Bias at the Mirror?

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At the WSJ, Robert Aitken looks at the BBC report on left-leaning bias in its output.

...while the report, commissioned by the BBC, is a careful piece of research, it pulls its punches when it comes to bias within its own News and Current Affairs department -- where it matters most.

To an objective reader, last week's report seems to confirm that the BBC is biased. Testimonials from serving BBC journalists and a stack of polling evidence clearly shows the gap between the "impartiality" rhetoric and the reality. Yet the old defensive reactions did kick in. Richard Tait, chairman of the BBC's "Impartiality Steering Group," point-blank denied that there is any bias in its news output. The Beeb has never been distinguished by a culture of robust self-criticism.

I know this from experience: Toward the end of my 25 years as a BBC reporter I began writing a series of internal memos, first to senior news executives and finally to the BBC's Board of Governors, detailing an entrenched liberal-left bias that seriously undermined the BBC's claim to be an impartial news provider. Referring to well-documented incidents, I posed several questions: Why did we keep hiring established left-wing pundits, but never any journalists with right-wing credentials? Why did we use "right wing" as a yah-boo term to mean "anything we don't like"? Why did we never give U.S. actions the benefit of the doubt -- in contrast to our strenuous efforts to be "fair" to Britain's avowed enemies?

The reaction was a studied indifference from everyone up the command chain.

On every issue of public policy and political controversy, the BBC's instincts are to side with the progressive, liberal wing of politics.

The war in Iraq? Opinion within the London newsrooms was overwhelmingly opposed to military action from the start and has never wavered since. Man-made climate change? The BBC has jettisoned all semblance of impartiality on the issue; it now openly campaigns with a constant stream of scare stories. The Arab-Israeli conflict? The BBC's sympathies are firmly on the side of the Palestinians, who, having achieved the status of permanent victims, escape skeptical examination of their actions and motives.

The same biases color attitudes on moral issues. Abortion? BBC reportage invariably starts from the premise that it is an unquestioned social good, and the company has close links with pro-abortion groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Multiculturalism? The BBC enthusiastically embraces a relativism that treats all cultures, no matter how backward, as equally valid and gives our own democratic traditions no special weight. Homosexuality? The BBC has consistently pushed the agenda of gay-rights activists on issues like same-sex marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples.

The reverse of the coin is that the BBC has its own in-house pariah groups: the "Christian Right," neocons, climate-change skeptics, "homophobes," George W. Bush. These people will never get the soft interview or helpful publicity.

The BBC reserves special venom for its portrayal of the Superpower. Little details betray underlying attitudes. I once spotted a poster of President Bush as Hitler in the large, shared radio current affairs newsroom; no one else seemed to mind this sophomoric but revealing prank. A much deeper anti-Americanism was at work in the reporting of the New Orleans hurricane disaster: BBC correspondents demonstrated unholy relish in dwelling on the failures in a way they would never have done had the event occurred elsewhere. The murder spree at Virginia Tech this spring was an opportunity for moralizing reports about U.S. gun laws. Reporters conveniently forgot that such tragedies happen the world over.

All these biases arise naturally from the type of organization the BBC is and the sort of people who work there. The BBC is a public-sector entity, paid for by what is essentially a universal poll tax levied on everyone with a television, and thus has an instinctive suspicion of the private sector. This colors its judgment in debates about, for instance, public health care and education. The general view is that the public sector is always superior, at least in intention, to the private.

In terms of staffing, BBC editorial people are overwhelmingly university graduates, usually in the liberal arts, and young; the official retirement age is 60, but the ranks of the over-50s are very thin. Not surprisingly there is a strong "group think" mechanism at work. It is striking how quickly the "BBC position" on any news story emerges. I know from personal experience that expressing dissent in BBC editorial meetings can be an intimidating and uncomfortable experience.