When an agent of the Tory party decides the BBC’s
‘bias’, it’s a huge problem
Emily
Maitlis
All too often, news media are primed to back down,
even apologise, to prove how fair they are. That can be exploited
Thu 25 Aug
2022 13.22 BST
This is not
a post-BBC ex-employee rant. I had two decades of opportunity that could not be
bettered. But it is an exhalation. A deep breath out. All the things that
wisely could not be said then, can be said more easily now.
Things that
for many decades were givens – the checks and balances on the executive, the
role of the judiciary or the civil service, a media free from interference or
vilification – now appear vulnerable.
Things that
once would have shocked us now seem commonplace. The ministerial code violated
with impunity. The unlawful attempt to prorogue parliament for five weeks; the
blink-and-you-miss-it moment the governing party’s Twitter account changed its
name to “factcheckUK” – in the middle of an election campaign, to coat party
propaganda in a format that sounded objective. Or the admission by the then
Northern Ireland secretary that he would be prepared to break international
law.
The
long-term effect of those trends I will leave to others. Today I want to look
at where we come in. Journalists. Broadcasters. Specifically, the impact that
populist rhetoric is having on the way we do our job as journalists.
I remember,
to my shame, interviewing the Trump acolyte Sebastian Gorka on Newsnight in the
early days of the Trump victory. Gorka would use up most of the interview time
by screaming abuse at the BBC. He didn’t have any problem with the BBC. He
quite liked the BBC. He was always happy to say yes to the interview. But he
used our time on air – and that of many of my colleagues – as an effective
conduit to sell a key populist message: that the mainstream media could be
dismissed as “fake”. Once you understand how this works, it seems so obvious.
You kick down belief in a trusted source of news, you make the audience doubt
what they are seeing and you step into the breach; a shameless play for power
and dominance.
As a
journalist, I was mortified. I would spend half our allotted interview time
trying to defend our objectivity and the rest bending over backwards to
reconcile his strangled version of the truth, just to prove his criticism of me
wrong. (In so doing, ironically, I lost the very objectivity I was seeking to
defend.)
This was
when Donald Trump was already finding his feet as president. But our mistakes
started long before that. Let me take you this time to early 2016. The UK is
beginning to debate the big questions around Britain’s potential exit from the
EU. It is complicated stuff: we are trying to offer our viewers both sides of a
fiendishly difficult debate. And that intention was right. But we still got it
wrong. We fell into what we might call “the Patrick Minford paradigm”. In other
words, it might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who
feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. But by the
time we went on air, we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal
effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.
I would
later learn the ungainly name for this myopic style of journalism: “both
sideism”, which talks to the way it reaches a superficial balance while
obscuring a deeper truth.
I remember
the time we were granted an interview with Robert De Niro from New York. It was
the height of Covid: New York had been decimated by the disease, makeshift
morgues and a ghostly city abandoned by anyone with the means to leave. It was
a sobering but equally an exciting time to have an interview with one of the
world’s bestloved actors. And I wanted to know what it felt like for the
archetypal New Yorker to see the city and its people so bereft.
As we began
the interview, however, it was clear that De Niro had other things on his mind
than New York. He wanted to rage about President Trump’s mishandling of the
pandemic. He accused him of not caring how many died. It was – for context – three
weeks after Trump had given the infamous “bleach” press conference where he was
seen to be suggesting the use of disinfectant to fight Covid inside the body.
De Niro
told me: “It’s scary because everyone is sort of nonplussed and stunned at what
this guy Trump is doing … You’ve got a lunatic saying things that people are
trying to dance around – it’s appalling.”
In my ear,
my editor is urging me, as is his editorial job, to put the other side. But I
am resisting it because – quite frankly – what is the other side? Do I say:
“Nonsense, bleach might work – we just won’t know until we’ve tried!” Or do I
pretend he didn’t mention disinfectant when it’s there on tape? Or do I say:
“You’re only saying that because you’re a liberal lefty luvvie Democrat”? Which
doesn’t seem to capture the gravitas of this moment when he’s talking about the
horrendous death toll America is witnessing.
As an
attempt at pushback, I begin: “Trump’s fanbase would take issue with that.”
The reason
I’m recounting this is not for the exchange, but for what happens next. I am
terrified that by putting out the interview as it stands we will be seen as
biased. De Niro is a world-famous actor, and a New Yorker, and has chosen our
programme, Newsnight, as the place to land his thoughts quite carefully. So why
do I feel unable to let him say it without trying to find an equally
world-famous actor who that same night is miraculously going to tell us the
opposite?
It speaks
again to how forcefully even imagined populist accusations of bias work on the
journalist’s brain. To the point where we censor our own interviews to avoid
the backlash.
The coda to
this story is that the De Niro interview did go out. And the sky didn’t fall
down. And the news lines were picked up around the world. But it’s curious now
to look back on our reactions because of what happened two weeks later.
The
now-infamous Dominic Cummings Newsnight introduction got way more attention
than in truth it ever deserved. It stated bluntly and baldly that he had broken
the rules. And it asked why the government – Boris Johnson – was standing by
him. The introduction set out, as is often the case, the rest of the show. We
had Conservative MPs explaining the PM’s loyalty, we had pollsters explaining
the public horror on this issue, we had defenders, we had critics and we had a
detailed analysis of which rules had been broken and when. In other words, the
introduction was a precis of what viewers could expect of the whole show. And
on the night itself, the programme passed off with a few pleasant texts from
BBC editors and frankly little else.
It was only
the next morning that the wheels fell off. A phone call of complaint was made
from Downing Street to the BBC News management. This, for context, is not
unusual. It wasn’t unusual in the Blair days – far from it – in the Brown days,
in the Cameron days. What I’m saying is, it’s normal for government spin
doctors to vocalise their displeasure to journalists.
What was
not foreseen was the speed with which the BBC sought to pacify the complainant.
Within hours, a very public apology was made, the programme was accused of a
failure of impartiality, the recording disappeared from iPlayer, and there were
paparazzi outside my front door.
Now, don’t
get me wrong. I’m not trying to pretend our intro was the Gettysburg address.
When I hear it now I think it was rather long-winded, wordy and sounded a bit
piqued. But I don’t think: “Wow, what a shocking breach of impartiality because
we called out the actions of one of the chief architects of the Covid laws.”
We show our
impartiality when we report without fear or favour. When we are not scared to
hold power to account, even when it feels uncomfortable to do so. When we
understand that if we’ve covered rule-breaking by a Scottish chief medical
officer or an English government scientist then journalistic rigour should be
applied to those who make policy within No 10. The one person – ironically –
who understood this was Dominic Cummings himself. Who texted me that very
evening to offer his wry support.
So, back to
the speed of response. Why had the BBC immediately and publicly sought to
confirm the government spokesman’s opinion? Without any kind of due process? It
makes no sense for an organisation that is admirably, famously rigorous about
procedure – unless it was perhaps sending a message of reassurance directly to
the government itself?
Put this in
the context of the BBC board, where another active agent of the Conservative
party – former Downing Street spin doctor, and former adviser to BBC rival GB
News [Sir Robbie Gibb] – now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality. According
to the Financial Times, he’s attempted to block the appointments of journalists
he considers damaging to government relations, provoking Labour’s deputy leader
(among others) to call it “Tory cronyism at the heart of the BBC”.
We –
journalists, management teams, organisations – are primed to back down, even
apologise, to prove how journalistically fair we are being. That can be
exploited by those crying “bias”. If it suits those in power to shut us up – or
down – they can. Critically, it’s lose-lose for the audience.
This
summer, we’ve watched the havoc at Dover customs meet with a wall of silence
around Brexit. Those who promised to get Brexit done can’t mention it – because
it clearly isn’t. Their insistence on “third nation” status has meant passport
checks and horrendous waiting times. Labour avoids talking about Brexit because
it’s decided – rightly or wrongly – to distance itself from remainer tags. And
large sections of both the BBC and government-supporting newspapers appear to
go into an automatic crouch position whenever the Brexit issue looms large.
Many
broadcasters fear discussing the obvious economic cause of major change in this
country in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still,
as above: unpatriotic. And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with
glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are
pushing the public further away.
Emily
Maitlis is a former Newsnight presenter. The News Agents, her daily Global
Radio podcast with the BBC’s former North America editor, Jon Sopel, launches
on Tuesday
Taken from
the MacTaggart Lecture, given by Emily Maitlis at the Edinburgh TV Festival
2022, which is available on YouTube, and also on The News Agents podcast
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