Newspapers keep flushing the BBC's head down the loo; it likes it

... and while the corporation's independent review into impartiality can explain many things, it can't explain that.

Jan 31, 2023

Previously: Boris and the missile | Marie and the mess
When quotes get streamlined, stories become what we want them to be rather than what they actually are...

Doing early shifts, you’re picking up what’s in the papers because that’s the news that’s been generated overnight that is the basis of the national conversation the next morning… the organisation is far too swayed by what’s in the newspapers. And that’s increasingly so when the newspaper readership is absolutely dwindling… [I think] a reason we come to rely on the papers a bit too much is because they are decisive about what is happening… I just wonder sometimes: Do we let the newspapers take charge of what’s going on?

— Review of the impartiality of BBC coverage of taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot (November 2022)

When the BBC published the conclusions of the ‘independent’ Blastland-Dilnot review into the impartiality of its economics coverage yesterday, its 49 pages were immediately boiled down to the harshest and most bad-faith-drenched1 interpretation by the national newspapers it relies upon so much. The corporation’s relationship with the press is a bit like a kid grateful to a bully who bog washes2 them because it’s attention and at least it makes them feel something.3

The Daily Mail went with the headline…

BBC journalists 'don't grasp basic economics' and are guilty of 'uninformed group-think' which is creating a risk to impartiality, independent review finds

… and quoted with unsurprising selectiveness to avoid positive comments and focus on the lines that adhere most with the Rothermere-endorsed worldview. While the first line says, “Too many journalists at the BBC…” and an update appended at the end of the long article notes…

This article was amended slightly to reflect that the report criticised the competence of BBC journalists in covering economics when this was not their specialist subject, rather than the BBC’s economics coverage as a whole

… the headline and copy are designed to reinforce a sense in the reader’s mind that all journalists at the BBC covering economic topics are sub-par.

The Daily Telegraph’s headline reads…

BBC impartiality at risk because journalists ‘lack understanding of basic economics’

… and keeps this detail below the fold/after the scroll:

The report said the criticism was aimed at “non-specialist” reporters, but added that “even senior journalists” have shown that they do not fully understand all the arguments.

It also must have required an industrial amount of gall for the Telegraph to raise its institutional eyebrow at the suggestion that…

… a lack of “wise heads” in the newsroom had led to the BBC commissioning popular journalism stories based “on what people are searching for on Google”.

… when its executives have often pushed SEO and Google-addled policies; in 2021, a leaked memo revealed that Telegraph bosses planned to link staff pay with the story performance. A case study published by DataIQ in May 2022 with the Telegraph’s Head of Editorial Insight, Emma Wicks, confirms that ‘stars’ are still a key measure of a journalist’s success in the organisation. The paper’s website has a whole category dedicated to “culture war” stories.

The Times headline is even blunter…

BBC impartiality ‘threatened by economic ignorance’

… though the copy at least mentions early on that “[the report’s] authors said [their conclusions] largely applied to other parts of the UK media”.

That credit is immediately spent, however, as the story then uses the same tricks as The Daily Mail coverage, with fragments of quotes selected to provide a partial picture that fits with the company line.

The Daily Express focuses on a quote about “uninformed groupthink”, which is a bit like Machiavelli calling someone else sneaky. The i paper offers a slightly different line (BBC told that many viewers find its economics coverage incomprehensible), Stephen Bush, in his Financial Times newsletter, focuses on How to make the BBC a fair arena for UK election fight, and Press Gazette protects its revenue from newspapers for job ads, events, and awards by falling in step (BBC coverage review finds too many journalists ‘lack understanding of basic economics’).

The Guardian mentioned the Blastland-Dilnot report as an aside in a news story about a strike vote among BBC local radio staff, but commissioned James Meadway, chair of the Progressive Economy Forum academic think tank, to comment on it. He opens his piece, Bad economics at the BBC enabled Tory austerity and its aftermath – and it knows as much, by asking:

How different might the last decade of British politics have been if the public had been better informed about economics? It’s the inescapable thought I had when reading through the BBC’s newly published “thematic review” into its coverage of “taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt output”

It’s a good question but I don’t exempt The Guardian from the same query; the paper leans on many of the same assumptions and framing devices as the BBC; it frequently tells economic stories through the lens of Westminster battles, despite its love of sending John Harris on safaris to the Midlands and the North.

With wearying inevitability, Meadway also directs his alternate reality pondering to the dread question of Jeremy Corbyn:

Would a public not spoon-fed mush about the supposed perils of government borrowing have been so ready to accept David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity in the early 2010s? Would Labour’s then leadership have felt so compelled to support spending cuts – a position that helped lay the ground for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity leadership bid? Might the Brexit vote have gone differently?

Meadway turns his focus to the ongoing scourge of the “household budget” analogy in economics reporting, which the report strongly criticises:

We’ve all seen journalists, not just on the BBC, compare government debt and household debt. The claim from the BBC’s former political editor Laura Kuenssberg, for instance, in a BBC News broadcast of November 2020, that the government’s “credit card” was “maxed out” was a classic of the type – and sparked the complaints by well-known economists that led to the review being commissioned.

Government borrowing has little in common with the borrowing that you or I engage in since, as the review puts it, “states don’t tend to retire or die, or pay off their debts entirely”. Nor do ordinary people typically have a money printing machine in their front room to pay their debts with, unlike the government and the Bank of England. Journalists reporting on economics, as the review accepts, need pithy metaphors for complex processes. But in this case, the conceptual leap from government financing to household borrowing distorts the truth. Worse, the metaphor almost necessarily lends itself to supporting government spending cuts – a position that tends to find the most support on the political right.

But the line Medway takes is essentially a centrist version of the one taken by the right-wing papers: The BBC “occupies a unique position” and is therefore uniquely guilty of failings. Like The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph et al. the role of the newspapers in influencing the BBC’s reporting is absent from Medway’s piece, though he does say that “other journalists are taking note”, linking to a thread by Sky News political correspondent Rob Powell.

While Medway also quotes from the portion of the review which says…

… the BBC [should not] feel it can subcontract judgement about what’s reasonable or impartial to a few established names like the Bank of England, the OBR, the IFS or the Resolution Foundation, however respected.

… he’s a player in the commentary game and his piece, like the others I’ve linked, skips over Dilnot’s previous life as director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies from 1991 and 2002, and his role on commissions for the Tory government (including the 2011 review on social care that bore his name). This is the establishment reporting on itself.

Similarly, Blastland and Dilnot’s connections to the BBC — as co-creators of Radio 4’s More or Less (the former as its first producer, the latter its first presenter) and through other commissions — is why I put quote marks around ‘independent’ earlier in this edition. It’s not to suggest that the review isn’t thorough or that it isn’t critical of the corporation, but I think the pair’s fondness for the BBC leads them to go softly.

On page 34 of the report, a BBC News staffer — quoted anonymously as all those interviewed were, whether internal or external voices — says:

I see a lot of ‘Whoah, should we be doing that?’ And… pulling punches on putting certain voices on or putting people on… maybe sometimes leads to [us] not… getting the range of voices that we should sometimes have.

Later, after a discussion about audiences, the authors echo that sentiment:

Another anxiety we heard, once again, was that some voices aren’t heard enough.

Who those unheard voices are is not specified. Blastland and Dilnot’s suggestion that the BBC is equally biased towards left and right perspectives may explain why:

We didn’t find evidence that BBC coverage of fiscal policy is overall too left or right – because we can’t. Others might think the answer obvious, we do not. We doubt the methods available are equal to the task, not with any statistical robustness. These methods would, without a truly vast amount of time and expense, themselves be at risk of bias. In any case, we think it more useful if we’re specific

This feels a little like suggesting that looking out of the window doesn’t provide the data required to tell if it’s raining, and sticking your head out would be too dangerous.

Blastland and Dilnot’s book The Tiger That Isn't: Seeing Through a World of Numbers (2010) is a good examination of how statistics are misused in politics and the media, and they apply the same rigour to dissecting failings in language and framing in the BBC’s economics reporting.

They correctly diagnose issues with BBC reporting (which can be applied to the wider media) such as the use of language that makes outcomes seem inevitable, the role of hype in undermining attempts at impartiality, how assumptions distort framing, and the toxic effect of word choices (describing debt as “eye-watering” for example). It is also right to question guest selection — they criticise “stale contacts books” — and to point to how social media posts can undermine stories.

But Bastland and Dilnot’s ‘rational guys’ worldview has its limitations. They say they are aware of a BBC initiative to make reporting more transparent but then fail to say whether it’s working; I consume too much BBC content and haven’t encountered much of this ‘Pompidou Centre’ programming.

When they caveat their call for a wider set of contributors by saying it risks “trawling for obscure views in the name of tick-box impartiality”, it feels like they’re beaming in from another dimension where fringe political parties, astroturfing groups, and opaquely-funded think-tanks are not frequently given airtime by that universe’s BBC (whose director-general is a psychic dog who never stood to be a Tory councillor).

The report says:

Another example which loses out for a different reason is coverage of public spending on buses. Bus travel is, for a great many people, all there really is. There are more journeys by bus than any other form of public transport, and these services are significantly shaped by public spending through concessionary fares, subsidies, etc. But trains and planes receive more attention. Why might that be, do you think?

It doesn’t mention the derision directed at Jeremy Corbyn — yes, that guy — when he asked about local bus services during Prime Minister’s Questions in 2018, including from BBC commentators. The desire to maintain the line that left and right are equally well/ill-served by BBC reporting creates an aversion to naming names and dodges many concrete examples.

All in all, I think it’s a good report with conclusions that would improve all of the BBC’s reporting if they were taken on board. But it fails to take into account bad faith, desperation to keep the licence fee settlement, a sclerotic management culture, and interference from political figures in considering why the BBC behaves as it does.

After discussing a report by Faisal Islam from September 2022, after the mini-budget was reversed, in which he claimed the failure was not about policy but perception, the report’s authors write:

Sometimes the simplest questions, against the direction of media coverage, can be surprisingly revealing: ‘And is that really a big number?’, for example. That such a small poke at the consensus can seem even mildly defiant suggests the media are easily herded. What we’re asking the BBC to consider is whether a defiantly independent attitude can be an important aspect of broad impartiality. If so, is it sufficiently encouraged?

That’s a suggestion that works in the vacuum of a policymaker’s report but which does not survive contact with the enemy (The Daily Mail, The Times, The Telegraph). The BBC is scared of and controlled by its bully; the foxes haven’t just got into the hen house, they’re running the farm. Just before Dilnot was interviewed by Martha Kearney — with whom he made a series for the BBC in 2018 — this morning, the Today programme had booked the Tory, Lord Hannan, and the former Tory cabinet minister, Theresa Villiers, to discuss the economy after Brexit and trade deals.

That’s more or less the problem summed up.

Thanks to Dr Kate Devlin for reading today’s draft.

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And publications currently engaged in a folk panic about a Sam Smith video, which The Sun howled contains a “urine-based sex act”, are clearly obsessed with that sort of thing.

“To 'Bog-wash', noun. To 'bog-wash' somebody is to force their head into a toilet bowl (almost without exception against their will) before flushing, thus soaking the victim.” per Everything2, only the website Wikipedia could have been.

Yes, I may be tapping into my own school experiences here but I was, thankfully, never the victim of bog washing.