Labour needs to stop kneeling to media pressure

Concerns over BBC’s anti-Corbyn bias are not restricted to “Corbynistas”

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s that common right-wing myth that there is somehow a “left-wing” bias at the BBC. As the great former journalist for the BBC Robert Peston said rather succinctly, it is “bollocks”.

Following the Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on the upcoming EU referendum on 2 June, the media seemed to be focused on one particular asset: the booing of Laura Keunssberg. And it wasn’t long before the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon:

And, of course, the inevitable Daily Mail headline, (oddly defending the BBC for once):

As should be clear from anyone who saw the altercation for themselves, the incident was approximately 7 seconds long, Corbyn hushed the crowd and Kuenssberg was able to ask her question. This story was completely concocted by the media. Even left-wing papers such as The Guardian — which has been criticised for its anti-Corbyn bias in the past — uncritically posted Kuenssberg’s Twitter comments that:

Yet, as some on Twitter helpfully pointed out to Kuennsberg, free speech goes both ways. Yes, you do have the freedom to speak, but equally protesters have the freedom to show disapproval for what you have to say. And as for the petition which recently got taken down by 38 Degrees, the issue here is that the BBC guidelines demand impartiality, and that taxpayers’ money is going towards what you say — therefore, it is up to the public to hold the BBC to account, just as it is up to the media to hold politicians to account.

Nick Robinson — who has been accused of Tory bias in the past — recently said to the Sunday Times that, in response to allegations of the BBC bias against Corbyn that and as to whether he was “shocked” how the organisation “rubbished” him:

Yes. Oddly, although I was off work, I did drop a note to a few people after his first weekend saying this is really interesting and we owe it to the audience to sound as if we’re interested.

Yet The Guardian ignores this, referring only to “Clashes with what Corbyn’s supporters regard as an unsympathetic ‘mainstream media’”. Clearly, this does not give the full picture here. Although the criticism of Kuenssberg started with Seumas Milne (Corbyn’s “Executive Director of Strategy and Communications”), clearly it’s not only “Corbyn’s supporters” who view the mainstream media as “unsympathetic” to Corbyn and the Labour Party.

In discussing why Labour’s pro-European credentials were not strong enough, Kuennsberg writes in her blog on the speech that:

If you didn’t know that [Labour was pro-EU], and you listened to his speech this morning, you would not have left the room with that overwhelming sense.

Mr Corbyn said the Labour message was “loud and clear”, that the Conservative Party was a bigger threat to the country than the European Union was, and that whether on workers’ rights, the environment, or renewable energy, Britain can achieve more progressive policies working with other countries in the EU than alone.

But as part of his “Remain and Reform” agenda, the Labour leader listed almost as many downsides with the EU as positives.”

Kuenssberg herself notes that Jeremy Corbyn is far from the only pro-European who supports reform, and Corbyn’s mention of the Tories being worse than the EU is — misleadingly, in my opinion — a way for Cobyn to re-articulate arguments very similar to those put forward by those such as Paul Mason on Question Time. But she doesn’t mention this context, and — to paraphrase Keunssberg — “if you didn’t know that, and you read this analysis of Corbyn’s speech, you would not have felt that overwhelming sense.”

As The Canary puts it: “Media reporting … [has] largely ignored the Labour leadership’s efforts, including those of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, to make Labour’s case for staying in Europe. They have, however, continually rolled out the trope that Corbyn isn’t ‘doing enough’. So, if there’s anyone to blame for Corbyn’s ‘silence’ it’s the gatekeepers of public opinion, and whether they are covering what he’s saying.”

This phenomenon of right-wing bias at the BBC is not new, as Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian in 2014, before Nick Robinson was replaced by Kuenssberg. It’s a long passage, but it’s worth reprinting here in full:

The truth is the BBC is stacked full of rightwingers. The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne’s special advisor in 2012. Andrew Neil, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship political programmes Daily Politics and This Week, is chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine. His editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to the Tory Francis Maude. After the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders left for a £400,000-a-year job at that notorious leftwing hotbed, JP Morgan, she was replaced by its business editor Robert Peston. His position was taken by Kamal Ahmed from the rightwing Sunday Telegraph, a journalist damned by the Guardian’s Nick Davies for spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.

BBC stalwart John Humphrys last week joined the chorus of voices alleging “liberal bias” at the BBC. Here is a man who was slapped down by the BBC’s own trust last year for violating impartiality and accuracy guidelines in BBC2’s The Future State of Welfare. … With such coverage, this “liberal-biased” BBC shares the blame for leaving the public completely ill-informed, with, for example, voters estimating that 34 times more money is lost through benefit fraud than is actually the case.

Tory politicians favour the BBC as a useful recruitment service too. After Andy Coulson was driven from No 10, David Cameron replaced him with the then BBC news controller Craig Oliver. Boris Johnson’s former communications supremo was the former BBC political correspondent Guto Harri; after moving to News International in 2012, he was replaced by the BBC’s Westminster news editor, Will Walden.

Add to the mix that former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman described himself as a “one-nation Tory” and David Dimbleby’s past in the notorious Bullingdon Club, and the idea of a radically left-wing BBC doesn’t really stand up. Instead of Tom Watson rubbishing the “hissing revolution” and issuing grovelling apologies to the BBC, the Labour Party should be holding the BBC to account and demanding a less Conservative-biased media overall.