Like so many aspects of Wales’ situation, progress ultimately depends mostly on first creating the desire for progress.

Attacking the wrong target

Tweet Jeremy Corbyn seems to have upset some of his shadow cabinet colleagues by saying openly and honestly that, if he were Prime Minister, he would not authorise the use of nuclear weapons.  Both Labour and Tory MPs - ably aided and abetted by the BBC who seem to have swallowed their argument hook, line, and sinker - have jumped on his words as an indication that the result will somehow be to weaken the UK’s defences.  The whole point of a ‘deterrent’, they argue, is that the unspecified ‘enemies’ out there have to believe that they would be used, otherwise they’re useless.

Some of us think such weapons are useless anyway.  It’s impossible to conceive of a situation where any rational person would authorise their use.  (But perhaps that’s my problem - expecting rationality in a politician?)  Possession seems to be more about being one of the big boys in the school yard than anything else – but it’s an awfully expensive way of getting one of the biggest sticks.

Seriously, even if Corbyn had answered the question in any different way, would he have been credible?  Labour’s warmongers seem to want him to say something like, “I’ve campaigned against nuclear weapons all my life, I believe that the use or possession of such weapons is morally indefensible, but of course, if I were Prime Minister, I’d be willing to use them”? 

One has only to ask the question to see the flaw in the argument that he could or should have answered other than as he did.  He would not have been in the least bit credible.

What would be far more useful and meaningful would be to ask all those who are now criticising him to explain, or to give one hypothetical example, how and when they would be willing to authorise the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians in some distant cities.  I’m sure that they’d all respond by saying something along the lines of ‘not wanting to let the enemy know in advance what he could or could not get away with’.  But the fact that they’d all say that there are circumstances in which they would be willing to use such weapons tells us all we need to know about their moral compasses.

Corbyn isn’t the one who needs to defend his stance.

Politicians and the BBC

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And on the subject of cuts and budgets…

One much-loved trick of public bodies when engaged in a struggle to either obtain more funding or else make unpopular cuts to services is to threaten to cut the most high-profile services first.  When the initial proposals are followed by the inevitable outcry, they either end up receiving more money, or else making the cuts elsewhere.  And those alternative cuts may still be unpopular, but will end up being accepted as the lesser of two evils.

I was reminded of this when I saw the proposals from BBC Wales today.  I cannot think of anything more likely to unite politicians across parties than threatening to cut the coverage of what they say and do, and it has, indeed sparked the unsurprising outrage from three of the four Welsh parties (although the Tories for some strange reason seem not to have objected yet – another indication that they don’t really care about Welsh politics, or have they just not cottoned on yet?).

The inevitable question in my mind is this – have the BBC already got a Plan B, and what is it?

Time for a WBC

Tweet I suspect that Jeremy Hunt has been truly surprised by the reaction to his pronouncements and announcements about S4C.  He shouldn't have been, of course, but the fact that he was surprised should come as no surprise to Wales.  They don't get it, never have, and probably never will.

That doesn't mean that he can't get some things right by accident though, and I think it's important that we don't allow obvious and justified outrage at the arbitrary and rushed way he's decided the future of S4C to detract from a more rational analysis.  What is the real objection to what he's proposed?  Is it the funding of S4C from the licence fee, is it the idea of placing all publicly funded broadcasting in one place, or is it the submerging of S4C into the BBC?

I don't have any major objection to any of those, in principle - it's the detail that's the problem.  The fear that I have about giving control to the BBC is more to do with the anglo-centric nature of the BBC than with the underlying principle that the main public service broadcaster should have responsibility for braodcasting in both languages within Wales.  If a Welsh Broadcasting Corporation were on offer, funded by all licence fees collected in Wales, and answerable to the Welsh Government rather than the UK Government, how many of us would really object to giving that WBC the responsibility of providing a comprehensive service to Wales in both languages?

The apparent loss of S4C's independence appears tragic at one level; but what recent events have surely taught us is that that independence has always been somewhat illusory anyway.  He who controls the budget controls everything else, and a period of benign arms length management has lulled us into a false sense of security.  We now face the danger of a Welsh language service managed at the whim of faraway people who know little of Wales; but that's exactly where our English-language service has always been.

Time, I think, to turn events to our advantage, and use the underlying decisions of the government to make the case for a break-up of the BBC into an EBC, WBC, NIBC, and SBC.  In a digital age, those wishing to watch the England service could still do so - just as I can choose to watch French services if I choose.  And channels in Wales could always buy in programmes from elsewhere if they wanted to.  But 5% of the licence fees, re-directed to a new WBC, if used solely to produce a high quality service on TV and radio, one channel on each in each language, would go quite a long way towards giving Wales the sort of national media which are currently in short supply, I suspect.