h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think the BBC is losing its reputation as a news broadcaster. Radio 4's standard remains pretty high, but it can no longer be regarded as a completely trusted source. Rather, like all media, its reports need to be taken with a pinch of salt and analysed carefully.

Well ITV and Kate Adie specifically lost my vote years ago. Largely due to a story about Ms Adie that I can't reproduce here unfortunately.

"I think the BBC is losing its reputation as a news broadcaster. Radio 4's standard remains pretty high, but it can no longer be regarded as a completely trusted source. Rather, like all media, its reports need to be taken with a pinch of salt and analysed carefully."

To some extent but I think it will make moves to deal with that. John Simpson (who has be cited as an example of someone who thinks there is bias at the Beeb and remains one of their best and most trustworthy reporters) claims there are still plenty of people at the Beeb who take its reputation seriously and follow the "no room for ranting" rule. Hopefully, we'll see more John Simpsons in the future and less "look at how Israel has blown up THIS ENTIRE TOWN" woman. Until then, I agree a pinch of salt is the best policy.

Having said that, I still trust the Beeb more than ITV news, Channel 5 news, Channel 4 news or Sky News.

Yeah, but it'd be nice if the BBC1 6 O'clock magazine would return to being a News prog...

>>
"My own opinion is that all mainstream media is now co-opted by capitalist pressures, so it's very hard to have a broad understanding of issues if one relies solely on the mainstream." (kea)

This is simply yet-another "explanation" of why the news doesn't report what certain people want to hear. What's that? Not enough coverage of our demo? Well, they must have come under pressure from The Man. It's nothing to do with it being a story that most people aren't interested in.

If "capitalist pressures" really could stop media outlets broadcasting what they didn't want you'd never hear about sweatshops or the views of trade unionists. We do, so the whole thing is nonsense.
<< Zagreb

That's not the first time you've misunderstood my point, Zagreb, and then gone on to portray what I've said as the words of a blinded leftie who thinks the world is agin them when they don't get their way. I wish you wouldn't.

What I in fact meant by that post is that ownship of media, and who controls what gets said, has changed hugely. In NZ I'm not sure if any of the newspapers in the main cities are independant any more, and that's a change of the last 15 or so years. There *has* been a noticeable change in both content and editorial policy in papers here. The main 'left' magazine (the weekly Listener) likewise underwent a noticeable change when its ownership changed. Staff, including editors, change, new staff have different biases, over time this affects the general tone of the paper/magazine.

That's all fairly routine stuff, and it gets talked about in media analysis media. Anyone who thinks that ownership has no influence on content and editorial policy is ignorant or naive.


>>
If "capitalist pressures" really could stop media outlets broadcasting what they didn't want you'd never hear about sweatshops or the views of trade unionists. We do, so the whole thing is nonsense.
<<

This is also ignorant, or at least obtuse. All you have to do is compare coverage by say the BBC, CNN, Fox, Indymedia, various blogs, independant journos, etc to see that the same event can have many different tellings. So we do hear about sweatshops and the views of trade unionists, duh, but we hear about them in the ways that the mainstream dictates. My point was that that mainstream view is now controlled by a much smaller number of people than in the past i.e. capitalist culture has allowed the major media networks to be colonised by the few. Do they have absolute control? Obviously not. Have they affected what we get to see, hear, read? Yes they have.


As for the BBC, SWL you still seem to be under the illusion that any media can be without bias. Can you give an example of any media organisation that is without the bias that you condemn in the BBC?

>>
Bias is hard to avoid because of the personal opinions of those involved, but what really should be nailed is the *accuracy* of the reporting.
<< Iaconian

That is one of the most pertinent things that's been said in this thread.

What is News 24 like in comparison to the normal TV bulletins?

I cannot help thinking that the amount of "time" available to cover storys will affect this. Newsnight, C4 News, Radio 4 have much more time available to go into depth in stories.

>>I cannot help thinking that the amount of "time" available to cover storys will affect this. Newsnight, C4 News, Radio 4 have much more time available to go into depth in stories.<<

I think this is at the heart of the matter, and it's related to the audience as well. The BBCs flagship news bulletins - BBC Breakfast, News at 1, News at 6 and News at 10 are all general round-ups that lack any real depth.

However the assumption goes that most of their audiences at that time aren't looking depth, they're looking to be told the gist of the major stories while they're doing or preparing for something else: work, having a lunchbreak, preparing dinner or getting ready for bed. It's reasoned that if people want in-depth coverage they'll watch Newsnight or they'll check the internet.

I can personally attest to this: when I was studying for my PGCE I simply didn't have the time to watch Newsnight or the Channel 4 news. I settled for 30 minutes of Breakfast and the 10 o'clock news just so I knew what was going on in the world. On a Saturday I'd buy and read the Economist* and rely on that for the detail behind the major stories (although I'm well aware of its particular bias). Now I'm between jobs I have the time to watch Newsnight and Channel 4 news and I find myself frustrated with the other BBC news programmes.

When you can't cover a story in depth the choices you make in your cuts *inevitably* reveal a bias of some sort - what a person doesn't say can be as crucial as what they do say. This is a call the BBC editors have to make, and it's not a job I envy.

The crucial point is that the BBC does have some excellent programmes that are as impartial as humanly possible and they are well-advertised. Newsnight is one of the most respected news programmes in the world for a reason and at the end of every single 10 o'clock news the presenter says "For more detail on today's stories Newsnight is starting on BBC2 now" or words to that effect - it'd be hard to make it any more explicit. Now contrast this with ITV or Channel 5 - ITV is news is dross of the lowest calibre, full of bias and scaremongering and nowhere on that channel will you find an outlet for decent reporting and journalism

The other issue with bias is that it is very hard to take the 'neutral chair' approach because the issues are emotive. I believe on of the biggest problems with politics right now is that the BBC takes the neutral chair stance and politics comes across as very, very boring. The alternative would be to have a programme where all sides can be as passionate as they like - really get to the heart of politics - but be given completely equal treatment but it'll never happen because of scheduling.

Then there's the point of malcontents who are simply wrong - rare, I accept, but it does happen - take Zimbabwe for example. The BBC has been said to have an anti-Mugabe bias, but this ignores the fact the the Mugabe regime lacks redeeming features - there is nothing good anyone can say about this abhorrent situation.

Just posting this is a separate post in case it gets modded - didn't want to lose everything else I'd written.

There are times when the BBC shows quite disgraceful bias and it angers me immensely. Two examples that spring to mind are the Danish cartoon fiasco and Saudi Arabia.

During the Danish cartoon fiasco the BBC displayed incredible cowardice and in doing so let a bunch of reprehensible fanatics undermine everything the BBC is supposed to stand for. The incident was a serious attack on the BBC itself and their response was to let it happen. This showed a strong bias towards religious fundamentalism and terrorism, all because the BBC lacked the testicular fortitude to stand up for itself.

The case with Saudi Arabia is a personal bugbear of mine, so I'll accept accusations of impartiality. The political and societal situation in Saudi Arabia is one of the most disgusting situations I can imagine for so many reasons - a feudal politcal structure, dehumanising attitude towards women and complete religious intolerance and fundamentalism being the most severe. How often does the BBC report on this? To my knowledge, never.

This article is getting old now, but it is still relevant:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/09/09/do0901.xml

Jeremy Paxman's recent lecture.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/08/the_james_mactaggart_memorial_lecture.html

FB: "Crikey I would hate to have been off hootoo for a couple of days and have to trawl through this backlog "

Well, unfortunately that's exactly what happened to me! Ho hum, this morning's work wasn't really very important anyway...

Anyway, my point of view on this: I agree with SWL that there is a bias, but I disagree about the exact nature of the bias. As far as I can tell, it's a pro-New Labour bias, which is not to say it's either left or right wing. I imagine that the BBC has lots of staff who are to the left of NL but support it anyway because they think it's better than the alternative. This explains how the BBC could indeed have the sort of individual liberal bias that Marr has commented on, whilst also having a systematic bias in favour of what the government is doing (which will be described by different people as left-wing or right-wing depending on their own point of view).

Personally, I think NL are a centre-right government based on their free market ideology (privatisations which previous Tory governments had considered going too far), their authoritarianism (Terrorism Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, etc.), etc. That's my point of view though, and I've no idea how many people would share it. I wouldn't like to define the political 'centre' by the middle point of the two main political parties because that makes a whole bundle of assumptions about the relationship between the stances of the main political parties, and the interests and opinions of the population and other groups.

Going back to the Beeb - there are various factors which contribute to the problems. For a start, they are very weak willed, especially after the Hutton inquiry. To be of any use at all, news has to be critical: critical of power, and those who potentially might be in power (and not just political power either). A timid organisation like the BBC, which doesn't want to tred on any of the toes of people who have or might have power, cannot fulfill this role. This leads to the triviality of the Beeb.

My overwhelming impression on watching the BBC news is not the bias (although I do notice this quite strongly), but of boredom. The stories they choose to cover, and the way they cover them, rarely tells me anything beyond what is in the news agency reports (AP, Reuters, etc.), and almost never gives me any new *understanding* of what is going on. I'd like to point out here, to avoid misunderstanding, that analysis is not the same as comment. There is of course potential for bias in analysis, just as in comment or reporting of the facts, but it nonetheless has an important role. As a left-winger, I would rather have analysis from a right-winger than no analysis at all (although analysis from both sides would be best). The role of analysis is to put relevant facts together which you as an individual couldn't do. We don't have the time to read as much news as journalists do, and without their experience we might miss significant connections between things, so we rely on their analysis. BBC analysis rarely seems to get beyond the level of 'this will be embarassing for the government' - which leaves me wondering: what does that even mean? Why should we care? What is the actual significance of it?

This ties in with another problem that the BBC shares with most news outlets, which is that the quality of journalism is very low. There is relatively little investigative journalism for example, presumably because this is very expensive compared to just reprinting agency reports. Now this is what annoys me about the BBC. Other news agencies are under strong commercial and competitive pressures and so they have to do this. When margins are very slim, you have to cut costs, and high quality investigative journalism it turns out is not a particularly profitable venture. But the BBC are not under these same pressures, and could be doing exactly this sort of journalism. Instead, they do rubbish like the Panorama Wi-Fi investigation that someone mentioned earlier.

Zagreb,

"If "capitalist pressures" really could stop media outlets broadcasting what they didn't want you'd never hear about sweatshops or the views of trade unionists. We do, so the whole thing is nonsense."

This is slightly tangential to the rest of this thread, but it's a subject I'm quite interested in so I'll reply briefly. The problem is not so much that powerful capitalists ring up newspapers and say to them "don't run stories on X or you'll be for it" (although that does happen and there are several well documented instances of it), but that there are 'pressures' (as the original poster carefully wrote). One pressure is the small margins that news outlets use, which as I noted above minimises the amount of independent analysis and investigative reporting that news companies can profitably do. This means greater reliance on press releases (often whole chunks of articles are literally copied and pasted from corporate press releases), and little challenging of accepted viewpoints, etc. Another pressure is advertising. Just been looking around trying to get accurate figures, but haven't got time to be 100% sure. It looks as though in the UK the average newspaper gets 65% of its revenue from advertising (87% in the US). Interestingly, it may be the case (it was in 1975) that 'quality' dailies get a higher percentage of their revenues from advertising than other papers. I have read that 'The Independent' gets 75% of its revenues from advertising, but I can't substantiate that. Anyway, let's say 60% of your income comes from advertisers, and 40% from readers. Who is more important to you? Obviously it's more complex than that because advertisers wouldn't pay that money if people weren't reading the paper, but it's naive to suggest that newspapers just give people what they want as if there were no commercial pressures.

Read more on my blog:

http://thesamovar.wordpress.com/2006/11/18/media-freedom/

I read that Paxman lecture with great interest. He talks a great deal of sense.

First thing, I first noticed this quote at http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/:
>>The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?<<
This makes it sound like Paxman is against the idea of a publicly funded BBC, but, read in context of the rest of the lecture, it seems to me he is saying it is pointless having a TV license when TV is just part of the BBC's output.

That's a long lecture so I don't suppose everyone will want to read it end to end. So I've picked out two paragraphs which I think are especially relevant to the way TV news is produced.

>>In fact I fear there’s a dreary tendency on all our parts whenever a story breaks to address it by asking for an interview with the minister responsible. I’ll give you an example. When we learned a few weeks ago that ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ meant that thousands of prisoners were going to be released early, it was an opportunity to have a sensible, grown-up discussion about why we lock so many people up in this country, what we do with them while they’re there, and whether releasing them a few weeks early makes any difference. That discussion might have involved people who know about penal policy, maybe a prison governor, and perhaps a thoughtful ex –con. Instead of which what did we end up with on Newsnight (and elsewhere)? The latest prison minister and his conservative shadow. Why do we do that? Because we’re too close to Westminster politics, and because when the production desk is being run ragged, looking for guests, the one thing you can be sure about is a politician’s willingness to spout confidently.<<

>>The answer to the question of whether people like me have any special right to interrogate the powerful is no: I have just the same right as anyone else. The only difference between my position and that of any other citizen is not entitlement but opportunity. I’ve got the chance. But the justification is built on an intuitive understanding of what the function of the medium is. That we ask the questions the average reasonably intelligent member of the public would like to see asked. And if you ask a question, you owe it to the audience to get an answer. Even if you have to ask the question more than once. Or more than a dozen times.<<

Good old Paxo!

Surely when one man has control over so much of the media output in this country, then he also has control over what the news agenda is.

If the majority of newspapers are running with a story, the BBC is almost oblidged to have an angle on it.

"During the Danish cartoon fiasco the BBC displayed incredible cowardice and in doing so let a bunch of reprehensible fanatics undermine everything the BBC is supposed to stand for. The incident was a serious attack on the BBC itself and their response was to let it happen. This showed a strong bias towards religious fundamentalism and terrorism, all because the BBC lacked the testicular fortitude to stand up for itself."

Except it wasn't just the BBC - no British media covered the Danish cartoons and the UK government itself attacked the "offense" they generated. And yet you single out the BBC and make it the whipping boy for the crimes of a whole host of media. Might give people the impression your issue is specifically with the Beeb...

"The case with Saudi Arabia is a personal bugbear of mine, so I'll accept accusations of impartiality. The political and societal situation in Saudi Arabia is one of the most disgusting situations I can imagine for so many reasons - a feudal politcal structure, dehumanising attitude towards women and complete religious intolerance and fundamentalism being the most severe. How often does the BBC report on this? To my knowledge, never."

How often does it report on X conditions in X totalitarian country? There needs to be an angle. North Korea was pretty much ignored until Kim Il Jong died in 1994 when there were suddenly reports all over the news about the "last Stalinist outpost" and we all found out what it was like in the country. Then it all went quiet again until the fuss kicked-up with South Korea and later the US in the 2000s and we suddenly had reports on "conditions inside the last Communist state" etc etc. BBC (and other news outlets) report on the internal state of other countries when it makes the news and there is public interest. I used to see plenty of news reports about the internal state of Burma (now Myangmar) in 1995 now I see none at all beause the country's legal leader hasn't recently been imprisoned. And then there's Afghanistan - big news in the 1980s, then little until the Taliban took over in 1996, then little until the war with the West in 2001...

I also note that you have, again, singled-out the BBC for a "crime" other news outlets are equally guilty of. Someone might think...etc..etc.

I think the point is, more is expected of the BBC because it is publicly funded.

"Personally, I think NL are a centre-right government based on their free market ideology (privatisations which previous Tory governments had considered going too far), their authoritarianism (Terrorism Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, etc.), etc. That's my point of view though, and I've no idea how many people would share it."

I think that makes the modern mistake of thinking free-market = rightwing and authoritarian = rightwing. The free-market it simply a system, the right/left aspect comes from what people think it's for and what they want to do with it. It's worth remembering that Adam Smith, the man who invented the whole shebang, was a liberal who thought free market economics was a smashing way of helping the poor. And that's before I get to pro-market leftists like the Mexican republicans of the 19th century, the modern Hungarian socialist party (leftist, strongly pro-market and ironically born of the old communist party) and the third way ideology. Or, for that matter, anti-free-market rightist movements like fascism, the modern BNP, and the Spanish Francoists (all of whom favoured a corporatist "class co-operation" between workers and businesses).

"Going back to the Beeb - there are various factors which contribute to the problems. For a start, they are very weak willed, especially after the Hutton inquiry. To be of any use at all, news has to be critical: critical of power, and those who potentially might be in power (and not just political power either). A timid organisation like the BBC, which doesn't want to tred on any of the toes of people who have or might have power, cannot fulfill this role. This leads to the triviality of the Beeb."

I don't think the BBC is "timid" or not "critical of power". The problem with the Hutton thing was that it took a position and attacked the government which is different from general criticism and was thus overstepping its remit. You might agree with the *reasons* it attacked the government but that's not the point.

"My overwhelming impression on watching the BBC news is not the bias (although I do notice this quite strongly), but of boredom. The stories they choose to cover, and the way they cover them, rarely tells me anything beyond what is in the news agency reports (AP, Reuters, etc.), and almost never gives me any new *understanding* of what is going on. I'd like to point out here, to avoid misunderstanding, that analysis is not the same as comment. There is of course potential for bias in analysis, just as in comment or reporting of the facts, but it nonetheless has an important role. As a left-winger, I would rather have analysis from a right-winger than no analysis at all (although analysis from both sides would be best). The role of analysis is to put relevant facts together which you as an individual couldn't do. We don't have the time to read as much news as journalists do, and without their experience we might miss significant connections between things, so we rely on their analysis. BBC analysis rarely seems to get beyond the level of 'this will be embarassing for the government' - which leaves me wondering: what does that even mean? Why should we care? What is the actual significance of it?"

Ah, at last something I can wholeheartedly agree with. I think the problem with modern news reporting in general is exactly this - that it's assumed that the average viewer isn't very bright and doesn't want any serious analysis so we don't get any which leaves the reporting looking shallow. However, I do worry that "analysis" can easily spill over into "opinion" although that's hard to avoid. Perhaps, as you suggest, the BBC should have analysis from both sides of the debate in some way.

"This ties in with another problem that the BBC shares with most news outlets, which is that the quality of journalism is very low. There is relatively little investigative journalism for example, presumably because this is very expensive compared to just reprinting agency reports. Now this is what annoys me about the BBC. Other news agencies are under strong commercial and competitive pressures and so they have to do this. When margins are very slim, you have to cut costs, and high quality investigative journalism it turns out is not a particularly profitable venture. But the BBC are not under these same pressures, and could be doing exactly this sort of journalism. Instead, they do rubbish like the Panorama Wi-Fi investigation that someone mentioned earlier."

Hmm, again I can't agree. I think generally standards of journalism are lower than they should be but there is still some excellent BBC reportage of certain things (like I said, one of the best examples of this was some BBC radio news covering the Israeli pull-out from the Gaza strip which managed to be informative and balanced - it remains the only time I heard the opinions of Israeli settlers in a news report on the issue). As for "investigative journalism" I think you're taking an easy pot-shot with the Panorama "Wi-Fi" thing. I think it was last night Newsnight reported on an investigation into a radical rightwing Islamist group (their name's a bit complex Ta'u Hut Dya or something nothing like that) and I saw a spot on it featuring an interview with a former member of the group who left it and now campaigns against it. I didn't see the programme, alas, but it struck me as exactly the sort of thing the Beeb should be doing investigations into (little is known about Islamism by the general public - compare to their "shock" investigation into the BNP which told us all that the BNP was a racist fascist party. Well I never). Having said that, Channel 4 shows like "Unreported World" seem to be covering the stories that I think the Beeb should do more as well.

Hizb ut Tahrir

>>And yet you single out the BBC and make it the whipping boy for the crimes of a whole host of media. Might give people the impression your issue is specifically with the Beeb...<<

As laconian correctly guessed I single out the Beeb because I expect so much better from it and because this thread is about the BBC - I'd make the same charge about Channel 4 for whom I have similar feelings of disgust in this case. As I had already said ITV and Channel 5 news aren't worth considering as their news programmes are dreadful already.

>>How often does it report on X conditions in X totalitarian country?<<

The difference between Saudi and North Korea, Myanmar and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is that Saudi isn't isolationist - it's part of the global community. The others cut themselves off and I think it's an important difference - when a country cuts itself off there's little we can do to influence that country because that country doesn't care about the British public because our companies or government has no power.

A better comparison would be Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan as both came out of their post-Soviet isolation. Turkmenistan is a particularly good example because the BBC got it right - as it started to enter the world economy and its gas industry was developed the BBC started to report on the insanity of Niyazov's regime. It has taken an impartial approach to Kazakhstan as well - talking about the good and bad points of Nabaryev's government.

In a country like Saudi, if the British public knew the sort of things that go on, there'd be an outcry and the government and business would be put under pressure to do something. I believe that this job of providing the British public with this sort of information belongs to the BBC.

If I didn't make it clear in my first post, I'm usually a strong supporter of the BBC and that's why these examples get me so riled up. The BBC is one of the best, most trusted, most reliable news sources in the world. It shouldn't be pointing to its rivals saying "But *they* aren't doing it" like a wingeing child

I get so angry because I expect so much better from them. It might be completely unrealistic but I genuinely think the Beeb is up to it.