-Caveat Lector- November 17, 2002
Let's hear it for prejudiced television news As debate rages about the need for balance in British broadcasting, Andrew Sullivan calls for an injection of honest bias, US-style. Before you continue reading, I have a confession. I am biased. I have opinions - quite strong ones at times - on events. On many issues I have conservative views. On some I have somewhat liberal ones. The only thing that connects them is my general point of view which is the product of my idiosyncratic thinking, reading and arguing. To put it another way: I have no intention of trying to persuade you of something in which I don't believe. And a large part of my motive in writing at all is to promote my own view of the world, however implausible to some, at the expense of others. Got that? I have a feeling you do. This is a newspaper, after all. And columns in a newspaper invariably have a point of view. And in each newspaper you won't necessarily get a full range of all the possible ideas and arguments out there. Nobody thinks this paper is interchangeable with The Observer, for example. And nobody thinks that's particularly outrageous. So why, one wonders, do we think so differently about television? Two weeks ago the Independent Television Commission reprimanded the US-based cable channel CNBC for an opinion and news programme that featured only the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The programme was deemed too biased and was barred from being broadcast in Britain. It seems that while British readers are considered mature enough to distinguish between news and comment, British viewers are not. Simple questions: aren't they often the same people? And what is so unique about television that it requires some elusive quality called "objectivity"? I can see the argument, perhaps, in the 1940s when there was only the BBC and its power was so great and its reach so comprehensive that some rigid internal balance was deemed important. (Even in the 1940s, of course, the BBC was anything but unbiased, representing establishment Britain in largely conservative form.) But today? With dozens of television options to choose from, why on earth is "objectivity" deemed to be important to each? Why are viewers not allowed to pick and choose between differing viewpoints? Why are producers, editors and writers required to be "balanced" in their output? Perhaps a look at the United States confirms for some what a hellish place the world would be with the freedom to produce the media that producers enjoy and viewers want. In America, dozens of channels compete with each other and with subsidised public television and radio. Some stations - are you sitting down? - actually promote a liberal or a conservative view of the world. One of the newest and most successful cable channels, Fox News (owned by The News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times), touts itself as an antidote to the liberalism endemic to much of the rest of television. Others, such as National Public Radio, are proud of their liberal tradition and make only superficial attempts to disguise it. Dan Rather, the long-standing anchor for CBS News, has hosted fundraisers for the Democrats and makes no bones about his liberal opinions. Peter Jennings, the ABC News anchor, is an avowed critic of Israel's policies in the West Bank. And the moderator for This Week, the ABC News Sunday morning talk show, is George Stephanopoulos, one of Bill Clinton's chief and early enablers. Does this debase the American body politic? I don't think so. Bias is inevitable in any grown-up journalist's work. You can try to be balanced (and you're a better journalist for it) but in your choice of topics, selection of guests, presentation of facts, you inevitably show your hand. This isn't to say that journalism should degenerate into simple propaganda or outright advocacy, at least not in the presentation of news rather than opinion. Trying to present many sides of an issue is the mark of an honest journalist; maintaining a distinction between news and opinion is the mark of an honest editor. But such honesty also requires that we don't pompously claim an absence of any bias or claim the mantle of complete impartiality when such pristine neutrality is simply impossible. And that's the problem with the BBC and the regulation of television in Britain. In fact, the only time when things can go truly awry is when biased journalists pretend they're completely objective. When viewers actually imbibe the biased news as if it were neutral, the danger begins. The viewer's guard is down; the programme presents itself as authoritative and propaganda can get passed off as journalism. The threat is not bias but the notion that bias can be abolished. That's when deception - a more alarming issue - begins. The classic American examples are National Public Radio and The New York Times. Virtually no Republicans work in either. The news stories reflect, in the case of NPR, a benevolent, well meaning but thoroughly liberal view of the world. In the case of The New York Times, the news stories do exactly what they do in The Guardian: they are designed, edited and written to promote a political agenda. That's not to say they aren't often informative or interesting or excellent. But for the most part the bias is so obvious that it scarcely needs pointing out. The classic British example, in contrast, is the BBC. I grew up on Radio 4 and took it as gospel. Only later in life when you see who actually went into the BBC as a career do you realise how skewed it is. Nobody I knew in my generation who had anything good to say about Margaret Thatcher went into the BBC. Why would we be shocked to find that, two decades later, news coverage reflects this view of the world? Take the recent BBC mini-series on new Labour, The Project. Tory newspapers pounced on it as proof of new Labour iniquity when in fact its entire plot is straight from the left's playbook. The equation of political realism with corruption, the assumption that pouring more money into unreformed public services is obviously a good thing, the critical importance of the Freedom of Information Act - whatever else these are, they certainly aren't part of Middle England's view of the world. Yet these assertions are presented as drama - as subtle a form of propaganda as you can find. And there's a long tradition of this - from Granada television in the 1960s and 1970s to the contemporary products of left-wing extremists such as John Pilger. Watching the BBC when I visit Britain is an eye-opener. The soft anti-Americanism, the unreflective Third-Worldism, the facile assumption that old-style statist policies on the environment are correct, the instinctual loathing of Israel, the benevolent multiculturalism, the equation of the European Union with the future all reflect an effortless left-liberal viewpoint. The BBC World News channel in America reflects the same bias. Last week, for example, I watched a BBC broadcast that depicted the Iraqi parliament as if it were an actual parliament, with elected officials and some role independent of the dictatorship it serves. No context was provided and the sole commentator was James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute. >From what I have seen in Britain, this is par for the course. And I see nothing wrong with this as such. There's a place for a left- leaning network for Britain. What's wrong is the pretence that the BBC is somehow neutral, objective or balanced. And what makes this doubly wrong is that it is paid for by the licence fee. I can see why people in a free society should tolerate a television channel that promotes a viewpoint with which they disagree. I don't see why they should also be forced to pay for it and then be denied the opportunity to have an alternative by specious regulations over something ludicrously called "balance". When experts ask why audiences for television news have declined, they might think about that point. For years American television executives also asked themselves why their ratings were in decline. Of course, as liberals they couldn't actually see their own bias and so looked elsewhere for reasons. When Fox News came along and won massive ratings almost from its debut, they still refused to recognise what had gone wrong. So the idea that some television channels should actually have a viewpoint, recommended recently by Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas of Cardiff University, is not so absurd. This is especially true when it comes to political coverage where opinions are always going to be divided. One of the glories of British culture is its scrappy and competitive press, which gives a variety of viewpoints in ways that America's monopolistic and pious newspapers don't. Why not convey some of this talent into television and radio? Such competition doesn't mean a lowering of standards but clearer and fairer criteria with which to judge media products. Excessively slanted shows will lose viewers. Opinionated programmes that also try to address opposing viewpoints will do well. If the BBC is to remain in its current form, maybe it can loosen up and let some conservatives produce a few talk shows or interview programmes. Let the bias be upfront and enjoyable. Give different viewpoints a chance. Let the real old Labour lefties rip as well, without passing themselves off as purveyors of neutral drama or documentary. One of the oddities of, say, Fox News in America is that its viewers are by no means all conservatives. Liberals tune in as well to see and hear viewpoints that are obscured by the suffocating liberalism of the pseudo-objective networks. Nobody loses. And politics - especially knowledge and awareness of politics - can only gain. Why not in Britain and why not soon? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-482392,00.html <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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