See Emily Pay: The BBC monsters Maitlis while its news *men* break the rules frequently...
The BBC says impartiality applies to everyone equally but the corporation has been cuckooed by conservatives and some are more equal than others.
When I finished reading Press Gazette’s interview with Emily Maitlis on Thursday, two things immediately drifted into my head:
That was a remarkably direct and honest interview which the bosses will not like.
We’re going to be seeing those quotes reframed in the baddest of bad faith by the right-wing press within hours.
And I was right on both counts.
Maitlis was thrown to the wolves by the BBC after introducing an edition of Newsnight covering the Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle Specsavers Happy Advisor Fun Time Hour with the words “Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that, and it’s shocked the government cannot.”
She was asked by Press Gazette whether she regretted her actions:
No, I don’t. It hasn’t ever been explained to me what was journalistically inaccurate about that.
Similarly, she refused to be contrite about a second public rebuke she received after briefly retweeting a line from Piers Morgan who had written:
If failing to quarantine properly is punishable by 10 years in prison, what is the punishment for failing to properly protect the country from the pandemic?
She told Press Gazette that she deleted her retweet after ten minutes not because she thought there was anything wrong in it but because “I just didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a load of @PiersMorgan tweets”.
The real misjudgement here is Maitlis’ ongoing friendship with Morgan. But the BBC Executive Complaints Unit found:
The retweeted material was clearly controversial, implying sharp criticism of the government and there was nothing in the surrounding context to make clear Ms Maitlis was not endorsing it or to draw attention to alternative views.
Asked again by the cheeky shit-stirrers at Press Gazette whether she had “any regrets”, Maitlis replied:
The tweet said nothing I haven’t actually asked on-air. These are questions that we ask all the time as journalists on the programme. And if we stop doing that, then I think we’re in trouble. Because our audience can say to us: What are you about? What are you for?
While it serves the right-wing newspapers’ agenda and that of the government, in fact, to frame Maitlis — pal of Piers Morgan no less — as a left-wing agent in the Newsnight studio. The evidence doesn’t remotely bear that out.
Three quick examples come to mind — Maitlis was in the chair on the night of the Corbyn soviet hat/Kremlin background debacle, rolled her eyes in a pantomime performance when she was unhappy with Barry Gardiner’s answers on Brexit and was accused of double standards by the PLO’s ambassador to the UK in a debate about Gaza back in May.
Maitlis also had a memorable encounter with Dennis Skinner in 2015, when she was interviewing him about Jeremy Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet. After Skinner had told her that he wouldn’t be taking a job in that shadow cabinet she said:
In that breaking news then, Dennis Skinner has said that he has not been approached by Jeremy Corbyn and would not take a job from Jeremy Corbyn. A line that he has held consistently…
“You’re spinning already,” Skinner said from out of shot. The camera cut back to a two-shot showing Maitlis and Skinner:
Skinner: That was spinning. That was an example of spinning. You were trying to imply that I turned it down.
Maitlis: No, that was a joke/ That’s all it was, it was a joke.
Skinner: Well, I think it’s time that you got real and you understood that you’re not working for Rupert Murdoch at the BBC, because you seem to be following the same pattern.
Maitlis: Dennis Skinner, thanks for clarifying that…
From the other side, in 2019, a complaint about Maitlis’ interview with Rod Liddle — described by frozen-faced authoritarianism enthusiast Douglas Murray as “more of a drive-by shooting than an interview” — was upheld. Maitlis had, as with the Cummings incident and the Piers Morgan retweet, stumbled by stating facts. She had told Liddle that his columns contain “consistent casual racism week after week” — a provable fact — and asked him if he was a racist.
The usual argument is that if a BBC News presenter like Maitlis is “attacked by both sides” it must mean that they are actually fairly impartial. But that’s a total fallacy; the critiques from either end of the political spectrum have entirely different intentions and seek very different endgames.
The right decries statements of fact as “left-wing” and tends to believe anyone in a BBC studio is a Marxist, desperate as it generally is to see the corporation broken down for parts, while the left, much of which still tries to defend the BBC’s continued existence, is enraged by what it sees as repeated examples of unfairness and an institutionalised tendency to foreground a conservative perspective on any given issue.
Maitlis prodded the bears of BBC management further in the Press Gazette conversation by suggesting — rightly, I believe — that the corporation’s complaint-handling priorities are misplaced and raising the recent spectre of the Martin Bashir scandal. She said:
It’s funny to see something like [the Cummings apology statement] happen so quickly when a corporation can take up to three decades to investigate serious journalistic malfeasance and critical management failings in the Bashir investigation. So I think it’s all a question of priority, really, isn’t it?
The Press Gazette interviewer, William Turvill, then returned again to the Piers Morgan retweet, prompting Maitlis to say:
… when a corporation takes three decades to investigate whether journalistic misdemeanour is going to then point to serious critical management failings, and then it spends another four months investigating the retweet of a question, then we have to ask ourselves about priorities.
More than the defence of her previous comments, this is what will have angered the top Tories at the BBC — Director-General and former Conservative Party council candidate, Tim Davie, and big Conservative Party donor, Rishi Sunak mentor, and BBC Chairman, Richard Sharp — whose true job is not to defend the broadcaster but to keep the government happy.
Startled by the inevitable attention that Maitlis’ comments drew from The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and Guido Fawkes, the blog run by perpetually thirsty drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines, the BBC clattered out a statement to MailOnline which read:
Nothing is more important than our impartiality. All BBC journalists must abide by the BBC’s editorial guidelines and social media rules. There are no exceptions. We will be taking this up with Emily.
Referring to Maitlis’ suggestion that the BBC issued its apology for her comments about Cummings statement because of pressure emanating from Downing Street, the spokesperson said:
This is false. Decisions about BBC editorial standards are made by the BBC.
That sound you can hear is my hollow laugh drifting across the country like the 101 Dalamatians’ Twilight Bark, a call to collective grim hilarity.
The part in that BBC statement to focus on is this: “There are no exceptions.” If the BBC is so keen to discuss things that are “false”, well, here’s one. Maitlis has made of habit of prodding the executives and pissing off the right-wing papers, so it’s no surprise that she’s the convenient piñata for the complaints unit. But others are far less committed to impartiality and get away with it just fine.
First off, there’s an exact match for that Piers Morgan retweet followed by a swift deletion where the BBC News employee in question didn’t face any sanction. In November 2019, a few days before the general election, Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s Political Editor, retweeted a tweet from Morgan attacking Labour’s Barry Gardiner — him again — for “hitting back at journalists”. Morgan wrote:
Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of this chump telling journalists what to ask. They should all ignore him & pummel Corbyn about anti-Semitism.
Like Maitlis, Kuenssberg swiftly deleted the retweet, but unlike her, she did not receive a rebuke from the BBC. Instead, it told people who complained that:
We've spoken with senior News staff about your concerns. They have explained that Laura retweeted a post by Piers Morgan in error, and as soon as this error was realised she deleted the post. We don't consider that this evidence of bias.
Similarly, while Maitlis gets slammed in public once again by the BBC bosses and their droogs in the press office, plenty of prominent BBC newsmen are allowed to publish opinionated pieces in partisan right-wing publications without any issue whatsoever. As I wrote in a previous edition:
But that ‘impartiality’ only seems to cut one way. If there were a truly mainstream left-wing newspaper to write for, BBC News stars wouldn’t get away with contributing to it. Guido Fawkes and his flying monkeys would swarm them immediately.
But popping up in The Daily Mail (Andrew Marr) or regularly contributing to UnHerd (Justin Webb) while still fronting major BBC News shows? No problem. Because the right-wing perspective is deemed the default by BBC bosses and any left-wing view is a sign of “metropolitan elite” tendencies. Forget the fact that you’ll find far more Daily Mail minded people around London dinner tables when such a thing is once more permitted.
Davie, a marketing man who has never done a day’s journalism in his life and whose other big job beyond the BBC was shifting the less popular brands of sugar water for Pepsi, told a Reuters Next event earlier this year that:
Impartiality is something we learn, it’s a skill and we need to show people that is what we are in the business to do… we are activists for impartiality.
It’s exactly the kind of line you’d expect from a marketing guy; it sounds like it means something but when you take it apart you’re left with a pile of mush, devoid of bones, absent of meaning.
Andrew Neil, who Davie desperately tried to keep at the BBC before he jumped ship to become Generalissimo of GB News1, spent 25 years at the corporation while working a double shift as the chairman of The Spectator.
Had Neil been the chairman of a left-wing title — which he then promoted frequently on social media alongside attacks on journalists with whom he disagreed politically — the newspapers would have ripped him to pieces.
But Neil is one of the right-wing establishment and his time as the BBC’s go-to political interviewer is completely ignored when they decry the corporation as a nest of Marxist revolutionaries set on the destruction of all that gammon-faced goons hold dear.
It was, apparently, not a breach of impartiality when Neil called the left-wing Jewish group Jewdas “nutters” when Jeremy Corbyn met with them. Nor was it a problem when Neil presented The Daily Politics while wearing a tie featuring the logo of the right-wing Adam Smith Institute think tank.
Neil said he simply wore the tie because it featured Smith, “the most famous professor, globally, of my old university (Glasgow).” I’m sure a similar excuse about a left-wing figure would be accepted by the newspapers…
That is the same flavour of BBC impartiality that allows Robbie Gibb, who went from editor of BBC Westminster output to Theresa May’s Head of Communications and now, as Sir Robbie Gibb, sits on the BBC board, where he has recently been attempting to stop the re-hiring of former Newsnight deputy editor Jess Brammar because she’s ‘too left wing’.
And that brings us to the last quote from Maitlis’ Press Gazette interview which has got the right-wing dogs running. She dared to defend Brammar, her former colleague, against the attacks on her. Despite offering some cover for her bosses which stretches credulity (“I know that nothing will matter more to the BBC than its editorial independence…”2), Maitlis says:
[Jess Brammar] is a terrific journalist and she is an excellent manager. I think she cares very much about her staff.
And how is that simple and hyperbole-free statement about a former colleague received by the overstuffed binbags at Guido Fawkes, whose rancid opinions trickle down into the open mouths of the right-wing newspaper hacks? Well, I doubt it’ll surprise you to find them raging:
The Newsnight presenter added that she would not let the current affairs show become a “public announcement tannoy” for ministers. No doubt Jess Brammar, whom Emily showers with sugary praise, will agree with Maitlis…
In The Daily Mail, Amanda Platell sneers:
The BBC is there to present the truth, not Emily Maitlis’s version of truth.
And no ego, not even one as big as hers, should be allowed to jeopardise
that reputation.
And that’s where we are. The right-wing press demands that the BBC tell its kind of truth. Just as Dawn Butler has been roasted for stating an observable fact — Boris Johnson is a liar — BBC News presenters like Maitlis are expected to abide by a version of reality sanitised to Tory taste. And the rest of us are meant to believe that Maitlis — mates with Piers Morgan and no stranger to sticking it to Labour politicians — is some kind of rabid Marxist revolutionary.
The Great British Gaslight Factory is still operating at full capacity.
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Although he’s currently holed up in France like a news channel Napoleon gone to Elba.
A line that doesn’t quite fit with her assertion that the BBC crumbled to Downing Street pressure on Cummings.